I don’t want to hear it!

“The truth? You can’t handle the truth…” We’ve all heard the line before. I find this to be a common thread with some of our clients.

It’s the deflating part of our work. Our one objective is to build and fix companies so they can get back on their feet, get unstuck, and grow. It’s our one constant.

It’s never all that hard to get to the core issues. We keep digging, triangulating what we find to make sure our observations and data are correct, but once we have it down, we’re almost always right. In fact, as I sit here writing this, I can’t think of a single instance when we were wrong about our conclusions. The problem comes when we deliver our findings, and the client doesn’t want to make the necessary changes. It’s covered in the book The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman. Do you want control or wealth? Few get both.

Often when we’ve defined the path to turning around a company, the CEO will disregard our conclusions and sometimes even get upset. They don’t want to destroy their monuments to themselves. Sometimes those moments can be in the form of internal cliques, or holding onto people who are largely ineffective or in the wrong role where they can’t possibly be successful. We get it. We know what it feels like too! Most of the time, it’s the wrong people in the wrong roles.

One of my favorite analogies is to hand a group of musicians the instruments you want them to play. The music is horrible. We advise the CEOs to hand out the instruments to those who know how to play them and the music is much better. We increasingly surprised by the number of companies who have the wrong people playing the wrong instrument and blame the musician. “Oh, Bob is horrible at his job…” Is Bob in the right role? Too often, the answer is no.

What about the client who’s in real trouble and hides it from their senior team out of fear they will all quit? The result is, a team that is working on entirely the wrong solutions, almost guaranteeing the company will end up in far worse shape and sooner than anyone thought possible. The reason we’re so good at turnarounds is because we don’t have that sacred cow to begin with. We’re there to solve a big problem and we start by a clear assessment of the true condition of the company. In the case of PicoBrew, we did our usual analysis, including contracting for some basic accounting and reported our findings to the investor along with a potential plan for the business. We can talk about it because it’s been in the press.

We do that with others, but we often are hit with a challenge at the leadership level where there isn’t anyone who’s focused on the solution or for that matter even aware of the true condition of the company. We’ve had CEOs that would prefer to not know because the reality is too terrifying and they wait to make any important decisions until it’s too late. The first step is to contact us. We have very specific steps we take at defined costs. Wouldn’t you at least want to know your options? Besides, the sooner you do, the more we all have to work with to save the company. Don’t wait until it’s too late. That makes our role impossible.