Leadership · Field Notes
The Business Turnaround
One phone call. A business that had lost money for five consecutive years. And the lesson that surprised me most wasn't financial — it was discovering that people can become remarkably comfortable with failure, provided somebody else owns it.
The Call
Two years earlier I'd built something from nothing — a brand-new business unit and product line inside a large matrix organisation. Pitch to launch to break-even in year one, a seven-figure net profit in year two. (More on that build another time. A struggling business is a more urgent story than the dream of starting one — and if this piece steers even one person in the right direction, it's time well spent.)
That kind of result doesn't go unnoticed, and the reward for doing well at work is, usually, a lot more work. So when our CFO — an individual responsible for several billion dollars of annual revenue — called and asked me to "have a look" at one of the group's businesses, two things struck me. First, it's flattering to be courted from that altitude. Second, how exactly do you say no?
So, in I went. Feet first, full of optimism, to turn around a business with huge potential that had struggled for many years — consecutive seven-figure losses, year on year, with no end in sight.
How hard could it be? I had executive sponsorship. Supportive line management. An organisation that celebrated success. A fresh set of eyes and, I told myself, a leadership and sales style that would get its arms around the problem in no time. I'd already worked closely with the business, knew many of the people, and understood the systems well enough to believe this would be a straightforward turnaround — and, with the career progression on offer within the group, a genuinely exciting one. The time commitment, as per my initial understanding, would average 90/10 in favour of my startup — 75/25 in the early weeks while I got under the skin of the thing.
When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
The Diagnosis
The business, its processes and a number of its people were so far from acceptable that it was genuinely a shock the thing ran at all — let alone inside a successful group.
I kept the first phase simple, and deliberately free of judgement:
The people — who they were, what their roles actually were, the impact they had, and the gap between how they understood their job and what the business needed from it.
The money — forensic analysis alongside FP&A. Major errors in costing versus what had been sold. And that was only the surface.
The contracts — a deep dive across every scope, pricing template, term, risk, payment schedule and debtor, run jointly by finance, legal, commercial and the unit itself. Historical baggage set aside; the only question worth asking was: how do we come out of this on top?
The roles — every position benchmarked against industry norms and standardised job descriptions, sized to what the business needed rather than to the people in the seats. Three people doing one job. One person doing three. An inept middle layer. And a worrying number of long-tenured staff with a shaky grasp of basic business practice.
The software — a genuinely strong platform, implemented years earlier, poorly understood, running at perhaps 10% of its potential.
Six weeks. I spent a lot of those nights awake, increasingly convinced I'd bitten off more than I could chew. At points I doubted the decision to take it on at all — it was starting to feel like a serious career blunder — walking away from something I genuinely loved doing for something I'd begun to dread.
The Hardest Part
It wasn't the financials that kept me awake. Numbers can usually be fixed. People are harder.
One decision became unavoidable. A long-serving colleague I genuinely liked wasn't capable of doing the job the business now needed him to do. He wasn't a bad person. Quite the opposite. He'd simply found himself in a role that had outgrown him.
I knew what had to happen long before I was ready to do it. I put it off as long as I could, but inevitably it became clear that the longer I let it drift, the more it became my own failure. As difficult as it was to make the decision, so too was accepting the consequences. Once he left, the work wouldn't disappear. It would land squarely on me until we could recruit, train and build the team the business actually needed.
At the same time, I still had responsibility for the startup I'd built from scratch — the work I genuinely enjoyed. Every hour spent trying to save one business was an hour taken away from growing another.
That was probably the moment I realised this wasn't just a turnaround project. It was going to become the hardest year of my career.
And I hadn't even fired anyone yet.
The Politics Nobody Warns You About
Here's the part you don't see coming.
When you uncover this many problems across this many areas, you also uncover a matrix of complicity. You may see yourself as the person brought in to save the thing. That is not how you'll be seen by everyone who stood by and watched it happen for years — comfortable in the knowledge that it wasn't their job.
My biggest mistake going in was assuming everyone wanted it fixed. In a large organisation with its share of politics and toxic pockets, the opposite was closer to the truth: a good half of the business needed me — and the turnaround — to fail. Success would only raise an uncomfortable question about why no one had acted sooner.
