BUSINESS UNDERPERFORMING 
UNSURE OF THE PROBLEM OR WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT ?

As a turnaround and business growth specialist, I have been asked to help many businesses in various stages of underperformance. This has ranged from companies that simply needed help with their product or market positioning or their sales organisation, through companies whose sales were in serious decline from a previous position of strength, to start-up businesses who have never gained any traction despite the quality and relevance of their product or services.

I have also, on occasions, been asked to help businesses on the brink of failure, these can be more of a resurrection than a rescue but that is a story for another time.

I could spend a considerable amount of time and typing discussing the many and various reasons for a downturn in performance or in the case of a viable startup, a lack of traction. It could be poor positioning, poor marketing, weak sales, ineffective value proposition, aggressive competition, incorrect pricing or even bad leadership or management. However there are two key factors that, in my experience always affect the longer term or continued success of a business.

The first is a timing issue; the ability and management proximity to recognise a problem as soon as it starts and ideally before it has any negative impact on the business and the second is, quite simply, knowing what to do about it.

The first factor is almost always in the hands of the management, they need to be as close as they possibly can to all aspects of the business and to keep their eyes open. In the case of start up and early stage businesses the leadership tends to be very close to the action and as long as they maintain contact with reality, don't believe their own hype and don't trust to hope they have a good chance of seeing the issue early on in the process before its starts to seriously impact the business.

Generally in the case of larger organisations, the decision makers can be more detached from the front line. They see the numbers at sales and board meetings and they will get sales and management reports but a one month slowdown can be seen as a blip, a two or three month slip can be blamed upon some lost sales, poor sales management, a promotion by a competitor or a hole in the pipeline. It may take up to four months before any real concern sets in and an investigation into the issues is started. Before you know it has been over six months and the business is in decline.

The second factor is what the leadership and management actually do about about the problems. I have worked with many organisations where they have, sooner or later, identified the problem and then they are totally at a loss as to what they should do about it. In a way I sympathise as many performance issues can be complicated and spread across a number of areas, that being said this is no reason to prevaricate or delay, something obviously needs to be done and done quickly.

There are many reasons given by business owners and leaders for a slide in performance most of them are based upon assumptions and standard assumptions at that. It is not good enough to assume that it is just the fault of sales management or the quality of the sales team, it is not simply ineffective marketing nor is it good enough to believe the hype of the sales pipeline with the prospect of a big order or two, these have a tendency to evaporate.

Believe it or not I have seen businesses who firmly believed that their declining performance was due to a short term market change and they just needed to 'hang in there' until they come through it. A situation that they often try to fund by letting some of the sales team go and slashing their marketing spend - just until things change !! In my opinion this is extremely short sighted, totally flawed logic and potentially business suicide.

From a personal perspective, I am have worked with a number of seriously failing businesses and I have delivered turnarounds that have been both effective and lasting. In many cases, however this recovery can be totally traumatic for the business, painful for the leadership and extremely challenging and difficult for the staff. This is even before the impact of the client base is taken into consideration.

If there was an earlier and highly effective intervention and a resource that business owners and leaders could call on the moment that they have a problem or even if they have a feeling that there could be a problem then things would be considerably easier and less traumatic.

Quite simply the business would not have to go down so far before it came back up: less of an impact for everyone involved

This is why I have launched Business Reset.

Business Reset is an early intervention organisation specialising in helping businesses overcome challenges before they impact the business performance and to support the leadership team in keeping the business on a growth trajectory.

If your business is showing signs of slowing down, if your sales are suffering or your margins are being squeezed then before these issues become serious then get in touch with Business Reset and we can arrange an exploratory no-obligation conversation.