Turning Stuff Around

A blog about the grit, grind, and occasional glory of turnarounds.

Author: Daniel Cohen

  • Sustainable Profitability

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    Sustainable Profitability

    As we all know, there are only two levers you can pull to drive profitability: cost cutting, and growing top-line. In stable times you are constantly pulling on both, aligning investments against forecasted business performance. But in a turnaround, things are not as straightforward. The top-line lever appears, at first glance, to be “rusty” and possibly jammed, while the costs lever often has an all too strong gravitational pull.

    The Cost Cutting Lever

    In a turnaround, launching a cost-cutting initiative may seem as an obvious first step. It’s quick and decisive—you give the order to reduce expenses, say by cutting 10% of the workforce—and manage through the fallout. While it may provide short-term relief—and seem like a quick path to profitability—it rarely is a sustainable solution. The “cleaver approach” will not fix the inherent inefficiencies that often plague organizations.

    For a cost-cutting to be impactful, it needs to consider the bigger picture and align with the long-term, strategic plans. For me, using the zero-based budgeting approach has been more effective in creating sustainable cost structures.

    Zero-based budgeting requires you to build your budget from scratch. For example, instead of saying “We had 100 engineers last year, so we need 120 engineers this year!” (assuming 20% growth), you and your head of engineering start with a blank slate. Together you consider the product plans, the technical debt strategy, new technologies as well as other factors, and appropriately align headcount and investment.

    Ultimately, the biggest benefit of this approach is that it forces you to stop and think rather than make inertia-based decisions. It brings to the surface the hard questions (and decisions) required to set the company on the right path.

    The Growth Lever

    Driving top-line growth is a different challenge altogether. You’re not shedding something you have, you’re building something you don’t. This requires a clear strategy, a strong product lineup, and seamless cross-functional execution. It requires the village. And since, in a turnaround, the village may not be, well, a village, it can take time to materialize.

    That’s why you need a bridging strategy—a way to achieve short-term revenue gains to keep the business afloat while laying the foundations for future growth.

    Some of the tactical initiatives that have helped me in the past:

    • Leverage existing customers. Acquiring new customers is a long-term initiative. This is not to say you should not pursue this, but working with your existing customer-base is often easier and quicker. Focused upselling and cross-selling initiatives can lead to fast, much needed, gains.
    • Optimize pricing. Review your pricing models for adjustment opportunities. Sometimes, incremental price increases or new pricing tiers can unlock significant revenue without major operational changes.
    • Identify and prioritize quick wins. The so called “low-hanging fruit”. Look for underutilized sales channels, untapped market segments, or underplayed products. Walk the halls, talk to people—you’ll be surprise at how many ideas are waiting to be uncovered.

    Keep in mind that tactical growth is about small wins that buy time and prove to your team that progress is possible. It also provides some financial flexibility to fund longer-term initiatives, such as product development, organizational redesign, or a revamp of operations. Lastly, deploying tactical initiatives can help you test business hypotheses that can further help hone your long-term strategy.

    The cost-cutting and growth levers are interconnected. Pulling them effectively provides you the breathing room to sustain the business through the turnaround, while aligning investment plans for the long-term. This creates a stable foundation that drives sustainable profitability, ultimately allowing your people and business to thrive well into the future.

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  • Silos, Silos, Everywhere!

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    Silos, Silos, Everywhere!

    Silos are one of the most pervasive and most persistent barriers to success. Yet, they seem to exist in nearly every organization, big and small, despite the fact they stifle collaboration, breed inefficiency, and often create a “them vs. us” mindset. In a turnaround, addressing silos isn’t optional—it’s critical to driving meaningful change.

    At their core, silos are often an unintended byproduct of growth and complexity. As organizations scale and expand geographically, physical sites are formed, functional boundaries are better defined, and management layers naturally develop. While these structures bring clarity and focus, they also create physical, operational, and cultural divisions within the company—silos!

    The problem with silos is that once they are formed, they are difficult to dismantle. Factors like geography, leadership influence (especially in highly political organizations), or fear of change, often keep them alive. Left unchecked, silos will drain your organization of its full potential.

    Building bridges

    There are two ways to address silos: you can either try and beat them, or you can try and join them… together! I’ve found the latter to be far more effective, productive, and surprisingly easier to achieve.

