Fixing a broken business is like treating a sick patient. And giving the right treatment at the right time is important 1. CPR 🆘 2. Intensive Care 🏥 3. Rehab 📈 Let me explain.

Before we start though … Welcome to Turnaround Tuesday. A series of threads, where you get equipped with the mindset needed to turnaround a broken businesses Find last week’s thread below

Much like curing a sick patient. When fixing a broken business, you need to make sure you give the right medicine at the right time. You don’t give CPR to someone with a sprained ankle. Likewise you don’t give physiotherapy to someone in cardiac arrest.

The scale of intervention needs to fit the issue at hand. And it’s no different in business. I think about turnarounds in 3 stages:

1. CPR 🆘 The heart has stopped. The vital lifeblood (Cash) isn’t flowing. Unless we can solve that problem. Nothing else matters. Unless we can get cash flowing inside X weeks, the patient is dead. There could also be longer term damage.....or maybe not.

But that isn’t for now. We are thinking from one minute to the next. In this stage of turnaround, focus is 100% on survival. (And often that means cashflow) One wrong turn at the wrong time could be fatal.

2. Intensive Care 🏥 The interventions at stage 1 worked. The patient is now Stable but critical. They aren’t fixed, but we can start to expand the time horizon beyond days and weeks. The business has the cash it needs to execute its plan.

But it doesn’t have any room to fail to execute it’s plan. We are only ever one or two steps away from needing CPR again. And with every time we go back to stage 1, the chance of success reduces. Steady but consistent and decisive steps in the right direction are key here.

3. Rehab The business is back on its feet, but not fixed yet. There is some lasting damage from both the original sickness. But also from the interventions taken in stage 1 and 2. You’ve got more leeway for wobbles here than you did at stage 1 &2.

But this stage still needs time and discipline. Applied long and well enough, a healthy business will emerge!

You don’t need to start from Stage 1. That is only for the businesses with the most serious sicknesses. But if you start at Stage 1 you must walk through all the stages in order. And the timing of transferring from one stage to the next is important.

If you move to ICU too early; before you have the lifeblood (cash) reaching every organ. That could be the difference between life and death. @elonmusk has clearly decided that Twitter needs CPR. With this framework, his urgency on cost and revenue has context.

I've found this medical analogy for turnaround very useful in the past (including internal communications). I’m going to deep dive each of the 3 stages in more detail one by one in a future Turnaround Tuesday. Starting with CPR next Tuesday.

If you are a wannabe CFO looking for tool, tips, templates and mindsets for CFOs, then sign up for my newsletter, coming soon.

CFO Secrets

---

Join 3,500+ current and future CFOs for this free 5 minute weekly newsletter. Sharing learnings from 20,000+ hours a...

https://secretcfo.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Follow @secretCFO for more threads like these. And please RT the tweet below to share this thread with your audience