Signs Your Business is Floundering and How to Turn it Around

Brooke Chaplan

March 31, 2014

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Is your business in a downward spiral? Are your expenses getting higher than your profits? What do customers and employees say? These, and other signs indicate that you are not just having a bad day, or going through a temporary business downturn, but that your business is actually floundering. While it is easy enough to lose heart, it may not be too late to turn things around again. In fact, with the right steps a floundering company, even one on the verge of bankruptcy, may be able to turn things around again.

Find the Real Problems

Often the business owner is not addressing the real problems, and may not even be aware of what they might be. Instead of analyzing the situation and finding out the cause of the problem, a business owner may simply be blaming employees, the market, the customers, and the economy. In this case they are merely addressing the symptoms of the real issue. One way to get a clear, objective idea is to get help from an outside consultant. When this happens, those running the company are surprised to find that it is not what they thought, and that it is easier to solve than they had imagined. For instance, a business owner of a store may not even know that his employees completely ignore customers when they walk in, and only when an outside consultant sends in mystery shoppers the problem brought to light.

Evaluate the Entire Staff

If things are not working, it is often because of low productivity, poor attitudes, and excessive downtime. While one option is to start over by hiring fresh employees, a floundering company would be better off giving incentives and retraining employees who already had the knowledge, experience and skills necessary to make the business work. According to Abakhan & Associates Inc., it is important to take time to observe and evaluate each person on the team to discover the real problems with their work.

Tackle One Issue at a Time

After a thorough investigation of why a company is floundering, the business owner may come up with a long list of things that need to be fixed. This can be overwhelming and intimidating to deal with at first. The best solution is to make a list of the problems by priority and begin to tackle the biggest one first. It may be you have to deal with corporate insolvency in British Columbia before you can start to get any other work on track. After each problem is resolved, confidence will be restored and the business can get back on track.

Following these three steps can confusion and despair in business leaders. When you take time to retrace the most important aspects of work, it creates a framework to develop a constructive plan of action to turn a floundering company around.