    Breaking down silos isn’t about dismantling teams or forcing a change to working processes. It’s about creating a culture of connection and shared purpose—building bridges. Though changing (or building) culture may sound like a daunting task, with committed leadership and a clear plan, it can happen faster than you think.

    Here are three key areas to focus on as you build your plan:

    • Nurture a unified vision—a shared goal
      This is by no means the corporate vision statement. But a real reason for being. It’s a call to action that rallies people behind a shared purpose, connecting their day-to-day work with a bigger, more meaningful goal.
      A turnaround is a perfect spark to light that fire (crises usually are.) Don’t be afraid to use it.
    • Encourage cross-functional collaboration
      Once you’ve clearly articulated the problem statement, encourage collaboration by bringing people together—preferably in-person to bridge geographical silos—and empower them to figure solutions out on their own. Most people want to contribute meaningfully, and feel part of something bigger. Your job is to promote this mindset, and make sure your leadership team actively supports it. Collaboration is never forced; it’s enabled.
    • Improve communications across the organization
      One of the biggest factors keeping silos alive is poor communication. When one silo hears one message, and another hears something different, alignment becomes impossible and silos persist. Consistent, and transparent communications are key to bridging silos and creating a cohesive organization. Establish your way of communicating to the broader team and commit to it.

    At my company, I held a global standup meeting every two weeks. We flew teams across geographies for in-person workshops. Leadership actively visited offices worldwide to drive alignment and communicate our shared goal. We transparently tracked progress using a set of OKRs, and even created a hashtag for our internal communications: #BreakingDownSilos. Ultimately, we built strong bridges across the functional and geographical silos we faced. How did we know we succeeded? We saw measurable improvements across all our internal culture survey metrics; Alignment, in particular, was up an impressive 11% year-on-year!

    Silos may form naturally, and are not always “bad”. What matters is that you don’t allow them to define your organization. Breaking them down and building bridges requires persistence, and nurturing a culture that values collaboration. The returns on this investment are huge: a unified organization, ready to tackle bigger and bigger challenges head-on.

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  • The Change Tolerance

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    The Change Tolerance

    One of the first variables to measure, as you assess turnaround readiness, is the organization’s change tolerance. In other words, how much change can your organization handle before resistance turns into disengagement or even chaos? It is very much like a rubber band—stretch it too far and it breaks.

    Some organizations have a high tolerance and thrive on bold, sweeping transformations. Others have a low threshold, where even minor shifts can trigger disruption. Understanding where your organization stands on this spectrum is crucial. And the most critical element is your people. Consider the following key questions:

    Culture

    • Are people engaged?
    • Are there silos (geographical, functional or otherwise)?
    • How political is the organization?
    • Is there trust in leadership?
    • Does information flow freely throughout?

    Most of these questions can be answered by walking the halls and talking to team members. You’ll be positively surprised at what people share with you if you take the time and interest.

    People

    • Do we have the right skills and capabilities?
    • What is the talent pool looking like and can we lean on it more?
    • How fatigued—or fed-up—are people?

    Sit down with your HR team and function heads to explore these questions. If needed, augment your learnings with interviews with your leadership team’s direct reports.

    Leadership

    • Do you have the right skills and capabilities on the team?
    • Is the team cohesive?
    • Is there trust and healthy conflict, or only artificial harmony?
    • Is there buy-in to your plans?

    Beyond your own observations, I recommend seeking an objective, coach-led assessment—especially if you suspect lack of trust in the team, as people will hide their true colors in this setting. (If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading “The 5 Dysfunctions of A Team“ by Patrick Lencioni. It’s been my go-to model, and has worked wonders with every team I’ve led.)

    Building Change Tolerance

    Getting a well-informed reading on your people and leadership team should be a top priority. Remember, people challenges are often the most difficult and resource-intensive to address. They are also the most impactful to the rest of the organization, and have the potential of completely derailing your turnaround plans.

    Once you’ve assessed the change tolerance, ask yourself whether it aligns with the level of change your turnaround requires. If the answer is yes—great (consider yourself lucky!) But more often than not tolerance will be too low. If that is the case, then you have a bigger, more immediate challenge to tackle: increasing the change tolerance.

