It might seem counterintuitive. The market is cautious, budgets are under scrutiny, and most boards are asking harder questions about every dollar spent. So why are some of the sharpest businesses I work with choosing this exact moment to invest in transformation?
Because standing still in a tough market is more expensive than moving forward strategically.
It's not ambition. It's necessity.
Cost pressure is the obvious one, but the smarter businesses aren't just cutting. They're doing what I'd call strategic cost transformation: stripping out inefficiency to fund future growth. Look at ANZ's 2025 programme — roughly A$800 million in savings being reinvested straight into digital banking and customer platforms (Capital Brief). That's not austerity. That's reshaping where the money goes.
Then there's the digital imperative. KPMG's latest research has it as the number one business challenge (Broker Daily), and 75% of CFOs are planning to raise technology budgets this year (CFO Tech) . ERP migrations, automation, AI integration — a finance team still running manual processes in 2026 is leaving money on the table every month.
And the external pressure is real. Insolvencies up 34% in FY2025 (Ashurst). Forty-eight percent of Australian SMBs have abandoned growth opportunities in the past year because they lacked the operational bandwidth (The Financial Review). That's a structural problem, and it's exactly what transformation is designed to fix.
When a business decides to transform, the instinct is to hire permanently. But transformation has a start point and an end point. Hiring a permanent FTE for a twelve-month project means you're either paying for a role that becomes redundant, or reshaping the scope to justify keeping them.
Contractors solve that. They bring specialist experience your permanent team almost certainly doesn't have — ERP implementations, finance restructures, complex change programmes. They walk in, assess the situation, and get to work. And when the project wraps, they roll off cleanly. No redundancy conversations, no reshuffling.
Some of the smartest clients I work with are flipping the model. Instead of hiring a contractor to lead the transformation, they're moving their best internal people into the project — because those people know the business — and backfilling their BAU roles with experienced contractors.
Your permanent team gets development and strategic exposure, which is one of the strongest retention levers you have. The transformation benefits from people who genuinely understand the business. And BAU keeps running. When the project wraps, your people move back with broader experience and the contractor exits cleanly.
The number of Australian companies offering internal secondments has more than doubled since 2020. There's a reason for that — it works.
The businesses doing this well aren't winging it. They're planning their transformation workforce deliberately — which roles need permanent hires, which need contract support, and which internal moves create the best outcomes.
At DMC, that's exactly the conversation we're having with clients right now. If you're planning a transformation and you're not sure how to resource it properly, we can help you think through the right mix, and deliver the people to make it happen.
Get in touch now