In this video, Eric Siu (founder of Single Grain) shares his personal experience rescuing a near‑dead digital marketing agency. He outlines three warning signs that a company is headed for failure: (1) dependence on a single platform or channel (e.g., Google or Facebook), (2) rapid employee turnover indicating loss of confidence, and (3) the founder’s loss of motivation and vision. Siu then explains how he turned the business around by diversifying services (shifting from SEO to paid media), investing heavily in culture and hiring top talent, staying hands‑on when needed, and persisting through setbacks. He backs his advice with concrete metrics—traffic grew from ~4 k to >250 k monthly visits and podcast downloads rose from 9 to thousands—demonstrating that relentless iteration, people‑first focus, and platform diversification can save a failing company.
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All right, so in this clip we are going to talk about 3 signs that your company is going to fail and how to save it. But before we do, before we do, don't forget to subscribe if you like videos or clips, audio clips on marketing, sales, entrepreneurship, personal growth. So with Single Grain, the company that I took over, uh, it was a failing company and I almost made it fail completely. It was failing, almost completely dead, and then I almost made it Almost completely, completely dead. All right, so what happened was our business relied on Google. So here's what you got to know. Never ever build your company on one platform. Never rely on just one platform. Okay? Because the work that we were doing previously for one of the companies, this is Single Grain, right? It was previously just an SEO company. Now we do a lot of different things, but it was an SEO company and a lot of the work that we're doing was a lot of link building work. And what was, what was happening was a lot of the work that we're doing was no longer effective. So that's why the original 4 partners, which I'm still friends with now, they hopped out and I decided to stay in. But when I joined, the company was kind of on its way down because of Google making things very difficult, right? The one lesson I learned from that is don't put all your eggs into one channel. You have to diversify, otherwise you're going to go through a lot of pain, right? This is the same thing for Zynga in the early days. They built a lot of their apps on the Facebook, in the Facebook ecosystem. A lot of people depended on Facebook's organic growth to help them continue to catapult up, right? A lot of these media companies, Upworthy for example, they depended on Facebook. So when that happens, when let's say Facebook decides to make a tweak or Google decides to make a tweak, everything starts going in the wrong direction, that's a sign that the company is about to fail, right? The second thing that basically told me, oh man, this thing is gonna fail, was when I first joined Single Grain after I took over a year into it, employees started dropping like flies. A lot of people started leaving, right? What I learned from that was, 'cause I read a lot of books and I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, like, you just gotta let your people do, you know, do their thing. You hired them, they're smart, let them do their thing. So I took that as, I'm just gonna not come to work and see what happens. Literally, I did that, and then I basically, everything started to fall apart. And I'm not blaming the people, I'm blaming myself. But when people start to leave, that's a sign of no confidence, and that is a sign that your company is going to fail. The 3rd sign that your company is going to fail is if you don't feel like doing it anymore, like when you wake up in the morning, you're kind of just dreading it. That is a big sign that the company is going to fail because if you are the leader, you're in trouble because you are the one that's driving the vision. You're driving everything forward and it doesn't seem like there's any direction anymore. When you start to become unmotivated, that means you are losing sight of the vision and you are the keeper of the vision. So that means the company is going to fail. So those are just 3 signs that your company is failing. Now what do you do to save it? Well, I'll just talk about it from my context. You just keep going. You try different things, you keep going, you try different things. You realize you did things wrong, okay? And you realize if you're gonna build a great company, you gotta build a great culture, and that's the fundamental building blocks of building a great company for long term, because it's the people, no matter if you're a product business or you're a service business, you wanna keep it going for a long time, you gotta have a great culture. So investing in those things, investing in your people, right? The culture, but also the people too. That's gonna help take— move your company in the right direction, right? And so that's exactly what I did. I mean, things weren't working out, and I was like, man, okay, we gotta try it, we gotta try hiring really amazing people, and also, you know, making it a really amazing place for them to work. And also, we're gonna try other things too, because if SEO was no longer working, let's go ahead and focus on paid media, which is what we did. We focused on paid media, and then the revenue started going higher and higher and higher, and we were originally referring some of the revenue out, and we're collecting referrals, and we're just like, okay, let's take it all in-house. Kept going higher and higher and higher, and it just keeps building, and now it is what it is today, and you keep going, because when I started, I could've given up once we dropped to 1 employee. I didn't give up. I could've given up when our blog traffic, when I first joined, was only about 3,000 to 4,000 visits a month. Now it's, you know, overall visits approaches over 250,000 visits a month, right? Same thing with our podcast, only 9 downloads a month after the first year. So for me, it's like, there's no sexy tactic here. It's we kept going, we kept trying different things, we knew to invest in our people, we knew to be hands-on when we needed to be hands-on, And then that led to success in terms of saving this company, turning this entire company around, when we originally had 5 partners, and instead, you know, it was only, initially it was me starting it back up, and then getting amazing people around me to help build it. So, that's how you do it. This is a long-winded kind of video, but I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know where you think your company is failing right now. I hope your company's not failing, but where you've seen companies fail in the past, drop that in the comments. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe no matter what platform you are on. It's gonna help us grow, and we'll see you in the next video.
