Cost Reduction for Managers & Management Consultants (Udemy.com)

What is the aim of this course?

Every company has to control costs in order to survive and prosper. Therefore, many firms on a regular basis perform cost reduction projects. Cost reduction projects may be part of a wider Performance Improvement Project or be a standalone project carried out only in one of the business units. Those projects are extremely interesting because you will be able to make a real change, create a new reality, and improve part of the business or even the whole business. They are also very difficult as you have to not only analyze areas but also find ways to cut costs, improve the current situation, as well as, on some occasions, implement the change. The skills that you will learn during this sort of project will also be very useful once you move to work for regular businesses or set up your own firm. In this course, I will show you how to deliver such projects fast and efficiently. In the course, you will learn the following things:

1. How to identify potential savings, especially quick wins

2. How to optimize processes

3. How to analyze investments

4. How to carry out a make-or-buy analysis

5. How to spend less

This course is based on my 15 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting firms and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, performance improvement, and turn-arounds in the biggest firms from the Retail, FMCG, SMG, B2B, and services sectors that I worked for. I have carried out or supervised over 90 different performance improvement projects in different industries that generated a total of 2 billion in additional EBITDA. On the basis of what you will find in this course, I have trained in person over 100 consultants, business analysts, and managers who are now Partners in PE and VC funds, Investment Directors and Business Analysts in PE and VC, Operational Directors, COO, CRO, CEO, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members, etc. On top of that, my courses on Udemy were already taken by more than 315 000 students, including people working in EY, McKinsey, Walmart, Booz Allen Hamilton, Adidas, Naspers, Alvarez & Marsal, PwC, Dell, Walgreens, Orange, and many others.

I teach through case studies, so you will have a lot of lectures showing examples of analyses and tools that we use. To every lecture, you will find attached (in additional resources) the Excel files, as well as additional presentations, and materials shown in the lectures, so as a part of this course, you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modifications, be applied by you or your team in your work.

Why have I decided to create this course?

As a manager, quite often you will have to find ways to spend less and reduce costs. This is not an easy task, as you will have to increase efficiency and quality at the same time. Luckily, there are a lot of techniques that will help you, in a structured way, look for savings that will help you improve the profits of your business. In this course, I will teach you how to find potential savings, estimate them in Excel, and make sure that they don’t impact quality or efficiency. We will use the management consulting tools, techniques, and frameworks from top management consulting firms.

This course will help you become an expert in the field of cost-cutting and cost reduction, which will be extremely useful not only in consulting but also later on when you become a director or you move on to build your own business. By giving you exposure to real-life cases and analyses, I want to improve your skills in analyzing the right things fast and implementing the improvements that you have identified. Thanks to this course, you will know what and how to do during cost-cutting projects to deliver high-quality products ahead of deadlines.

To sum it up, the course will help you become an expert in cost reduction and cost-cutting at the level of McKinsey, BCG, Bain, PwC, Deloitte, EY, and other top consulting firms. That is why I highly recommend this course to Managers, Management Consultants, as well as Investment Directors working for PE, Directors, and owners/founders of businesses that need to improve their profitability and prepare for scaling.

In what way will you benefit from this course?

The course is a practical, step-by-step guide loaded with tons of analyses, tricks, and hints that will significantly improve the speed with which you understand and analyze the business being considered for acquisition. There is little theory – mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience, as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that, thanks to the course, you will learn:

1. How to identify potential savings, especially quick wins

2. How to optimize processes

3. How to analyze investments

4. How to carry outa  make-or-buy analysis

5. How to spend less

You can also ask me any questions either through the discussion field or by messaging me directly.

How is the course organized?

The course is divided into the following sections:

• Introduction. We begin with a little intro to the course, as well as some general info on how the course is organized

• Cost reduction frameworks. In the second section, I will show you the main frameworks that will help you with cost reduction. We will have a look at the general framework. I will also show you the adjustments for FMCG and retail. Frameworks are great because they help you see the big picture. They also provide you with guidance on what to do to achieve your goals

• Quick wins. In this section, I will show you how to identify the so-called quick wins – in other words, big savings that you can easily achieve and implement. We will start with 2 general frameworks (80/20 and low-hanging fruits), and I will show you how we can apply them to find the projects that will generate big savings.

• Process optimization in practice – Retail chain example. In the 4th section, I show you how to reduce the cost of the process in practice. For that, I will use an example of processes in a store. You will see how you should calculate the cost of the processes and what techniques you should apply to optimize processes and achieve cost reduction and savings.