Well this is not a ‘how to guide’ – just a talk that I had with a ‘turn around’ specialist. I met him at a social function and what he said was interesting. Hence the blog article.

Many of the things he told me were intuitive. So I will not dwell on things like cut air travel, save electricity – he himself told me that such actions are normally energy saving and money saving, so it needs to be done. Such actions also help send a message through the organisation.

He said certain things like:

– he met the people who had parted from the company over 5-6 months before his arrival. He met people who had spent more than 3 years even if they had left more than 2 years ago.

– he met dealers, clients, retailers – with a good track record over the past 6 years. Some of them had ceased to do business with the company for various reasons. He says it was a revelation about what people were willing to say AFTER they had got all their dues.

– he met the sales team, and asked them to point of 10 people without whom the company could not survive. He then zeroed in on some of those who had been seen to be ‘useful’ and found some of them very poor performers 🙂

– those who could not see his vision for the next 3 years were SACKED. He felt it was a waste of time and energy trying to get them to his side.

he also tole me a lot on what he did on the admin, Hr, operations side…but those will do in a different post.

This turnaround was in an engineering company based in Mumbai – it had a manufacturing and a service division also.