    Increasing tolerance isn’t done overnight. It requires intentional trust building—especially true if you’ve been parachuted into the organization from the outside. Since trust is built slowly, by delivering on promises, small wins matter even more and can help you build early momentum. This will demonstrate that change is both manageable and doable, and will ultimately allow you to stretch the change tolerance further.

    Finally, always stretch carefully. Continuously assess the tension with your team, and work to increase the organization’s capacity and resilience to change. Over time, culture will become more adaptive and capable of handling larger more transformative changes.

    Cranking up the change tolerance is an ongoing task. As the saying goes, change is the only constant, and this has never been truer than in today’s fast-paced world. Keep challenging the organization to achieve more—but ensure you’re doing so on the right foundation.

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  • Small Wins, Big Impact

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    Small Wins, Big Impact

    Beginning a turnaround is like staring at a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of the Mona Lisa. You’ve got a few key pieces in place—a hint of her nose and mouth, some scattered fragments of the lake in the background—but the full picture is still elusive. Being able to see the end state, and formulate a strategic plan to get there is critical. But when it’s time to set out, I’ve found small wins to be incredibly powerful at building momentum to steer the ship in the right direction.

    Small wins give you something to hold onto when the bigger picture feels out of reach. They help you—and the team—believe that change is possible, one step at a time. Especially in turnaround situations, small wins are critical for restoring confidence, building hope, and reminding everyone that progress is possible. And as progress happens, the end result begins taking shape in front of their eyes.

    In my experience, the most important decision you can make as you set out on your turnaround, is the decision to move—before “analysis-paralysis” grips you and the team. The key is to stop waiting for the stars to align to tackle everything at once. But to look for the first small thing you can fix, and fix it. The fix becomes a win; the win sparks momentum. And momentum powers continued progress.

    At my company, for example, after assessing the different areas that needed fixing, each function head set out to achieve one small win within three to four weeks. In the people function, we fixed company communications. In the commercial function, we addressed pricing. In finance, we made incremental cost-control improvements. And each of these small wins demonstrated progress towards our shared goal of turning around the company. (More on these moves later in the blog.)

    In turnarounds, finding problems, is like finding sand at the beach—they’re everywhere. Don’t focus on fixing everything. Instead find your next small win, then build from there.

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  • Doubt the Doubt

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    Doubt the Doubt

    Like in all major events, there’s a moment (actually, many moments) in every turnaround where self-doubt sneaks in. Usually uninvited. It’s that little voice in your head that whispers questions you’d rather not hear: Did I make the right call? Am I leading this team the right way? What if I’m in over my head?

    I know that voice well. It doesn’t just question your decisions—it questions you. It makes you feel like you don’t belong in your role, that everyone else’s opinion matters more, and that you’re just one mistake away from being exposed as a fraud. It can grow especially loud when the stakes are high and the path is uncertain.

    Here’s the thing I’ve come to realize: that voice of doubt? It’s not your enemy. It’s your brain’s way of trying to protect you, to keep you in your comfort zone and away from risk. And while the comfort zone is a safe place, it’s not where growth happens, it’s where the status quo is kept.

    Self-doubt forces you to reflect, to question, to reassess. And yes, it can get very uncomfortable. But here’s the thing: that discomfort means you’re pushing boundaries, stepping into new territory, and challenging yourself in ways that matter. Doubt is a sign of effort. It means you’re trying something new, taking a risk.

    The key is to doubt the doubt itself. Instead of letting it paralyze you, recognize it for what it is—a protective reflex, not a prophecy of failure. Use it as a signal to pause, reassess, and adjust if needed, but don’t let it stop you.

    Every leader I’ve seen navigate a tough turnaround has wrestled with self-doubt (myself included). The ones who succeed aren’t the ones without doubt, but the ones who move forward despite it. Their confidence comes from taking thoughtful, deliberate actions, not from the absence of doubt.

    Doubt isn’t a sign you’re failing, it’s proof you’re trying! Doubt the doubt. Keep pushing. You are probably on to something.

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  • The Biggest Myths About Turnarounds

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    The Biggest Myths About Turnarounds

    Turnarounds are often glorified in stories and media. The fearless leader charges in, makes a few bold decisions, and everything miraculously falls into place.

    If only it were that simple…

    The reality of turnarounds is far messier and more nuanced than the myths would have you believe. And clinging to those myths can do more harm than good.

