Harvard Business Review

JULY 2, 2014

It’s a simple calculation to determine how many units must be sold at a given price to cover one’s fixed costs. Assume she must incur a fixed cost of $25,500 to produce and sell a kite. What if we want to make an investment and increase the fixed costs? What if we change the price?

Variable Costs 10

Variable Costs Fixed Costs Sales Sales 10

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

The essence of the phenomenon is the fact that each stage in the supply chain plans its capital projects and operations, including inventory levels, based on its future expectations. Macroeconomic data during the 2008 financial crisis show the bullwhip effect operating on a much broader scale. For example , U.S.

Sales 15

Sales Sales Operations Fixed Costs 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 19, 2015

Wall Street began charging a “conglomerate discount,” saying that diverse operations were hard to analyze with confidence. True synergies across the diverse operations were often hard to see. Before, a big conglomerate like GE diversified its risks by mixing pro-cyclical and counter-cyclical businesses.

Cash Flow 15

Cash Flow Engineering Fixed Costs Sales 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 8, 2012

Skype , for example, competes with fixed-line carriers by offering free mobile Skype calls. Google has its own contender in the market, Google Voice. Bharti's innovative business model converted fixed costs in capital expenditure to a variable cost based on usage of capacity. The trend is spreading.

Balance Sheet 14

Balance Sheet Variable Costs Telecommunications Fixed Costs 14

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 6, 2014

If round after round of profit warnings was not enough – group operating profits fell 20% between 2011 and 2013 and are likely to fall another 30% in 2014 — the company recently announced it had overstated its first-half profit by about $400 million. and spends it in international markets. Aldi UK sales grew from $6.3 billion to $8.6

Reorganization 15

Reorganization Fixed Costs Transportation Sales 15

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 6, 2016

Driven by economies of scale, container ship size has been increasing for decades, with the largest ships now costing roughly $200 million. The latest nuclear reactor designs, promising higher safety, longer operating life, and lower operating costs, cost up to $25 billion after factoring in the huge budget overruns.

Assets 12

Assets Operations Insurance Telecommunications 12

Harvard Business Review

MAY 9, 2013

In every part of the industry, the open innovation model is changing the economics of advertising by switching significant fixed costs to variable costs and sourcing creative from more relevant and, many times, lower cost sources. Advertising Innovation Marketing'

Advertising 14

Advertising Variable Costs Media Fixed Costs 14

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

These businesses have powerful disruptive potential because they can provide consulting at a fraction of the cost of traditional models, largely because they do not need to carry expensive fixed costs like recruiting, training, consultant “beach” time, and expensive real estate.

Real Estate 12

Real Estate Small Business Fixed Costs Recruitment 12

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 5, 2017

While a laudable effort in principle, measuring a company’s tendency to make myopic operating and investing decisions is fiendishly complex. But the other indicators probably pick up legitimate differences in how companies in the sample operate, as opposed to whether they are myopic. Are all share repurchases myopic?

Metrics 12

Metrics Cash Flow Revenue Compensation 12

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 4, 2013

For example, a decade ago, it''s unlikely that small-business owners would have told you that they needed a flexible way to host data and applications, one that preferably turned the fixed cost of computer hardware into a variable cost of renting capacity. When the company rides an enabling trend.

Fixed Costs 8

Fixed Costs Variable Costs Assets Banking 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

The first category is exogenous factors over which the business has little control: the growth of the markets into which it sells; the competitive intensity and thus the average profitability of the industry in which it operates; or the fragmentation of its industry and thus the scope for a growth-by-acquisition approach.

Assets 11

Assets Revenue Energy Fixed Costs 11

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Historically, larger scale has offered hospital systems a number of advantages, including increased referral volumes, better access to capital, stronger pricing power, and classic cost economies. For instance, larger scale has enabled many hospital systems to lower their per-patient operating costs significantly.

Hospitality 9

Hospitality Scaling Revenue Fixed Costs 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 28, 2014

Unfortunately, Zuckerberg’s “platform” reference has elicited many comparisons of Oculus to Google’s purchase of Android , the company that would provide Google with its own smartphone operating system. Virtual reality is not a disruption to the computing market, instead it stands poised to disrupt content consumption.

Fixed Costs 9

Fixed Costs Software Transportation Scaling 9

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 31, 2018

has slowed , and that in most industries the biggest firms have higher market share than they did a decade ago. By cutting the fixed costs of computing — avoiding the need to hire IT staff, servers, and hardware — even the smallest firm can satisfy large and unexpected computing needs. businesses.

