Strategy in the Post-Fixed Costs Economy
By: Ben Robinson
Tags: Scaleup, Platform, Strategy, Business Models, Scaling

Strategy in the Post-Fixed Costs Economy

Evaluating strategic options in a world where businesses have never been easier to start, but never been harder to scale Ben Robinson Follow Oct 7, 2020 · 15 min read

We’ve talked often about the diminishing importance of supply-side economies of scale. In its simplest expression, digitization flips the industrial age equation. What was scarce in the industrial age was supply; what is scarce in the digital age is demand (attention).

In the industrial age, scaling supply meant mass production to spread the fixed cost of large capital investments over large volumes. And the industrial age was an age of mass produced, relatively standardized goods. This applied to goods and services provided by the private sector, but also to state-provided services, such as education and public services.

Since the advent of the internet, this is changing. We first noticed the shift in industries where both supply and distribution could be digitized (e.g. media) because supply became abundant faster and this highlighted our limited attention sooner. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that all industries are being disrupted as software has eaten the world. More and more physical goods have software components to them, making supply more digitized. Where supply cannot be digitized, distribution nearly always can. And where supply-side economies of scale remain important, they can be borrowed.

Renting scale and the end of fixed costs

AWS was not originally intended to be a platform on which third-parties would run their businesses. But, thanks to Amazon’s business model, it was possible to open up that infrastructure service to others. In doing so, Amazon created a massive and highly profitable business which contributes 65% of group operating profits.

But, as big as the impact has been on Amazon, the broader societal impact has been truly dramatic.

Before AWS, companies had to make large upfront investments in computing hardware — a significant barrier to entry. But buying hardware was also a major source of risk: buying too much could bankrupt a company while buying too little could cause a major bottleneck to growth. And so, AWS removed both risk and cost for new businesses. As a direct consequence, it also contributed to the creation and success of hundreds of thousands of new businesses.

This boost to global GDP over and above the value captured by Amazon itself is difficult to calculate, but it’s certainly very significant. It’s probably not an overstatement to suggest, as Charlie Songhurst does, that AWS has been the single biggest factor in the rise of angel investing.

But AWS is not the only internet era platform. From Shopify to Stripe, examples abound of platforms that share their scale economies to remove the cost and complexity of doing ecommerce — allowing companies to form and start trading faster, with reduced risk and at lower volumes than would ever have been possible.

And not all internet-era platforms are providing digital services. As Rita McGrath, Columbia Business School Professor, discussed on a recent Structural Shifts podcast, by helping establish prices and create trust, digitization is making more and more non-digital assets tradeable on marketplaces. As she put it:

“What we’re seeing with the advent of the digital economy is that more and more transactions can be conducted in markets that used to require a firm.”

Uber was a pioneer in this regard, but we now see this “uber of x” phenomenon everywhere — even in the enterprise market.

In effect, it’s becoming easier to rent all services, physical and digital. All become liquid and on-demand. Capex gives way to opex or, as Younes Rharbaoui says: we have entered the post-fixed costs economy.

“Signs of a post-fixed costs economy are all around us: companies switching to full remote, increased reliance on independent workers & freelancers, on-demand software where cost matches usage, are all creating lean financial structures for growth.”

And, of course, like many other secular trends, the impact of the pandemic has been to accelerate it. If COVID-19 drew a binary distinction between online and offline services, lifting the former and sinking the latter, then it was disproportionately brutal in its treatment of those offline businesses with high fixed costs — oil companies, airlines, hotel chains and so on. From now on, all fixed cost investments will be more heavily scrutinized and, where they exist, variable costs alternatives will be more actively considered. Even Warren Buffett, a regular character in aperture blogs, is starting to consider the wisdom of some high fixed-cost business models.

The fact is, if fixed costs were already becoming passé, they definitely will be in the post-pandemic world — ushering in a faster transition to a new, internet-era economic structure.