Cost Optimization for High-Tech & Software

The tech industry has become hyper-focused on balancing revenue growth and profitability, but how do you continue to grow while managing your costs?

The tech industry has become hyper-focused on balancing revenue growth and profitability, but how do you continue to grow while managing your costs? 

Slowing growth and compressed valuations are forcing tech and software companies to focus on balancing current costs and margins with growth and value creation. Optimizing an operating model for efficient growth requires fundamental changes beyond layoffs, hiring freezes, and reducing unnecessary spend.

We understand the many levers for not only managing costs today but also for making your organization leaner and more competitive in the future.

We can help thanks to the breadth of experience in growth strategies for software companies that we bring to the table: insight drawn from our work with more than 250 software, tech-product, and tech-led services clients—and more than 65 leading private equity investors. 

Today’s market warrants timely, confident action, so we’ve built our cost optimization offering for both speed and precision. We’ll use data and benchmarking to develop hypotheses, study operations, and identify and quantify specific cost-optimization opportunities—all in a matter of weeks. Then, we’ll roll up our sleeves to help you see those opportunities through to meaningful bottom-line results.

How high-tech and software companies can further optimize costs in 2023

How high-tech and software companies can further optimize costs in 2023

What We Offer

Develop rapid hypotheses to sharpen your focus 

Where should you begin? Our analysis is designed to establish practical, working hypotheses in as little as a week or two. We take an outside-in perspective of your organization or target, using proprietary and third-party data to identify and size cost opportunities across the P&L. We’ll look at areas such as:  

  • Customer sentiment, product capabilities and differentiation, and offering/pricing materials 
  • Digital value identification 
  • Organizational design, structure, and cost profile compared to industry benchmarks and public competitors
  • Core technology and associated engineering skillsets 

If you’re in the early stages of a transaction, our analysis can help refine investment thesis testing and identify the most critical areas for further diligence. 

Identify your best cost-optimization and value opportunities 

Where can you create the biggest impact? We’ll help you determine that—with an operational and technical review across the P&L—including COGS, research and development, sales and marketing, and general and administrative (G&A) functions. We work fast but dig deep—analyzing functions and benchmarking cost structures to understand how to most efficiently and effectively run the business. 

From this, we can quantify cost-opportunities and the one-time spend needed to achieve them, and then create a forecasted P&L that reflects improvements. We also prioritize initiatives and work with your management team to plan the approach for capturing them—whether that is immediately post-close or later in a hold period. 

Execute your plan and capture the value

Can you move with speed to improve margins and efficiency? Our experienced team will help you implement margin improvement strategies and productivity initiatives to keep you lean. After close and throughout the hold period, we’ll guide you through the initiatives necessary to deliver cost savings and become a leaner, faster, digital organization—with established offerings and implementation expertise designed just for that:  


  • Labor cost optimization 
  • Cloud hosting and DevOps cost optimization
  • R&D optimization 
  • Product consolidation 
  • Customer success and experience design 
  • Strategic sourcing and spending optimization 
  • Software Spend Optimization 

Want to learn more?