Published On: Thu, Jul 9th, 2020

My Turnaround Plan

At my most recent turnaround engagement, I quickly identified ten different issues that were problems and needed resolved quickly. The issues are listed below:

  • The company needs a new “sales-friendly” website.
  • A manager-level person needs to oversee receiving, warehousing, and picking, packing, and shipping the inventory to customers.
  • The company needs to hire an accounting manager to replace the part-time bookkeeper.
  • I need to understand the COO’s responsibilities and determine how he can best help the company.
  • I need to increase the labor rate for the shop technicians to the current market rate.
  • The company needs to have loss prevention Edmonton security over its inventory, so parts do not disappear on employees’ trucks. The goal is to sell the inventory to a customer, not allow it to be stolen by an employee.
  • The financial statements need to be updated. They must always remain current in the future.
  • There needs to be an operating budget for the year.
  • The on-hand inventory balances need to be recorded within the accounting software and accounted for properly.
  • A physical inventory needs to be taken, so the company knows how much stock it owns. By doing a physical inventory count, this will help me reconcile an accurate inventory balance and the total for the cost of goods sold for the year.

The ten issues listed above had to be solved during the turnaround, but they were not part of the “turnaround plan.” If I resolved these business issues, the chances are that those and other problems would reoccur again and again.

The turnaround plan is a list of tasks that need to be accomplished that solve the issues that caused the problems I noted above. Solving these ten items listed above that I had learned about the company from the initial meeting would be easy.

But the secret to managing a successful turnaround is to dig into these problems to determine why they occurred in the first place. The “why” is the most important part of the turnaround. The turnaround plan goal is to solve the issues that caused the problems that have not been resolved by the existing management team. The turnaround plan mostly has to do with determining the quality of the management team and then fixing their weaknesses. My goal is always to have managers in place who can recognize potential problems and solve them well before the issue becomes problematic. Turnarounds all have to do with the management team—not the issues that are caused due to weak management.

If you read this article, and you can identify with some of the problems listed above, as the business owner, you need to understand the “why,” then fix that issue and the problem that the “why” issue caused.

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My name is Robert Curry, and I am an Author, CEO Coach, Keynote Speaker, and Turnaround Specialist. Over the past 20 years, I have worked with more than 70 companies taking their businesses from Loses to Profits. Please click on the links below to read other articles like My Turnaround Plan:

Never Give Company Credit Cards to Your Employees.

Your Employees Know What’s Wrong!

Successful Companies Hire the Right People!

I have recently published two books about turnarounds: “From Red to Black – A Business Turnaround” and “The Turnaround.” Both books are true stories about turnarounds of real companies that I have turned around during my career. In both books, I have shared all my Profit Improvement Recommendations (“PIR’s”). PIR’s helped to grow sales, reduce expenses, improve cash flow, and most importantly, strengthen the management teams.

If the information in this article My Turnaround Plan helps you, your family or a business associate, please email me at bob@ceorsc.com and please share the story with me.

If you would like to purchase either or both books autographed by the author, please click on the following link: Red to Black books.

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