Turning a business around typically isn’t just a walk in the park. I should know for I have personally helped more than 50 businesses doing so.
In business, achieving any level of success requires serious commitment. You just won’t get anywhere otherwise. Yes, you could just be lucky, but that typically won’t last with any bit of predictability or reliability. No, you’ll have to dig deeper in to your arsenal of strength and you will have to commit to do what’s necessary to get the business turned around.
And turning around the business often requires not just some serious grit, but also often making some very tough decisions and leveling up often to have the kind of conversations you probably don’t like and typically do everything you can to avoid.
Yes, such conversations can be having to let people go which requires you to look the individual person in the eyes and having that conversation, which frankly is never pleasant to have.
As a Top Business Turn-Around Agent, I try not to let it come to having to let people go in the organization of the business I help. I believe in first seeking to maximize the return of all the resources of the business and that includes all the personnel.
Only if I deem it absolutely necessary to make such cut backs as letting people go and see no other or better recourse will that be my suggestion. With over 50 businesses I have served personally, I have yet to let it come to that. But it could be the case, if e.g. I found a particular individual was altogether the wrong choice, with the wrong skills, and more importantly, the wrong attitude. Then I might resort to choose this outcome.
So more often the difficult conversations entail other conversations, more of the tough love kind. For me as the Business Turn-Around Agent, my tough love often goes to the business owner and sometimes even a spouse of same. This is actually more frequent than not.
There’s a reason the business landed in the predicament it’s in, and typically it’s simply because the owner messed up.
It’s important I get the business owner to realize and recognize this, otherwise he/she is just likely to repeat it again later on. So the tough love is not to bash, but it’s surely easier to fix something when you’re willing to face the truth, even if said truth is about you and when the truth hurts.
But many tough love conversations expand beyond the business owner and often become conversations the business have to have with his/her team or members of the personnel.
The high level of commitment required for turning a business around, however, extends far beyond just tough love conversations and even far beyond implementing sometimes new ways and new processes for optimization.
A great deal of the businesses I have helped, were in such dire straits that they were near bankrupt at the time I entered the business. As described to some extent in previous stories, they often had run up debts, to the point the banks wouldn’t extend any further credit.
They additionally often had used their vendors for credit, which quite simply means haven’t paid them for a while. Not out of being malicious, but frankly just because they didn’t have any cash to pay their vendors with. On top of that of course they would have all kinds of other issues going on, which all had contributed towards the deterioration of their business.
As I have mentioned previously in past stories, my rate used to be around $495 an hour when I helped a business (today my rate is multiple times higher). The clients additionally would have to pay all my expenses including flights, hotels, car rentals and per diem. On a weekly basis that would bring a typical invoice for the client to around $28,000 and typically an assignment would last from 10–12 weeks an up (some much longer).
In other words, as you can evidently see, the investment would be considerable. Add to this that the client already would be stressed out by the fact that everything in their business looked so glum and discouraging and let’s not forget, that they had no cash.
While my esteemed colleagues and I would ensure that the return on the client’s investment would be superior, you can imagine that it would take quite a commitment for a client to meet such conditions for engaging my colleagues or myself for his/her business.
Sometimes the insurmountable troubles that we’re facing blessing are our blessings.
Given what I just told you about the client’s situation and the charges they would be faced with with hiring me to help bring their business around, you may be thinking something along the lines of: “Who in their right mind, would take on such expenses, when they already have such huge debts, creditors calling, no money in the bank and their business is performing terribly?”
You want the truth?
Here it is: The desperate ones!
The desperate ones will. And they’re actually lucky. Well, lucky first of all because the method my colleague and I use has such incredibly success rates (97–98%), that spending the money with us typically guarantees a successful outcome. But lucky also, because their desperation makes them willing to do what’s necessary.
You see it’s necessary for them to realize they probably won’t stand a chance to fix the business themselves. If they could they would already have done so.
So now that they have found someone who can help them fix the business, the next necessary step is to be willing to meet the terms, and accept that they get on the hook, so to speak, for the large investment with their Top Business Turn-Around Agent.
Understandably, most of the clients are freaking out right about now, when they realize that the investment easily will run into $250,000-$300,000. And that’s the amount for the smaller kind of engagements. Some engagements go way North of that amount.
That takes quite a commitment to go ahead with when you are already faced with so many challenges.
But as I stated, it’s their desperate situation and desperation that actually help them. At this point a lot of these clients realize that if they don’t get the adequate help from the right business consultant, then they’ll more than likely lose their business, possibly more.
Many clients that are in less dire straits are actually challenged harder when facing this decision time. They are doing poorly, but they’re are not quite with their backs to the wall yet, so many often figure that they’ll somehow be able to fix it themselves. Facing the commitment to sign onto such an investment is simply too tough for them to muster and they chicken out.
Their results is often that they’ll linger on, rarely getting their business to higher performance levels, or that they’ll soon enough will end up being in the situation quite like the desperate ones.
The smart ones, don’t chicken out. But they are also the ones that have more of a winner’s mentality and mindset. You see the successful ones, most often understands, that it often takes an investment to achieve a greater result than those you have accomplished before.
They successful one, understands that to reach higher levels, they’ll probably have to do what they have never done before or have to do what they are doing, but do it differently.
They understand that it is probably better, faster, more efficient and in the end probably less expensive to have someone who has done it successfully, possibly multiple times before, show them, lead them and guide them through the process.
People with success mindset will sign on. To be very blunt: Losers will not.
Your business is in trouble and needs help. Or you may be relatively successful, but know the business can go to higher levels which you desire. But you also know, that you don’t quite know how to take it there.
What’s your level of commitment?
Over the course of this series of posts, I will share with you my insights, including many secrets of the Top Business Turn-Around Agents and how they do it. I hope, you’ll follow along as I extend my personal invitation to do so.
If you wish to learn more about me and what I do, you can find more information on my website https://theautomatedmillionaire.com
If you wish to learn most of the content from this series of posts on how you too can turn your struggling business around or make your successful business even more successful, then visit https://theautomatedmillionaire.com/no-cost-training
That’s right, there’s a free training that reveals the system I use.
At time of posting this story the training isn’t yet available, but if you sign up for it I will let you know as soon as it is. I expect it to be available within a few days. So sign up now. It will show you the system in its entirety and as I have said, it has helped me personally change the lives of more than 50 businesses and many more thousands that were helped by colleagues of mine who used much of the foundation of this system.
(This story is a continuance and part of a series describing real life like existence of a top business turn-around agent. To be continued soon…)
