Expert Advice: Turning Around a Failing Business for Business Recovery

It's hard to save a failing business, but it isn't impossible; here's how several entrepreneurs say they saved theirs.

Step 1: Gain insight into your lackluster sales performance or related problem areas by making any or all of the following suggestions:

?? Deep-dive into the numbers. Look at your financial statements, sales trends, and customer metrics to pinpoint areas of decreased loss. Has a particular sales channel dropped? Are the cost of goods sold increasing? Did the holiday season perform worse this past year? If so, what was the reason?

?? Listen to internal feedback. Ask employees of all levels what they think about the issue and what the solutions might be.

?? Do some customer research. Engage your target market and interview them about their problems, needs, and satisfaction levels with your type of product or service.

?Step 2: Write a Turnaround Plan

?? Determine specific, measurable goals and objectives: Lay out what “success” looks like in your business turnaround. Make your goals concrete, realistic, and quantifiable.

? Create actionable strategies: Plot out specific steps you plan to take to tackle the challenges at the heart of your business turnaround and achieve your goals.

? Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize: Concentrate initially on the changes that will have the most impact; don’t spread yourself too thin.

? Communicate your plan effectively: Get buy-in and support by sharing your turnaround plan with employees, stakeholders, and investors.

? Break your transformation plan into three buckets: growing the business, fixing the business, and growing the people. It requires budgetary investment and often includes rewriting or updating your strategic plan to fit today’s marketplace.

? Double down on what got you here. Identify the strategies that were most effective for you in getting your business off the ground and try to reapply them across other unexplored or under-explored channels.

? Gain operational efficiency. Not only should you focus on profitability, but you should also identify ways to streamline operations that can make your entire business more efficient and reduce costs. While profitability will save a business, operational efficiency will reward it.

? Reinvigorate sales and marketing. While you might be naturally great at sales and marketing, large portions of your sales and marketing efforts may rank from not having the right data and being able to make the right conclusions from that data.

? Be innovative. An innovative change to your business will help create new opportunities and breathe life into an aging business model. Some changes may be as simple as a new product or service; others may be as complex as a new business altogether.

Please remember that turnarounds take time, effort, and commitment, as well as a deep desire and total commitment by every individual in your business. We would suggest that you choose a single problem, implement solutions to correct that problem, and then move on to the next problem, completing each of these tasks in the shortest time possible. Also, please bear in mind that these are general suggestions and that the specific problems and solutions used in your business will be unique to you. If things are not moving forward quickly, seek assistance from a business mentor.