The kickoff goes well. The targets are set, the workstreams have owners, and the first wave of savings lands more or less on schedule. Then somewhere around month four the meetings get shorter, the tracker stops being updated, and the program quietly becomes a thing people used to talk about.
This is the most common shape of failure in cost work, and the research is unambiguous about how often it happens.
Deloitte surveyed 397 executives for its 2025 MarginPLUS study. Seventy-nine percent of companies failed to meet their cost savings targets. Fifty-eight percent achieved less than three quarters of what they set out to save. Boston Consulting Group, surveying more than 570 C-suite executives, found that respondents captured an average of forty-eight percent of their 2024 cost saving targets.
First, a number to stop repeating
You have heard that seventy percent of transformations fail. It appears in nearly every consulting pitch deck in circulation.
It is not a research finding. Mark Hughes of the University of Brighton traced the claim across five published sources in the Journal of Change Management and found no valid or reliable empirical evidence behind any of them. The number originates with Hammer and Champy in 1993, who described it as an unscientific estimate, and with Kotter in 1996, who cited no underlying study.
We raise this because a CFO evaluating outside help deserves to know which numbers are measured and which are inherited. McKinsey has measured the question directly. In a survey of 1,034 people who had been part of a transformation in the previous five years, fewer than one third said their company succeeded at both improving performance and sustaining the improvement. That is a real finding with a real sample, and it makes the same point without borrowing credibility it has not earned.
The problem is not the target
The intuitive explanation for a missed target is that the target was too aggressive. The Deloitte data says the opposite.
Companies that hit their cost targets had set an average savings goal of sixteen percent. Companies that missed had set an average goal of 13.6 percent. The successful group was aiming higher. Success could not be attributed to having a lower bar to clear.
So if ambition is not the variable, what is.
The value leaks out in execution, not in planning
McKinsey surveyed 908 respondents on transformation implementation. Fifty-six percent of companies achieved most or all of their performance goals. Only twelve percent sustained those gains for more than three years. On average, forty-two percent of the potential financial benefit was lost in the executing and sustaining phases, not in the design.
Deloitte describes the same pattern in plainer language. Cost programs are often multi-year journeys that start with momentum and quick wins. In the middle years, once the quick wins are exhausted and the remaining work is harder, many programs lose focus and fizzle out.
That is month four. The easy savings have been taken. What is left requires a department to change how it operates, a vendor relationship to be renegotiated, or a process to be rebuilt. Those things require sustained attention from people who have other jobs, and attention is the resource that runs out first.
What separates the programs that hold
McKinsey tested twenty-four different transformation actions against outcomes. The one that correlated most strongly with success was open communication about progress. Where senior managers communicated continually across the organization, respondents were eight times as likely to report success. For enterprise-wide efforts the multiplier rose to 12.4.
The engagement finding is starker still. Among transformations that failed to engage line managers and frontline employees, only three percent were reported successful. Where those groups were engaged, success rates ran at twenty-six and twenty-eight percent respectively.
Three percent against twenty-eight percent is not a soft difference. It is the difference between a program that works and one that does not, and it turns on whether the people who have to change anything were part of the conversation.
The executives in the Deloitte study said much the same when asked what they had learned. The top two lessons were designing a solid tracking and reporting process, named by forty percent, and deploying change management activities to build awareness and acceptance, named by thirty-nine percent.
Change fatigue is a real constraint
There is a limit to how much of this an organization can absorb. Gartner research published in Harvard Business Review found that employee willingness to support enterprise change fell to forty-three percent in 2022, down from seventy-four percent in 2016. Over the same period the average employee experienced ten planned enterprise changes a year, up from two.
Boston Consulting Group found that half of the companies in its survey run a cost program every one to two years. Roughly one in three still use across-the-board cuts, which its research ranked as the most disruptive approach, with a threefold negative effect on employee engagement.
If your organization has run three cost programs in five years and none of them held, the fourth one does not start from zero. It starts from a workforce that has learned these things do not stick.
What we do differently
We design for the middle of the program, not the kickoff. That means naming an owner and a close date for every single finding on the day it is identified, tracking findings through a defined pipeline rather than a status deck, and reporting the same numbers to the same people on the same day every week until the work is closed.
It also means that senior attention does not taper. Our leadership brings more than twenty years of execution experience and stays on the engagement from the first conversation through delivery. There is no junior staffing model and no handoff at month three, which is precisely when most programs lose the person who understood why the decisions were made.
Related reading
For the mechanics of what a program should produce before execution begins, see what a transformation roadmap contains. For the largest recurring source of savings that erodes when nobody owns it, see contract value leakage.
If your last cost program did not hold, that is worth an hour. We start with a discovery call at no cost.
Book a 30-minute strategy call: calendly.com/bomsi-billimoria-evoxvantage
Sources
Cost target achievement and target-setting comparison: Deloitte, 2025 MarginPLUS study, 397 executives.
Average target achievement of forty-eight percent: BCG, February 2025, more than 570 C-suite executives.
Absence of empirical basis for the seventy percent failure claim: Mark Hughes, Journal of Change Management, Vol. 11 No. 4, 2011.
Goal achievement, sustainment, and benefit loss in execution: McKinsey, May 2023, 908 respondents.
Communication multipliers and frontline engagement findings: McKinsey transformation research.
Change fatigue data: Gartner research published in Harvard Business Review, May 2023.
Cost program frequency and the impact of across-the-board cuts: BCG, 2025, 2,080 respondents across six countries.
