diagnose, stabilize, rebuild
When margin is eroding or losses are compounding, the first job is finding the actual cause. Project-based turnaround work that starts with diagnosis, not cuts.
The Basics
A business turnaround is a structured intervention for a company that's losing money or watching margin erode. The work is diagnostic before it's prescriptive: identifying which of price, cost, mix, or overhead actually changed, then building a plan around the answer.
Most turnaround advice starts with cutting, because cutting is visible and fast. It's also how businesses cut the wrong things and end up smaller without becoming healthier. A declining bottom line looks identical whether the cause sits above the line in pricing and cost of goods or below it in labor and overhead, and those two situations call for completely different responses. We find out which one you're in before recommending anything. The work runs as a project, with a defined scope and a deliverable you can act on.
Not every difficult year is a turnaround. These patterns usually are.
Where It Gets Won
Above the line, where price meets cost of goods. We rebuild the picture per unit rather than in totals, because a price that hasn't moved in three years against costs that have is invisible in aggregate and obvious per unit. This is usually where the recoverable money is, and it's the part a cost-focused review skips entirely.
Below the line, where labor and overhead quietly become the largest problem on the statement. Costs get reviewed in dollars, which always rise and therefore always read as inflation. Reviewed as a percentage of revenue, the same numbers show whether spending grew faster than the business did, and that's the version that tells you what to change.
Profit and cash are different problems and they need separate answers. We model the cash position alongside the P&L so you know how much time the plan actually has, which determines what's realistic. A recovery that works over two years is no use to a business with six months of runway.
Every turnaround plan should start with a baseline: a projection of where the business lands if nothing changes. Current prices, current cost trajectory, current staffing. It isn't a plan and it isn't meant to be encouraging. It exists to price inaction, because inaction is the option a business is choosing by default until it chooses something else. Once the baseline is on the table, every proposed fix can be measured against it, one at a time, before anything gets committed. That's the difference between a plan and a set of hopes.
How It Works
Turnaround work is urgent, which is exactly why it needs structure. You know the scope, the cost, and the deliverable before anything starts.
We talk through what's happening and how much time the business realistically has. If what you need is an ongoing finance team rather than a project, or if the situation calls for a specialist we aren't, we'll tell you that in the first conversation.
No costWe rebuild the financial picture: margin per unit, cost structure as a percentage of revenue, cash position and runway. Engagements regularly find that the assumed problem wasn't the actual one, which is exactly why this comes before any recommendation.
Where the real cause surfacesA baseline showing where the business lands unchanged, then each intervention modeled on its own before any are combined. Running them apart is what tells you which lever is load-bearing and which one only felt urgent.
Every fix priced separatelyA sequenced plan with the reasoning attached: what changes, in what order, and what each step is worth. If you want us alongside the team through execution, that's a separate conversation and never an assumption.
Deliverable in handFrequently Asked Questions
A business turnaround is a structured intervention for a company that is losing money or watching margin erode. It combines financial diagnosis, scenario modeling, and a sequenced recovery plan. The defining feature is that it identifies the cause before prescribing a fix, rather than defaulting to cost reduction because cost reduction is the fastest thing to do.
When cuts have already been made and the numbers haven't moved, or when nobody can say with confidence which part of the business is losing money. Cost cutting is a response to a known problem. Turnaround consulting is what you need when the problem itself hasn't been located, and cutting into a margin problem usually makes a business smaller without making it healthier.
The diagnostic and planning engagement typically runs between two weeks and three months depending on the complexity of the business and the state of its data. Recovery itself takes longer and depends on what the plan requires. One of the first things the analysis establishes is how much runway the business has, because that determines which recovery timelines are realistic.
cope and duration. Turnaround consulting is a project that answers a defined question and ends with a plan in your hands. Fractional Finance is an ongoing relationship where our team owns part of your finance function month after month. Businesses in genuine distress often need both in sequence: the project to establish what's wrong and what to do, then ongoing support to execute it.
Turnaround engagements are scoped at a fixed fee agreed before work begins, with a buffer built in for the normal course of a project. If the work runs beyond that buffer, additional hours are billed, and we raise it with you before that point rather than after.
