Steering a Small Company Through a Turnaround

Leading any business is a delicate balance, but leading a turnaround is especially tricky. On one hand, you see so much potential: if a business was once successful, it could be so again — it just takes someone who believes in it to bring it back to life. On the other, you face incredible pressure. All eyes are on you. The employees, the investors, and even the market are waiting for your direction. When you unveil the new direction, it has to inspire them; if it doesn’t, there’s no plan B.

I was only 25 when I found myself leading a turnaround at my husband’s family business, Focus. For over 30 years it had been a thriving offshore manufacturer of premiums (consumer giveaways that come with products or are handed out at events). But the world had recently changed: Chinese manufacturing had become the standard for premiums. Clients grew accustomed to manufacturers’ delivering goods at prices that were kept artificially low because there were no quality control standards or social responsibility safeguards. Because we refused to compromise on ethics or product safety in favor of cost, we inevitably started losing business to lower-priced competitors. By 2007, the year before I came on board, the company was down to one client.

Guiding the business through a 180 as the youngest manager on the team was a daunting prospect, but it was not my first experience with a turnaround. I had worked on two turnarounds at P&G, and I knew that there was one powerful tool that would help me succeed: buy-in.

I first learned about buy-in while leading the marketing side of a turnaround on the Folgers brand in Canada. The team had been in place long before I joined them and were adamant about staying on the path they had mapped out. As a fresh pair of eyes, I saw things differently. We couldn’t keep trying to sell the same story over and over again to our customers. At first, getting agreement on each of my recommendations for change was a walking-uphill-in-the-mud kind of battle; my team members fought me on everything. But one day, I had an epiphany: they had no idea what I was trying to accomplish long-term, because I had never really told them. Sure, we had objectives and goals for the year, but we had never sat down and discussed our vision of where we wanted the brand to be in five or 10 years. I was giving my team bits and pieces one at a time — one analysis, one recommendation, one brush stroke of an entire painting. If we didn’t create a vision together that we could share as a team, they could never really get excited; they could never buy in.

So when I got to Focus, I knew what I needed to do. If we were going to change our offering, we’d have to do it together &#8212 or risk a failure we couldn’t afford to have.

Step 1: Open Honest Lines of Communication
I started by getting to know the team members individually. They regaled me with stories about the glory days, and we commiserated about the current drought. We talked about what they’d heard from clients, and what they thought we should do. I began to notice a trend: we had been adding value in ways other than price for years but had never talked about it as a point of differentiation. Our account managers would handle the entire premium project from start to finish, working internally within our client’s company to connect different functions, making recommendations on co-packing with products or drop-ship logistics…we were doing total project management without even realizing it!

Step 2: Get in Touch with Your Target
I realized that with a few more custom services, we could deliver a breakthrough offering to the market, and add enough value for our clients to balance out the incremental costs of paying proper wages and maintaining a high standard of quality control.

Armed with my hypothesis, I started collecting data to confirm or deny it, interviewing brand managers and corporate purchasing managers. Once I had an outline of how I thought we should evolve, I called Focus’s first weekly priorities meeting with only one priority on the agenda: our vision.

Step 3: Create a Mosaic Vision
The meeting lasted for over two hours. I made sure everyone had the opportunity to voice his or her ideas, concerns, and opinions. Before we closed the meeting, we had a mosaic vision, made up of a little bit of each of us. We felt renewed pride, and a distinctly electric feeling was running through the office. We had created a new story for our company, and each day was a new page.

Over the next six months, we brought that story to life. We kept going with the weekly priorities meetings, and we found ourselves gathering around the speakerphone in my office whenever a sales manager called in after a great client meeting. We started brainstorming client recommendations as an entire company and came up with comprehensive plans we could be proud of. We’ve since brought in a wave of new blue chip clients and have gotten a lot of feedback about how unique our offering is, not to mention a reputation in Canada for our excellence in total project management on ethically made, high-quality premiums.

Still, in my mind, Focus will always be the place where I saw the power of buy-in take a company from the brink right back to number one.

Monica Tate-Maile is a managing partner at Focus Creative Concepts, a manufacturing and strategic consulting firm for consumer premiums. In her previous life, she worked for P&G Canada as a brand manager on some of North America’s largest brands.