After several successful turnarounds the question is a very obvious one: what does it take to make it a successful ride?
Important is how to get started. My strong advice: ask yourself to draw a very individual ‚roadmap‘. But it’s not a classic roadmap where you’ll find what exactly and when to do, which actions to take first, and so on. It’s more like a real map describing the situation (= point on the map where we are now) and the goal (= target where we want or need to arrive) including the visible ways how to tackle the detected problems (= paths, or roads). So a roadmap in that sense doesn’t tell you what exactly to do, but gives you a good overview about your status, your surrounding and where your goal is: in which direction, which distance.
Many ways lead to Rome. And so it is for a business turnaround.
Speed, first steps, tools and methods depend on where you are, which capabilities and which time pressure you have. In the mountains on a via ferrata you act differently than during a walk at the seaside. I always question myself: what’s the risk, how do alternatives look like – and what is their „price“. And there always is one…
A turnaround is not a rodeo – although it’s a nice picture to give to peers when you say „I’ve ridden a rodeo like this before“. Instead turnaround is a journey where you have to act very responsible and yet still fast. And for this it’s vital to have a good ‚roadmap‘ showing where you are and where the goal is. If you (need to) take detours, you have to know how to get to your destination anyway.
To create such a roadmap I typically do this:
First, define the real problem, not just the symptoms.
Most of these businesses think their issue is technical: “Our software is outdated”, or “We need cloud migration”, or „Our website doesn’t create any inbound leads“. But those are symptoms. The root issues often are organizational fear, cultural inertia, lack of (very basic) knowledge and leadership paralysis. If I rush in talking tech – cloud-native, microservices, DevOps, SEO optimization, integration of (gen)AI – I’ll lose credibility or sound tone-deaf.
These people aren’t dumb; they’re stuck.
Necessary investment capital often is missing. But not because there is no money in the shareholders pockets.
It’s because the shareholders don’t trust the existing strategy or its execution would lead to success.
Second, understand the psychology.
The employees are scared. Management feels powerless. The shareholders don’t trust the current leadership. Sarcasm is their defense mechanism. Confidence is a performance, and everyone’s faking it.
All sorts of things are to blame for the crisis: the technology, the management, the competition, the (outdated) product, sometimes even the weather such as sun, rain, snow and headwinds.
That tells me I can’t pitch optimism – I need to project grounded clarity and a track record of hard choices. A great tool for this is the roadmap: I can easily show where we are and what we want to achieve. I cannot tell about each and every step and the exact timeline. But I can clearly determine what is the first direction, what we want to achieve and how we are going to measure our success.
Third, remember what works.
I’ve done this before. The turnarounds that succeeded were not those where we had a perfect roadmap upfront, but where we stabilized confidence quickly, identified leverage points (tech, people, clients), and delivered quick wins that built internal momentum. And where we measured where we were, what our progress was and what was driving/preventing that progress. So this is about alignment between the operational management team as well as between the different internal teams.
My strong advice: Don’t oversell transformation—sell execution, honesty, and traction.
Fourth, identify the stakeholders’ real pain.
VCs and PE firms? They want ROI, an exit path, or at least a defensible thesis. Owners? They want to sleep again, knowing the company has a future, and often enough also an exit path. I must speak their language: growth levers, reducing risk, aligning teams, creating a doable and credible transformation narrative. Create a feasible strategy and make it work.
For this I synchronize needs and deeds, reality, goals and the roadmap. And this explicitly includes financials. A transformation, especially a turnaround not only needs trust and engagement, they also need to be backed with the appropriate funding.
Fifth, clarify roles, responsibilities, communication and reporting
It is a vital part of enablement to clarify who is in charge of what, when and how to set goals, when and how to measure success, when and what to report to whom, as well as the process of internal alignment between the departments, between the different stakeholders and peers.
Getting practical: story and playbook
You know the feeling:
Sales are stagnant. Tech is outdated. Morale is shot.
Your once-innovative software company now runs on duct tape, good intentions, and a monolith no one dares touch.
I’ve been brought into companies exactly like this—where the codebase is crumbling, workflows are broken, and the management team avoids eye contact when “transformation” is mentioned. It’s not just technical debt. It’s emotional, cultural, and strategic debt. Which goes along with poor financial numbers.
So, what does a successful turnaround really look like?
1. Diagnose Without Blame
The first thing I do is listen—not to find fault, but to understand the ecosystem of constraints. What are people afraid of? What’s not being said in meetings? Who’s still trying despite the dysfunction? What are ideas on what and how to achieve?
I map the reality across three dimensions:
• Product: What’s core, what’s obsolete, what’s defensible?
• People: Who has potential but feels unheard? Who’s blocking progress, knowingly or not? Who is so frustrated that he is about to resign?
• Process: Where is agility being killed by inertia, legacy workflows, or decision bottlenecks? Which process or task does not pay into achieving the new goal?
This stage is about building trust and traction. Without it, no change sticks.
2. Create Breathing Room
Turnarounds die when everything feels urgent. I help companies create space – often by:
• Stabilizing key accounts and resetting client expectations.
• Isolating the legacy system to reduce fragility.
• Enabling and empowering people to act truely self-responsible, to decide on their own.
• Freeing a small team to explore modern solutions, without dragging the whole org into chaos.
This gives us two things: focus and hope.
3. Build a Real Strategy (Not a Buzzword Deck)
Every turnaround plan I’ve led includes:
• A short-term win (within 60–90 days) that proves change is possible.
• A mid-term roadmap: usually involving modularization, cloud-enablement, or process redesign.
• A cultural shift: rebuilding confidence by surfacing internal champions and flattening decision paths.
• A communicational shift: say what you are doing, say that you are doing, say that you did. Setting aligned goals, measure them and adjust where necessary.
We also identify what not to touch yet—the “sacred cows” that can wait. Prioritization is key.
4. Reset Leadership Dynamics
Often, the biggest obstacle isn’t the code – it’s leadership distrust. Shareholders are skeptical. Middle managers feel stuck. Founders may be checked out. Employees are mentally blocked.
I help owners, investors and the management team to make tough decisions:
• Who’s capable of adapting?
• Who needs coaching, support, or a different role?
• Where do we might need interim leadership to steady the ship?
• Which part of the business is a dead horse we should immediately stop riding?
• How far do we realistically get with the existing budget?
• What do we need to have or get the right to exist in the future market we see?
If no one’s driving, the strategy doesn’t matter.
5. Make the Future Real
The most powerful shift happens when employees start believing:
“This company has a future. I can be part of it. I want to be part of it.”
We do this by:
• Sharing wins—no matter how small.
• Upskilling teams in relevant, modern technologies.
• Replacing fear with structured experimentation (e.g. small refactors, product sprints, customer validation loops, outcome before output).
• Empower teams to decide in their domain
This is when the sarcasm starts to fade—and curiosity returns.
What Makes a Turnaround Work?
• Speed and honesty. You don’t have time for endless planning.
• Technical clarity. Know what to modernize, and what to sunset.
• People leverage. Don’t swap the team—elevate the right players.
• Agile culture. Clear and aligned near, mid and long term goals.
• Execution discipline. You need weekly wins, not (only) quarterly dreams.
• Stakeholder alignment. Everyone—from devs to investors—must see their role in the new story.
Final thought: turnarounds aren’t fairy tales
There’s no magic bullet. But I’ve experienced struggling companies not just survive – but thrive – once they face reality, align around a strategy, and rediscover their own potential.
If your company is at that crossroads, let’s talk.
I won’t bring you a 100-slide deck. I’ll bring traction.
