Business Turn-Around Management

Business Turn-Around Management

By Jesse Kauffman, Lead Consultant, Everyday Business Resilience Group

My name is Jesse Kauffman, and my business is Everyday Business Resilience.  Our goal is to help companies and organizations like yours be be prepared for any changes the world throws your way.  One of the big challenges many companies will face as we continue to work through the COVID pandemic is turnaround management due to the impacts of the virus itself, along with the repercussions of regulatory and customer behavior changes.

To address this need for change, I’m excited to share a 3-part series of articles on effective business turnaround management.  We’ll be walking through the application of industry proven methods to help your business become more resilient and be ready to take advantage of the opportunities that will continue to impact our region.

At Everyday Business Resilience Group, we’ve found that taking a business impact analysis approach will address three key aspects of business turnaround management:

1. Identifying where the business failures are happening.
2. Quantifying the impact of those failures on the business.
3. Utilizing that knowledge to build a plan for action.  

Each of these 3 aspects will have its own focused article.  In this first article we’ll be focusing on the identification of where the business is failing.

To identify where business failures are happening, it’s easiest to focus on 3 separate areas of the impacted business, People, Process, and Place.  This also provides a strong framework for quantifying the failures and developing the turnaround plan.  Starting at a high level, ask the following questions:

• People:
  • Were people with the right combination of skills, experience, and motivation in the right roles to help the business serve its target market?
  • Training:
    • What kind of training program or opportunities do the current employees have to enable them to adapt to a changing market?
    • How were employees recruited and onboarded?
  • What did turn-over look like?  
    • What are the reasons employees left?  
    • What are the reasons employees stayed?
  • What was the original target clientele?  Why did existing clients stop buying the good or service produced by the business?
• Process:
  • How rigid were the key processes the business depended on?  How flexible were those processes to adapt to market changes?  Are there even processes available to guide operations in the first place?
  • Which processes were most directly responsible for the following?
    • Customer/client acquisition?
    • Supply chain and logistics?
    • Manufacturing or service delivery?
    • Accounting and Finance?
    • IT and Managed Systems?
• Place:
  • Is the location of the business appropriate to serve the target market?
    • Is the existing location a good value, ie, cost effective, for its ability to meet existing and targeted future client needs?
    • Is the target clientele local to the business, or located nationally or globally?
  • Is the building, or buildings, capable of accommodating the processes the business needs to succeed?
    • Are major modifications needed to infrastructure to grow or even to serve existing clients?
    • Is the existing space to small?  Too big?  
    • Does the building meet the security and access requirements of the existing and future planned growth scale of the business?

Once you’ve gone through these questions, it’s time to quantify the answers in a meaningful way so that you can apply the learnings to your turnaround plan.  In article 2 of this series, we’ll look at how to quantify what the answers to those questions are for the following metrics: Financial Impacts, Legal/Regulatory/Statutory Impacts, and Time Impacts, and Reputation Impacts.  Here at Everyday Business Resilience Group, we’re looking forward to helping your business turnaround process.

FOOTNOTE:  Jesse has 17+ years of experience in industries including, appliances, plastics, nutrition, and pharmaceuticals, across all aspects of business operations.  He and his wife, Josi, are proud parents of 3 wonderful kids and are continually working on their own version of a modern homestead on the west side of Evansville, IN

Any comments or questions please contact Jesse at 812-568-0515 or jesse.kauffman@everydaybusinessresilience.com