Bill Canady argues that speed and clarity matter most in the first 100 days of a turnaround. Act on obvious problems immediately, use a Start-Stop-Continue framework to cut waste and boost pricing, and move fast enough to keep the team aligned without leaving them behind.
Hey everybody, it's Bill. I thought I would give you kind of— it's gonna be a short video, probably just a couple minutes long, but I can't overstress the importance of going fast. And in this 100 days, but really at all times, you want to take and take obvious steps. So if your house is on fire, put out the fire. If your boat has a hole in it, fix the bottom of the boat, right? So things that are obvious, go forward and do them. Don't wait until you get the data. Don't Don't wait till you've got everything on board. If you see a problem that needs to be fixed, go forward and fix that problem. This is really important. It really helps you pick up momentum. It really helps get the team energized. Wins coming early are important for 2 reasons. One, it frees up cash, right? So, more money's coming in. 2, it gets the team excited. So, we call it the start, stop, continue. Quick wins in the first 100 days, but candidly, it goes for all times. And, you know, Why does this matter? So if you're in trouble, if your business is struggling, cash is king. You can lose money for a long time. As long as you have cash coming in, you can pay your bills. Getting it— keeping the cash rolling in keeps everybody happy. You make payroll, you get everything else. And a lot of times, particularly if you're a small business, these things can make a huge difference for you. So moving with speed is key, taking the obvious actions. One of the examples I like to use: if you have less than 20% of the data, you're just making things up. If you have more than 80% of the data, you've waited so long, your people probably already ran by you. They're probably out there making decisions somewhere else with you. So important part here is as you go in and you get into and you have some data, you know what to go do. Go do that. Don't wait. You'll you'll you'll you'll you'll thank me later. And every time. Every time we always look back and go, "Jeez, I wish I'd gone faster. I wish I'd solved that issue, hired that person, fired that person. I wish I'd raised that price. I wish I'd shut down that building." Whatever it is, these things that are just kind of gut-wrenching. Once you know, you know. Go do right. It gives you a lot of credibility with your stakeholders. That's your employees, your customers, your investors, your LPs, whoever you've got around you. They see you moving with speed. Speed and certainty and getting results. When it feels good, they're going to like it, right? The other thing is make sure that, uh, that you're doing it with focus and recognize that when you do this, people will be watching, uh, and they'll know that you've got focus created there. Uh, so again, uh, speed, clarity, uh, gets a lot done in it. In fact, you can outrun some of your problems, uh, some of the times just by making your decisions going on. And remember, Not making a decision, still making a decision. All right. So, the framework to work around, obvious, right? Start with, do the obvious things I said before, right? If it's an obvious problem, it's an obvious opportunity, go forward and do it. Don't bet the farm. Don't do things that you go, geez, if I get this wrong, we're out of business. Don't do that. Maybe take a little more time on those. But things like pricing, things like employee matters, customers, get in there, pick up the phone, do it. It'll work out, right? So underpricing products is a real key. When you're losing money in something, you know you're losing money, go raise the prices. Now that's hard to do sometimes. Sometimes you have contracts, you gotta sell this stuff. It's okay, you'll figure it out, right? Thinking is required on this stuff. Make sure that where you can, you're shifting resources away from the things, the 80 percenters, the things that aren't working out, the things that aren't that big, to your 20% accounts, accounts that That are your few critical accounts that's really keeping the doors open on that, right? Stop, right? So stop, you want to eliminate waste. So make sure you're stopping anything that is muda, if you like the Japanese term, but eliminate waste and distractions. Ask yourself what is draining profit, time, and focus, and stop those things. And even more importantly, tell your team, like make them involved in on this if you can. Ask them where they're, where they think it's value added at. They're the ones out there living it. You probably want to involve them in it with you. Stop chasing low-value customers. I've seen it where it's like sales are down, let's go get every customer you can, and you find bad customers. Customers who want products you're not good at selling, customers who want to do things that you don't want to do. Sarah Kennedy, Flow Star. It kind of goes on and on off of that. So, so make sure that you eliminate your waste and distractions. I'm gonna finish this up real quickly here. Then continue. The things that are working, keep doing them. Keep investing where you can, keep pushing yourself into it. If you know it's working, or if you're not sure it's not working, keep doing it, right? Keep moving, you'll be happy you did it. How does this imply in your business? Look, you need to spend some time, get yourself around this thing, identify these top 2 or 3, 4 things that are going, that you're going to do it with. Write it down day 1. You'll be amazed at how impactful this is. Helps get your team aligned. You can action plan around it, and then for goodness sakes, you can actually go and execute on these things, and it does feel good. So some common quick wins to win in the first 30 days: pricing, things that are not being priced appropriately. You generally know, your team knows, you can look quickly on it. You don't always have all the perfect insight, but the best— but the top ones you do. Uh, on the customer focus, it really shifts things around that you pick that good customer, pick up the phone, go see them, ask them what's going on. How is that working for them? Getting rid of bad products. Now, getting rid of— stopping selling is one thing, but if you have an inventory full up, you have a warehouse full of it, what are you going to do with that stuff, right? If you write it down and take it to zero, you actually get to take the full credit on your P&L, but that's an accounting trick, right? If you stop selling it, you've still got inventory. You got to figure out how to get rid of it. So that's just an example there. Overhaul, right? Kill overhead. Kill pet projects. Things that, uh, people want to do and they're interesting but they're not important. Any of those you can stop. You know, I took over one business and we had like $30 million we were going to spend on a new ERP. We were using SAP, if you're familiar with that. Super complex. We didn't have the team for it. We wound up stopping that project. It actually wound up saving the company before it was over because we weren't ready and we didn't have the capital to do it. We made that decision. We never looked back and regretted it. People really wanted to do the SAP project. We just weren't capable of it. And then make sure that you're talking to people. Make sure that it's transparent, people understand what's going on. This is the core of your culture. Make sure they're understanding and you don't get ahead of them, don't get behind them. If you're going too fast, right, you're leaving them behind, you're on your own. If you're too slow, you're the bottleneck. So pick up the pace, keep them with you the whole time, right? So your first 100 days, all about getting command of the business, all about understanding what's going on, making some of these decisions and putting paid to them and moving on. People are gonna notice that. They know you're serious and you'll get some wins out of it, right? So remember, speed wins, execution counts, and cash is king. Okay, go get 'em. Hope this helps a little bit.