    Here are a few of the biggest myths about turnarounds—and the truths I’ve learned firsthand:

    Myth 1: It’s All About Bold, Big Moves

    When people imagine a turnaround, they picture sweeping changes—a major restructuring, a massive product launch, or a dramatic cost-cutting move. While big moves can have their place, most successful turnarounds are built on small, consistent wins. Addressing small inefficiencies, rebuilding trust, and fixing foundational problems often have a far greater impact than a single dramatic gesture. Turnarounds aren’t won with a sledgehammer; they’re carefully carved with a scalpel.

    Myth 2: One Leader Can Fix Everything

    There’s this romanticized idea of the lone savior who swoops in to save the day. But the truth is, no leader—no matter how skilled—can do it alone. Turnarounds rely on teams. The best leaders aren’t the ones who have all the answers; they’re the ones who inspire people to step up, collaborate, and own the solutions together. It’s not a solo act—it’s a team effort.

    Myth 3: Once You Fix the Problem, It’s Over

    People often assume that a turnaround ends when the immediate crisis is resolved. But that’s just the beginning. Turnarounds require sustained effort to stabilize and grow. The real work starts after the major fires are out—ensuring the changes stick and the culture evolves to prevent another collapse.

    Myth 4: Turnarounds Always Succeed

    I wish that were true! The hard truth is that not every turnaround has a happy ending. I’ve seen many companies die in spite of the effort put in to try and fix them.

    The Reality of Turnarounds

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that each turnaround represents a unique challenge of varying complexity and conflicting priorities. In those circumstances, the chances of a silver bullet—a bold move, a fearless leader, or a quick fix—solving everything are slim. Instead, it’s small wins, by a solid team, that set you on the right path. Allowing you to adapt, reiterate, and keep the forward momentum going, step by step.

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  • What Turnarounds Teach You About Yourself (and Life)

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    What Turnarounds Teach You About Yourself (and Life)

    There’s that moment in the turnaround when you realize just how bad things really are. Maybe it’s the moment you see the numbers in red, the customers ditching, or the team losing faith. It’s that gut-punch telling you — this isn’t working! And it can feel utterly paralyzing.

    As you scramble for a solution in your head, every possible move you think of leads to a dead end. The weight of the moment can be crushing. I’ve been there. Many times.

    For me, what has helped is thinking of it as the starting gun at a marathon. I use it to signal the first step, which is often the hardest — accepting that something is very broken.

    Acceptance shifts your mindset. You’re no longer in denial mode (or worse, “sugarcoating mode”). Instead, you’re thinking creatively and constructively about the next small step towards fixing the situation. This transition is incredibly empowering. It lifts that crushing weight off your shoulders and gives you the much needed boost to start moving — to start fixing.

    Evolving your thinking in this way can teach you a lot about yourself, and how you handle crisis situations — whether in business or life. It is a reflection of your ability to stay composed and thoughtful, and demonstrates your emotional intelligence and resilience.

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  • Turning Stuff Around: Why I’m Writing This Blog

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    Turning Stuff Around: Why I’m Writing This Blog

    It always starts messy…

    A couple of years ago (early 2023), I took the role of CEO at a global FinTech company. At the time, the business was practically in a nosedive: profits were evaporating, operations were deteriorating, and the team was losing faith. To make things worse, the company was being put up for sale. My job? Get it sold and get it fixed, fast!

    I did both.

    By summer the company was sold. In the ensuing months we drove double-digit top line growth, and 13x profit growth. Our culture surveys also showed measurable improvement. We had turned around the company.

    Why this blog?

    Turnarounds are tough. I’ve been through many of different shapes and sizes. They continuously push your limits and, as the leader, test your emotional resilience through sleepless nights, paralyzing doubts, and the overwhelming question of “what next?”

    In business, we often celebrate the success stories, glossing over the messy reality of what it takes to get there. This blog is about sharing the hard lessons I’ve learned in the trenches—what went right, what didn’t and everything in between. I expect some of the ideas in this blog will resonate, or at the very least, provide some much needed fresh perspective. My hope is that it serves as a starting point—a way to help you begin moving in the right direction as you try and conquer your own business challenges.

    Feel free to reach out to me directly. I would be more than happy to connect!

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