my business is failing FAST … going on CPR

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 90 locations around North America. And today I'm going to be talking about how you can turn a business around that is absolutely failing. Employees are leaving, profits are down and out and negative. And I've learned this over several years in my own businesses, in turning around other companies, when I've stepped in as an owner, helping other businesses that are not, I do not have an ownership stake in, but I've seen them turn the business around in six weeks. And this is what I'm going to be talking about today. The three steps to making sure you turn around the culture of the business and the profitability of the company. Company. And really what it stems down to a lot of times is the people side. Whether I am stepping in and replacing an owner, whether I am consulting with someone and helping one of our franchisees at Augusta Lawn Care do one of these saves. We call it state of emergency, where they have to really flip the business in six weeks. And regardless of what is happening, a lot of times it starts with the people. And a lot of times a state of emergency is called or really a bad time for the business happening when employees are leaving, employees are not performing well. And overall, the business is just kind of deteriorating the culture of the company. So there's really three steps, and I want to talk about those today because I feel like a lot of times when someone steps in, you kind of have this mentality like bar rescue or something like that. You just come in and start blowing things up. And like, we got 24 hours, like, make massive changes. And sometimes that works, sometimes it's necessary. But also I feel like there's sometimes we as entrepreneurs jump the gun on making improvements, because I actually don't think improvements need to be made until other things are happening. So let's go through this. The first step in a turnaround and when employees are leaving, leaving really quickly. And this can happen in a turnaround of a business. It could also happen when you have a bunch of employees just leaving all the time and the culture's deteriorating and you can't hold on to and retain any employees. So the first step is stop the bleeding. So if I move, if I step into a company that is losing customers, has really bad customer service, lots of complaints against the business, and they have lawsuits. All I got to stop the bleeding. This is like emergency room. This is like. This is like going into the ER and just like, let's stop the bleeding. You know, put some bandages on, you know, suture it up. If you need, whatever do like in the immediacy is stop the bleeding. And a lot of times the bleeding comes in the form of employees that are leaving or super inefficient and you need to fire them. So stopping the bleeding is the first step of turning around your business, turning around your culture. And if employees are leaving like crazy, you've got to stop that. You've got to figure out why are they leaving. Now this has happened also in businesses I've owned where just employees are just leaving like crazy. And I had to step back and realize like, okay, why are they leaving? And in one case it really came down to massive amounts of stress. Overworked and not so much even the amount of hours they were working, but the, the amount of just feeling overwhelmed with the workload. There was so much to be done. Regardless if we all pulled an all nighter, it just, it was like drinking from a f, like not a faucet. It was drinking, like drinking from a fire hose. It was just impossible. The amount of workload that we were expecting them to get done and that's very demoralizing and it's very stressful. And so to stop the bleeding, you're going to have to do some very drastic. And I'm gonna talk more about that one at conference. If you haven't signed up already for conference, check out mikeandys.com summit. It's a great place. If you do landscaping, lawn care, you definitely wanna be there. It's conference coming up here in January 2023. Check it out. And that's been a lot more time breaking this D3 steps down. But stopping the bleeding important regardless. If you're trying to save a business, you're stepping in, trying to turn around a company or you're having employees that are leaving handover, like just leaving. Like they're staying for three or four weeks and then they leave. Or some of your best employees start leaving and this I've hap. I've had this happen where they're leaving and it's like we've got be honest with ourselves and ask why are people leaving this business? Is it overworked? Is the hours, Is it the management? Is it the pay? Like we've got to figure something out. Do we need to have a better pay structure? Do we need to have better benefits? Do we need to add health benefits? These are all things you might have to do to stop the bleeding. It's not the time to step into the business. Like, okay, we're Going to change this and we're going to change that. No, you've got to stop people from leaving the company. And if you're stepping into a business that has plenty of people and no one's leaving, but they're all inefficient, guess what stopping the bleeding means? We're going to fire employees, we're going to take care of customers that are complaining. We're going to make wrongs right in the community. So we have a. We protect our reputation and stop the bleeding. Got to do, like, emergency surgery, like, get it done fast and just stop the bleeding. All right? Second thing you're going to do is work through the backlog, all right? Typically when you're stepping into a business, work through the backlog. Typically, when you're stepping into a business that's failing, there's a backlog of customers that have not been satisfied. There's things have been not done correctly, people haven't been contacted, there's a lot of emails and phone calls. There's a backlog of equipment that should be fixed. There is all sorts of backlog in terms of work that's been pushed off. I've had it, too. Where at command center, when we've had a backlog of thousands and thousands of emails, thousands and thousands of calls that we're behind on. And you've got to work through the backlog again before you start making changes. Everyone wants to jump to, like, what's the solution? What's the solution that could be months away before you actually need to address what is the solution? What could we make better in the business? How can we