A Briefing on What the Top 2% Do Differently
Most leaders haven’t had the opportunity to learn directly from 30,000 businesses about what’s shifting in today’s environment. We have. And we’ve seen a clear pattern emerge: top performers don’t rely on traditional, function‑based structures. They operate from a strategic framework that guides how the entire organization works. While many companies are built to simply execute tasks, the outliers design systems that deliver specific, measurable outcomes.
What does that mean? It means each part of their business — every person, digital worker, service provider, tool, and process — actively advances their growth and profitability, all operating as a whole. We help build, refine, and operate this strategic framework – allowing them to figure out where to invest, where to prioritize, and how to win.
What We’ve Seen
Achieving this is different for every organization — but we’ve learned that the obstacles all originate in the same three areas: talent, technology, or processes. Most companies try to solve them in isolation — with rigid frameworks, siloed expertise, or answers with no plan behind them. We help clients treat them as they are: one problem, not three.
Where Growth Stops
Talent
Your best people are buried. They’re splitting their time between strategic work and administrative tasks that shouldn’t be on their plate — and the low-level work slowly chips away at the thinking that actually moves the business forward. When a key person leaves, the whole operation feels it. That’s not a hiring problem. It’s a structural one.
High-growth companies solve this by building around their best people. They use AI, automation, offshore talent, and managed services to execute the work that doesn’t drive measurable growth and business results. And increasingly, they’re going further – deploying agentic AI as a workforce in its own right. Digital workers that handle defined roles end-to-end: research, outreach, reporting, coordination, and more. These aren’t tools that assist your team, they’re workers that operate alongside them. The companies pulling ahead aren’t waiting to figure out AI. They’ve already put it to work.
Employees spend 60–65% of their week on work that doesn’t generate value. Process inefficiencies waste 26% of an employee’s workday.⁽¹⁾
Technology
Your tech stack is working against you. Technology today has enormous upside – but it’s moving faster than most organizations can absorb. The problem isn’t usually a lack of tools. It’s that the tools don’t talk to each other, the ROI is unclear, and many don’t possess a complete picture of what they have, what it costs, or what it’s actually returning for the business.
High-growth companies treat their tech stack as a system. Every tool has a defined role, a measurable return, and a clear owner. They’re not chasing the latest platform – they’re maximizing what they have and upgrading deliberately, without disrupting what’s working.
That means auditing what you have, cutting what’s bloated, and aligning your technology to your core mission. Where an IT partner can manage parts of the operation more effectively than an in-house team, we identify that too. The goal isn’t better technology, it’s the right technology, working as a system to fuel growth.
On average, companies use just about half of the software licenses they have purchased — wasting an average of $18 million on unused licenses. ⁽²⁾
Processes
Most organizations don’t fall short because their people aren’t capable or their technology isn’t sophisticated – but because nobody built a process to hold it all together. When companies grow, informal structures stop scaling. Teams become reactive and siloed. Decisions that should take hours take weeks. The result is an organization that is managed, not led.
High-growth companies treat their operating model as a competitive advantage. They’re not a collection of high-performing parts, but rather a system. They’ve mapped how work actually flows – across teams, tools, and handoffs – and built a structure that scales with them instead of against them. When something breaks, they fix the system, not just the symptom.
Managers spend 40% of their time resolving internal issues that shouldn’t exist – Companies can lose 20–30% of annual revenue to cross-functional inefficiencies.⁽³⁾
Here’s How We Help
We assess where your people are spending their time, where your technology is costing you more than it’s returning, and where your processes are breaking down — then we deploy the right mix of expertise, human talent, and digital resources to fix all three. Every recommendation is specific to your organization, grounded in how you actually operate, and organized around one outcome: growth.
Where Do You Start?
Most companies know something isn’t working. Fewer know where to look. We strip it all down and align everything to contribute to growth – not one team, department, or executive, but a single shared purpose. alliant provides every client with a comprehensive benchmark – comparing them to their industry across multiple dimensions.
It begins with a single workshop – mapping your processes, people, and technology, and identifying where a stronger framework can drive tangible value. It’s the same beginning for every client because the questions worth asking are always the same. The goal is simple: get back to doing what you do best and building a structure around you that handles everything else. You already know something needs to change. Let’s find out what – and build from there.
References:
- https://asana.com/resources/why-work-about-work-is-bad
- https://www.cfodive.com/news/saas-license-wastage-ranked-as-top-it-spend-challenge/708580/
- https://crebos.online/resource-center/the-true-cost-of-operational-inefficiency/