How to turn a business around
Posted on July 15, 2016 by Rex Mackrill, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
If a business needs to be turned around how do you do it? See how to allow people to make informed decisions and take action, without recrimination.
People want to do their jobs. Well.
That’s why they come to work.
So how do we let people do their jobs?
I was brought into a £100 million turnover business. Everyone was working hard; really hard.
But the business was not going well.
Financially it was adrift. Turning the business around was critical.
The problem was that people did not have the information they needed to make informed timely decisions.
The business was spending £1 million a month. The systems collecting cost information were not working properly, so the error rate was £1 million a month. No-one had any financial idea where they were, let alone how to turn the business around.
So we rebuilt the systems. We rebuilt the way that the work was structured and the way that costs were collected. We changed the way that budgets were forecast.
And then we gave the results back to the people across the business to take the decisions and actions to sort it out, to turn it around.
So they could take informed decisions and timely actions.
Everyone was still busy, and calling for more resource.
After three months we showed them the effects of that.
The business was going bust quickly.
The information told the people across the business what decisions and actions were needed to turn it around.
No recriminations; just quality information.
The business was turned around and became profitable.
We had let people do their jobs.
If you want to know more, or about how intuition, compassion, determination and fearlessness proved to be important, give me a call.
