# Turnarounds *What it actually takes* --- I've spent a good part of my career on businesses that had stopped working - some I bought, some I was handed. These are the things that mattered most. Details are disguised and numbers rounded. --- **Know your window.** Usually it's cash that sets it, but not always. Software businesses die slowly and can stay profitable for years while they do, so the clock there gets set by other things: an owner's patience, an exit horizon, a big customer renewal. How long you have decides how drastic you need to be. **Find the problem yourself.** Have people walk you through the products and the customer base, not the strategy. Sit through the product as a buyer would, and ask each person separately what they'd fix if the business were theirs. The answers won't match, and the gaps between them are most of the diagnosis. In one business, a week of this showed us the central problem before any analysis did: products at a few hundred pounds a year were being sold and managed alongside systems at tens of thousands, as if they were the same thing. Everyone could see it, but nobody had felt it was theirs to call. And keep checking the diagnosis against the ground, because I've got this wrong too: I once treated a shrinking business as a sales and marketing problem for eighteen months, partly because the people closest to the product believed in it, and partly because a sales problem was the diagnosis I preferred, quicker and cheaper to fix. An afternoon in the product settled it. **Change the structure before you judge the people.** When results disappoint, everyone starts with the people. The problem is usually the structure they're working in ([[Systems first]]). In one situation we split a management team that had been stretched across businesses with nothing in common, inside the first two weeks, and the people who took what looked like narrower jobs were mostly relieved. There was a cost: one side, seen on its own, was short of management, and filling that gap became the next problem. One team we disbanded outright, because years of steady customer losses said it wasn't working; another that looked just as unprofitable we refocused instead, because underneath the numbers it was propping up the development team and giving away days baked into old contract pricing. Repositioned, and protected from work nobody was paying for, it swung to a couple of hundred thousand pounds of annual contribution. The two looked the same in the monthly pack. **Pick the two or three decisions that matter.** Most of what moved these businesses came from two or three decisions, and half the job was refusing to spend energy anywhere else. In practice that meant picking one competitor to take on rather than the whole market, so the story and the reference case only had to work once before we could carry them elsewhere. We stopped the marketing, events and retention spend in a declining business, on the bet that nothing would move: sales didn't move, churn didn't either, and the money went where it made a difference. We simplified six products into two with clear price points. And a team pointed at one business, with its own plan, gets more done than the same people spread across three. **Put the plan in the budget.** A plan only becomes real when it's in numbers people are held to, and the budget is where that happens. Expect to send the first cut back: it will arrive with everything still going backwards, and the work is in the assumptions - when development lands, when a deployment becomes something you can sell, what a missed window costs. In a business that sells on an annual cycle, a missed implementation window doesn't cost a month, it costs a year, and you can't sequence a plan without knowing it. What goes back is assumptions, not totals. Where a business's future is in doubt, build the case, don't assert it. For one that was being written off, we costed the technology rebuild to know how long the customer base needed to hold, put renewal probabilities against the customers and looked at the range of outcomes rather than the average, and separated the spend that protects existing customers from the spend that has to earn its case. It had been keeping customers on one-year contracts because nobody would commit to its future; when we committed, they did too. Two years on it makes more profit than it did when it was being written off. **Set the rhythm, then hold your nerve.** Keep the machinery simple: short weekly sessions that actually decide things, a written update at the end of the week, the numbers and the product plan reviewed separately so each gets proper time, and a plan on a page for each business - the long-term goal, this year's milestones, the projects that get there, the metrics that prove it. Holding your nerve is harder, because the right moves routinely make the reported numbers worse before they make them better ([[Inverse response]]), and the pressure to reverse them is strongest exactly then. If the leading indicators you named when you built the case are moving, hold; if they aren't, look again. Give reorganised teams time and space, because the productivity that comes back can surprise you. And be slow to declare victory: one of the businesses above still isn't finished, and I'm not counting it yet. ---