Business Turn-Around Management

Business Turn-Around Management

(This Article Is Number 2 of 3)

By Jesse Kauffman, Lead Consultant, Everyday Business Resilience Group

In this, article 2 of 3 on Business Turnaround Management, we’ll walk through how to quantify the impact of the business failures you identified when going through the first article of the series.  To recap from the first article, we focused on identifying where business failures were happening based on 3 primary focus areas: People, Process, and Place.

Now that you’ve figured out what the business failures were, how do you quantify the impacts to your business?  At Everyday Business Resilience Group, we focus on quantifying impacts by how they affect 3 aspects of your business: finances, time, and reputation.

Finances

What did the business failure COST your business?  How much money did you lose?  How much potential revenue did you miss out on?  How much did you have to spend on fixing or recovering from the failure?

Businesses don’t exist without cashflow, so understanding what the failure is costing your business, from all possible aspects, is critical to understanding where to focus your turnaround efforts.  If you don’t know how much money you lost, spent, or will have to spend to deal with a business failure, how will you know where to put your time, energy, and critically, hard-earned money to make sure you turnaround your business?  

Work with your accounting and finance partners, whether they’re internal or external to your business, to get a true picture of what the business failures you’re trying to fix are costing you financially.

Time

How much time did the identified failures cost your business?  How much of your time?  How much of your employee’s time?  How much of your customers time?  How much of each business stakeholder’s time?

Lost time can’t be recovered.  Lost time is directly related to the finances and reputation of your business.  Quanitfying the time a business failure costs you allows you to know where that valuable resource is slipping away from your business.  

To make the most of the valuable time you have for turning around your business, work with the business partners, employees, and upstream and downstream vendors to understand where there is wasted time in your business.  There are many tools available from 6 sigma and lean methodologies that you can use for these analyses, so pick one that fits your preference and business needs.

Reputation

Reputation is perhaps the most critical aspect of your business, and yet is often the most difficult to quantify.  How do you currently monitor and judge what your business’ reputation is in the marketplace?  Do you have a way to track client and customer feedback?  Do you regularly seek out feedback on how your business is meeting your stakeholder needs?

If you haven’t been tracking your business reputation, now is the time to reach out to a marketing expert to work with you to quantify how your business looks to your clients, to your competition, to the regulatory agencies that could impact your business, and to your employees and peers.  If you already have in-house or contracted marketing support, now is the time to really dig-in to the data they have and develop a complete picture of the strengths and weaknesses of your business’ reputation and image.

Once you’ve quantified the financial, time, and reputational impacts of the failures you identified from part 1 of this series, you’ll be able to move to the third phase of Business Turnaround Management, building a plan of action and executing that plan.  We’ll dig into how to put your plan together and execute it in the third article of this series.  

Deciding to turnaround your business is a big step, and if you need help with any of these tools, give us a call at Everyday Business Resilience Group.  We’re looking forward to helping your business turnaround process, and seeing you succeed!

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

If you have questions about this article please contact Jesse at 812-568-0515 or jesse.kauffman@everydaybusinessresilience.com