How a $6.2M Savings Estimate Became $10.67M in Six Weeks

This client planned to execute the restructuring internally using some of our tools and had engaged Resultant to review and validate the output. Leadership realigned ahead of kickoff and asked us to lead the process from the start. 

We ran two phases across six weeks.

• Phase one built a finance-owned baseline of cost and EBITDA by operating line and function, alongside diagnostics of IT, operations, and organizational structure benchmarked against real demand.
• Phase two turned that baseline into decisions: opportunities scored by confidence, timing, and risk on a single savings ledger; target structures drawn up; and a 90-day execution roadmap sequenced with named owners and decision gates. 

Throughout the engagement, finance owned the baseline, leaders owned the decisions, recommendations followed the evidence rather than a predetermined target, and the team protected the most important parts of the business. We engaged every business area, conducting interviews with team members in operations, IT,  finance, workforce management, mission, marketing, and sales. The spans-and-layers assessment examined $16.6M of loaded management cost across the enterprise. 

The $8.4M figure headlines this year's board deck. Maintaining that number next year required something the client could run without our team in the room, so we built a Labor Savings Tool: a baseline-and-scenario toolkit tailored to each business area that the client now owns and operates. A point-in-time diagnostic becomes a living view of spans, layers, and cost to catch headcount and layer creep early, enabling small adjustments instead of requiring another large reduction down the road. 

Leaders now review headcount and cost on a regular cadence against the finance-validated baseline and a KPI scorecard, and organizational reviews run on a standard process with a monthly executive readout. The tool catches the kind of drift that’s concrete but easy to miss otherwise, such as a site with ten trainers against zero active training classes. One finance-owned ledger and decision log replaced the fragmented, leader-by-leader cost reviews that had obscured true profitability. 

The transition itself followed a change-enablement model with a leadership message architecture, a readiness checklist and risk register, and a leader-owned communication cascade that moved from broadcast to targeted as the highest-risk moments arrived.