I don't come to work to make friends. But you do need a few key allies, and finding them early matters more than almost anything else you'll do.
The Plan
90–120 days, with a business case behind every cost and every saving.
Restructure. Some redundancies. Roles re-scoped — some up, some down — and fresh talent to round out the team. A net reduction in overhead, built to deliver well beyond the unit's existing capability.
Financial literacy for everyone. Cost, margin, contract profitability, renewal discipline. We refused hundreds of renewals that were being delivered at a loss. Even at ground level, people could now spot a problem in the numbers before it became one.
Delayering. We shortened the distance between the front line and the leadership team — daily informal conversations, an approachable tone, and honesty about why some people were leaving and what was expected of those who stayed.
The software. A full upgrade in liaison with finance and IT, built off a proper requirements document — covering every input, output and shortcoming. Beyond the day-to-day, it finally gave us the reporting, governance and audit clarity the business had been missing — a single source of truth we could actually stand behind, in front of finance, the board or an auditor. The investment went through a business case and was amortised across five years to protect the monthly run rate.
Those moves alone narrowed the bleed from around $120K of negative net profit a month to roughly $50K within three months.
My 75/25 split, needless to say, was long gone — and running in the wrong direction. Which forced the best discipline of all: I finally learned to delegate properly in my own startup. Real objectives, real ownership, and the space for good people to make their own mistakes and find their own answers. In hindsight, it was the making of several of them.
The Sales Engine
None of the above mattered without revenue. We could carry the cost base for a while, but the window was closing fast.
In this market, serious work comes through procurement portals — the big group companies and Tier 1 clients with the portfolios and cash reserves to do business at scale. This was never going to be solved at mom-and-pop level.
The first mistake people make is treating portals as optional. They aren't. Declining to participate — because a tender looks unwinnable, or the scope is awkward — can quietly lock you out of an organisation for years. Presence is the price of entry. So yes, early on there was an element of volume: get registered everywhere, bid widely, keep the solutions team working around the clock. Submit enough credible bids and you stay in the fight.
But it isn't spray-and-pray, and it's a costly mistake to think of it that way. Bidding wide, early, is about visibility and optionality — making sure that when the right tender lands, you're already in the room rather than locked out of it. And our timing was partly luck, something well overdue in this business after so many years in the cold: several major tenders hit the market just as we came out of the restructure, with a sharper team, a stronger operation and software that finally worked. We bid over $200M in new work.
Then the funnel narrows — and this is where it stops being a numbers game. Clarifications come back. BAFO requests arrive. The moment a buyer engages, procurement becomes human, and converting that is on the salesperson. In this case, me. Reaching the actual decision-makers, understanding the problem they needed solved that the incumbent wasn't, reading the pricing, the scope and the solution, and building enough of a relationship to get it over the line.
The portal gets you seen. The bid keeps you in the fight. The close is yours alone.
The Result
We worked ourselves into the ground, and we nailed it. Two nationwide, multi-year contracts — total contract value well into eight figures. First invoicing right on the six-month mark, which tipped us to a positive monthly run rate for the first time in the company's history.
Everything was measured against the group's balanced scorecard, weighted heavily toward the financials: revenue, net profit, and overhead as a percentage of revenue. By year-end we were delivering against budget across all four quadrants.
By the end of my first full financial year in charge, the business posted half a million in net profit. The records have kept falling since.
What I'd Tell You If You're In The Same Seat
The numbers are almost always more fixable than they look from the inside. The hard part is rarely the spreadsheet.
Find your allies in week one. Assume some people need you to fail, and plan accordingly.
Don't confuse activity with presence, or presence with the win. They're three different things, and you need all three.
And for the thanks? It certainly didn't arrive in the way a younger me may have hoped for — no speeches, no applause. But recognition at that level rarely arrives loud. It comes quietly, and more often than not financially: salary and bonus, both of which I was of course rewarded with, and the occasional quiet nod in the corridor from the people at the top. No plaudits, no accolades. Once you understand that's the deal, it's more than enough.
Businesses rarely stay broken because the problems are impossible. They stay broken because people eventually mistake familiar for acceptable. That's what a turnaround really is.
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