change things? This is the wrong time to do that. It's the wrong time inside of the emergency room to be like, you should really eat better. Like, yes, we know we should be eating better and being healthier, but this person's having a heart attack. Let's get some help here and let's, like, you know, shock them. Let's get their heart, baby. Do CPR. Like we're in the E.R. and so stop the bleeding, work through the backlog. Stop trying to make all these changes in the business way too soon. You're gonna lead to more employees leaving, more customers leaving, and the bleeding will continue if you don't first stop that. And that bleeding again can be customers, it can be employees, and it can just be inefficiencies in the business. You got to stop those things first, then work through the backlog. Because if there's been bleeding, if there's been customers leaving, if there's been jobs being pushed off, estimates not being shown up to employees that are inefficient. You're going to have a massive amount of backlog you've got to work through. And that could take days, weeks. And I've seen it take months to work through the backlog that's created when the business is suffering. And again, not all suffering businesses go out of business. It's just a matter of cycles. Employees leave, labor markets get bad. It gets really, really hard to stay up with inflation and wage infl. That's difficult. So this is a normal part of cycle of business that you're going to have bleeding and all of a sudden that bleed, that wound opens up and just gushing blood. Okay, stop the bleeding. Work through the backlog of all the work that's been missed. While we are addressing the gushing wound, all the other things in the body that had to be taken care of that we just, like, ignored. We've got to go fix all those things now. All right, so fix the most important, the bleeding, then work through the backlog. Everything else that was missed, bad debt, collections, all the things that has been missed. All right, now the third part that we all jump to so quickly, finally, number three, and that is improve the systems. And I put this last. All right, this is not something you should jump into first. I think all of us as entrepreneurs like to and type A people like to improve systems, jump in and change stuff. But if you have it in number one and number two, first, changing the systems, improving the systems, causing more change inside the business is gonna cause customers to leave. It's gonna cause employees to leave. And if you jump into a business that's failing and you immediately raise prices, that's a massive change. That's gonna be a red alert for customers. And I've stepped in a around. It's like, I know the pricing needs to go up, but it's not time to do that because we've been making customers mad for so long. We got to stop the bleeding of customers leaving. We need to work through the backlog, get back to stability, and then maybe we'll raise the prices down the road. You've got to improve the systems regardless of what business you're in. If you have employees leaving and then you stop that, great. Then you work through the backlog. Okay, now we gotta ask ourselves, why did the bleeding start? What created the wound? We're out of the ER now, and now it's made out of like, let's eat better, let's create good Habits for health and for exercise. That is improving the systems that will prevent the bleeding from happening again. And this could be anything from improving your software. Maybe you start doing better accounting, maybe you create a website so that way you can keep track of things better. Maybe you have a better form of just instead of taking notes when someone calls, it's in a CRM. These are all things improving the systems that will prevent the bleeding from happening again. But guess what? But as the business grows, chaos ensues. It's like an organism as it's growing. Cells start to go kind of a little haywire. That's what cancer really is. The cells start to go a little haywire. And so what you're gonna have is as the business grows, you're gonna have this constant cycle of a wound. Something comes open that starts bleeding. Then you gotta go through these steps, stop the bleeding, work through backlog created by all the attention being on that wound. And then you gotta improve the systems. How do we make sure that wound doesn't happen again? Once you do that, you go to this next stage, which is most of us go right into, is we start to grow the business. And that's a natural evolution. These four steps happen over and over and over. Because guess what's happened with growth. You're going to have something break. Growth just creates chaos. And so what's going to happen? You're going to go right back up with this eventually. All right? Now, hopefully you don't start bleeding out of the same wound, the same thing doesn't start happening. And maybe you, if someone is going into the er, you know, hopefully they stop the bleeding, they work through the backlog, they improve, you know, other parts of the body that got some food in them get some water after they stop the bleeding, then they improve the system. Okay, we're going to eat better, we're going to be healthier, going to sleep better. But then guess what, time goes on and guess what? They might get cancer. A different type of wound, a different thing that needs addressed and they're going to go right back into this. Because the body's constantly growing, cells are constantly duplicating. And the same thing goes for business. You're growing the company, this cycle will continue. And you've got to be sure that you don't try to skip number one and number two, that's what I constantly see entrepreneurs doing is they immediately, let's improve the systems. Let's go. We're going to change this and we're going to change that. And it just goes, makes the wound bigger. It's like, address the bleeding, gaping, gouging, gouged wound right there. That's your employees are leaving, your customers are leaving. Address those things first, and then work through the backlog. Improve your systems, and then you continue to grow. Faster you grow, the more the cycle is going to happen. And so that's why I always say, growth sucks cash and growth creates chaos. Sounds fun, right? If you want more information on growing a company past a million dollars in revenue, check this video out here. It's really the only thing you need to know if you want to grow a million dollar business. I'm Mike. Annie's. I'll see you tomorrow.