Scaling 14

Scaling Fixed Costs Software Education 14

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 1, 2017

You have to consider salaries, marketing budget, office size, technology services, and on and on. Too often, assumptions about the potential market and its clients can cloud our judgement about expenses. They were both naïve to think that creating a high-expense, polished operation would automatically enhance their business.

Revenue 12

Revenue Fixed Costs Staffing Accounts 12

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 29, 2013

A fascinating business dynamic will unfold as health care providers in the United States shift from a reimbursement system that has historically paid for procedures performed to one that rewards population health — providing the total care of a community at a fixed cost and improving its members overall health.

Revenue 9

Revenue Nonprofit Operations Hospitality 9

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 25, 2013

Just like the pilot makes a calm assessment and operates the right levers, leaders need to create a climate and culture where people can make a calm assessment and fine-tune the right set of drivers. Further, sales variation can get widened much more when it comes to financial variation because of fixed costs.

Fixed Costs 9

Fixed Costs Sales Sales Revenue 9

Harvard Business Review

JULY 27, 2017

Third, corporate VCs and accelerators are costly and complex to operate, turning them into a slow and expensive innovation tool. And the fixed cost from “touchpoint-to-pilot” are immense. Top startups already have market leading solutions. Private VCs and other professional investors can provide the first two.

Fixed Costs 8

Fixed Costs Variable Costs Administration Media 8

Zenefits

JULY 31, 2022

Some common strategies to start this process include ensuring your pricing is consistent with the current market conditions or increasing efficiency through process improvement. Keep your pricing consistent with current market conditions. If costs rise faster than revenue, you may have a difficult financial situation.

Manager 52

Manager Onboarding Banking Process Improvement 52

AIHR

APRIL 20, 2023

They balance short-term survival with long-term prosperity A study conducted by Harvard studying 4700 public companies across three recession periods confirmed that companies that make generic costs cuts across the board during a downturn are not able to flourish once the market recovers. million cost per year.

Sales 98

Sales Sales Fixed Costs Marketing 98

Chief Executive

JULY 25, 2022

It’s hard to tell what’s leadership prowess and what’s luck when you’re in a rising market. If I could pick the one thing that I would change in how executives lead companies by magically waving a wand, it would be the timeframe in which they operate—that you manage for the quarter century, not the quarter.

Balance Sheet 98

Balance Sheet Assets Engineering Operations 98

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 16, 2011

This is the essence of Groupon's declaration last week that it will remove the controversial accounting metric called Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income (ACSOI) from its financial statements. ACSOI essentially measures Groupon's profits before subtracting its subscriber-acquisition costs and stock option-based compensation.

Fixed Costs 22

Fixed Costs Metrics Scaling Marketing 22

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 30, 2018

And the same applies to the affected workers: The tight labor market means there are opportunities for those who go through retraining. Capital-intensive factories have a high-fixed-cost, low-variable-cost operating model. Another issue involves reallocating resources in the face of fundamental market shifts.

Fixed Costs 14

Fixed Costs Assets Cash Flow Variable Costs 14

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 22, 2011

As each of these companies expands its fixed-cost infrastructure, profits grow geometrically because the additional variable cost of adding each new user is near zero. Adding a profile on Facebook has little to no impact on Facebook's operating costs. Greater scale bestows greater competitive advantage.

Advertising 16

Advertising Variable Costs Scaling Media 16

Harvard Business Review

MAY 21, 2015

Over the past two decades, there have been many attempts to reform the electric utility market. Consider how Uber opened up the transportation market. In both cases, the two goods (car and real estate) are given value-creating potential through a process of market fragmentation and consumer empowerment.

Energy 15

Energy Transportation Real Estate Software 15

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 7, 2015

market has witnessed a substantial rise of activist investors. is a top performing S&P 500 listed company whose two-year total return outperformed the market by over 60%. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense for companies operating in the same space to continually compete. Over the last three years the U.S.

Balance Sheet 12

Balance Sheet Cash Flow Revenue Reorganization 12

AIHR

NOVEMBER 12, 2024

As the job market evolves, companies are experimenting with various employment types to build more flexible staffing models. One reason for this is the cost of slow hiring. However, top candidates are usually off the market in just 10 days. Cost management: You must carefully weigh the costs of different employment types.

Insurance 98

Insurance Staffing Compensation Benefits 98

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 5, 2017

Political campaigns are marketing campaigns, messages aimed at selling a product. Yet by 2004 its market share was down to 3%. It focused its efforts on earning a majority share of Europe’s digital classified advertising market (a product that connects buyers and sellers). Bigger marketing budgets may not pay off.

Media 15

Media Advertising Fixed Costs Marketing 15