Business Turnaround podcast

When your business is in trouble — cash is tight, team morale is low, clients are slipping away — your first instinct might be to blame external forces. The economy. The market. Your staff. Maybe even luck. But the real turnaround starts inside the mind of the leader. That’s where the bleeding either stops or continues.

In a struggling business, chasing more revenue without fixing your margins is like pouring water into a bucket full of holes. You’ll work harder, sell more, stress more — and still sink. Sales feel like momentum. Sales keep the machines running, the phones ringing, the invoices flowing. But here’s the hard truth — revenue without profit is just busy work.

In nearly every turnaround I’ve led, there’s one consistent truth — the old rules no longer work. But the team? They’re often still playing by them. When your company enters a downturn, everything shifts — cash is tighter, priorities change, and urgency goes up tenfold. But if your people are still operating like it’s business as usual, you’ve got a serious disconnect. And that’s dangerous.

If you reviewed all your clients today—every contract, every recurring order, every long-standing relationship—how many of them are truly helping you move forward? And how many are quietly dragging you down? This is one of the hardest but most critical truths in turnaround work: not all revenue is good revenue.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of turning around businesses—from logistics to retail to homecare—it’s this: speed beats strategy when you’re in trouble. In normal times, it’s okay to debate. To polish the PowerPoint. To wait until you have 90% of the data. But in a turnaround? That luxury is gone. Delay is the enemy. If you wait for the perfect plan, you’ll miss the window for any plan to work...

When your business is in trouble—sales dropping, costs rising, cash getting tight—your first instinct might be to cut, freeze, or fight. But here’s a turnaround truth most leaders miss: your biggest asset isn’t what’s on your balance sheet. It’s the trust of your stakeholders.

In a turnaround, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking the answer is just more effort. Work harder. Push sales more. Squeeze costs harder. But in reality, when a business starts slipping, it’s often because the very strategy it's built on no longer fits the market. The world has moved. Customer needs have shifted. Competitors have evolved. And you? You might be selling the right product… to the wrong customer… or delivering it in a way that doesn’t make sense anymore. That’s where Strategic Reorientation comes in.

In the early stages of decline, most leaders freeze. They wait, they hope, they delay hard decisions. And in doing so, they surrender the steering wheel. But a business in trouble needs the exact opposite—it needs someone who grabs the wheel, decides the destination, and gets everyone on board with urgency and clarity.

When a business is struggling, cash flow is often the first alarm bell that rings. It’s not just a number on a spreadsheet—it’s the oxygen your company needs to survive and thrive. Without a stable flow of cash, even the best products, the strongest customer relationships, and the most innovative ideas can’t keep your business afloat.

I’ve worked with plenty of struggling companies—some in manufacturing, others in care, retail, logistics—you name it. And one truth always shows up: turning around a business isn’t just about fixing the numbers. It’s about shifting the culture and the internal systems that allowed the decline to happen in the first place.