Even The Most Troubled Business Can Often Be Turned Around

In my last article I revealed my first couple of takeaways from my experience of having helped over 100 businesses from all kinds of industries and from all over the United States and Canada. Helping them to become higher performing companies, often helping them out of real deep struggles and what often seemed financial ruin or destination of such.

My first reveal was that Every Business Can Be Improved Upon.

This is great news for those businesses that find themselves wanting much better results, and it’s actually also great news for the businesses that are already doing fantastically.

However, as I stated in my previous article, I don’t particularly find this reveal very surprising nor very insightful per se, and I suspect you don’t either.

Yet, it’s funny how much of our success in life is dependent on us working on ourselves and improving ourselves, and yet, I often find most people aren’t terribly engaged in doing so. It is said that you cannot outgrow the growth of your personal development, and I believe it’s much the same for business.

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Yes, we may be very unhappy about our results and we may be struggling, nervous and stressed about how to correct our path of unsuccessful outcomes in our businesses, but in reality we often just go about our day and keep our ways the way we have always done so, and as you know, the definition of insanity is keeping doing the same things over and over again, while expecting a different result.

A lot of the clients from my case study share much the same type of background story. They had started out back in the day; small. Just themselves or perhaps with a spouse, brother, sister, son, daughter or a friend. Though often with the teething struggles of new business launches, they had eventually found some success, and eventually actually grown into a decent size operation.

Many of these businesses would have some 10-25 employees, but some even counted towards 100 employees or so, but altogether they had grown into successful enterprises, creating decent results for the owners and their incomes, as well as providing many jobs and livelihoods for others.

But over the more recent years, things had started to turn for the worse, and by the time I visited them, many of them would be downright struggling for survival.

Yet their daily activities and actions were basically a repeat of the day before, day by day, week, by week, month by month and year by year.

And often they were scratching their heads as to why it was, that their business which used to afford them so much, now was threatening to take everything away from them.

Don’t get me wrong. Pretty much all my clients were (and are) smart people. For sure they were typically excellent tradesmen and tradeswomen in their specific trades and knew their crafts exceptionally well. Yes, some had more education than others, but education isn’t necessarily an indicator of how clever or brilliant you are, and has certainly also been proven not to be a necessary component of success. At least not when we speak of schooled education.

But they were now struggling, and didn’t know how to get out of their struggle, and righten their ships again.

Such was the case for most of the clients that I helped and such was the case for most of the clients part of this case study.

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For some the struggle was so deep and their situation so dire, that bankruptcy considerations and thoughts were plentifully abound. Indeed, upon early inspection when I would arrive to such a client, I was often not very sure that anything could be done to straighten out the “mess” and that an investment with us could bear a high yield return, especially seeing we charged a pretty noticeable amount.

I know, that on occasion a client would be in such dire situation that colleagues of mine, turned a consulting engagement into helping the client to the best solution towards a bankruptcy declaration or sale of business in order to best salvage what could be salvaged. But these were actually rare, and none of the clients that I saw, ended up this route.

A few clients I helped ended up selling their businesses within a few years following engagements with me, and so we kind of lost out on seeing how well they would have done over a longer run following the implementation of what we did, when I was with them, but while I was with them we saw instant positive results.

One such case in which my client sold his business, for certain had an improved situation in negotiating his sale because of the consulting engagement. I actually helped the client with his negotiations with the buyer and helped structure how best to proceed with the matter. The savvy businessman and buyer in concern was greatly impressed with the “new” operations and processes of my client’s business and he instantly saw, how he could use the lessons from my client to be implemented with his existing businesses in the same industry.

But like I stated, often I would arrive at a client, and I would in my mind be scratching my head as to how we could possibly solve the challenges of this particular client and if indeed it would be possible to “save” the business in concern. But a couple more days into the engagement, and we would soon find ways to considerably improve the business. We would soon find plenty of cash in the business so to speak.

And some of these cases at the onset were bleak, very bleak.

Which led me to the second and quite a bit stronger takeaway than the first:

Even The Most Troubled Business Can Often Be Turned Around,

or as I believe I expressed in my previous article: Even the most terrible of situations, the most struggling of businesses can usually be turned around to success.

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I wanted to repeat this information, because if you only knew the kind of challenges many of these clients had and the cases I saw, you would be surprised that these businesses were even salvageable. Indeed, I was surprised myself. Often starting off an engagement being very skeptical indeed that I could turn it into a success. Often it was only after digging quite a bit deeper that I could even begin to believe they were salvageable.

I don’t know where you are in your business or with your current business results, but I for sure have lived through my share of challenges and struggles in business, financially and personally, and I for sure have had many moments when I was nervous as hell and stressed about how I would ever come out of a situation alive and be able to come up again for air and be able to breathe again.

But having now relived many such situations through the businesses of clients I feel now that there’s much greater hope for everybody who experiences challenges with their businesses, for I have seen how things can be turned around.

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Now, what helped me in helping these clients has been much of what helped my many colleagues too, and that was that of having a specific system to go about things. It was also much the success of a system that helped us when we tackled businesses operating in industries that we never had experience in before.

But alas, I must remind you that this article series is not going to cover the system in detail. Instead, this article series is about the takeaways of the 100 plus business cases, and I shall be happy to bring you more takeaways soon. Again, I shall endeavor to bring forth takeaways that hopefully can be useful to you in your business.

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PS.

I should state again for clarity, that I did have a few clients that were doing great, but still required help in getting to even greater levels of performance, but most of the clientele were businesses in trouble, and I’ll probably focus or speak of these more than the successful one for right now. I often feel that there are often great lessons in the cases of turning truly troublesome situations into successes, that we can make great use of for both others in such similar situations as well as for those in already much better spots. When I find takeaways from the cases of successful clients I’ll be sure to share these also.

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PPS.

If you would like to learn more about the system I have been using with great success in helping businesses make more money and perform greater, then please reach out to me. I’ll be happy to discuss if I believe such system could help you in your business or help you accomplish what you are seeking to accomplish.