A practical framework to lead a turnaround
A business can be one of two states: growing vs stuck.
You know how your business is doing, how to turn around if it’s stuck?
Recently, I’m reading a book called The Lean Startup, it’s a definitely a recommendation for entrepreneurs, it helps you get back control of your journey.
The key takeaway is to manage the success —
Regardless what state your business is at, you’re driving it using a series of build-measure-learn feedback loop.
In each iteration, you focus on experimenting one thing:
- Form a Hypothesis: Identify one idea you believe could drive success.
- Build Measurable Components: Develop the essential parts in a way that allows you to measure progress effectively.
- Measure Outcomes: Collect feedback on your results to understand the impact.
- Learn and Adapt: Use the feedback to draw conclusions: either the idea doesn’t work, needs more development to validate, or is worth continuing in the current direction.
Turn around from stuck
When we lack a clear process, we often feel stuck or confused, unsure of our direction. A business can’t grow if its people are wandering aimlessly. To lead my team out of this state, I developed a framework that organizes our reflections and discussions, helping us identify problems and discover solutions for future improvement. More importantly, this framework serves as a compass, steering us back on course.
Using this framework, Fina Money team had one of our most effective weeks of discussions, making critical decisions that set us back on track. Below is an outline of the framework — feel free to adapt and make it your own.
Let me know if this works for you or if you’d like any changes!—
Preface
By navigating the framework to answer questions, you need to do your due diligence on ensuring the answers align with you the best. None of the questions is easy to answer, please be ready to answer whys for 5 times if you make some statement in your answer.
Status Check
Vision
A platform that helps people build their own financial tracking system easily and share with others, people get connected, educated and helped out through the platform.
Q: Do you still believe in this vision? What is your leap of faith in this direction?
Strategy
Through the template gallery, a rich collection of templates, we help users foresee the possibilities and discover the value of the product to meet their needs.
Q: Do you think current strategy is the best strategy to reveal the product value to our customers?
Product
We have invested quite a lot of effort in the past 12 months to improve the product to a good state.
We need positive feedback along the way to ensure we are building and optimizing the right thing that users want.
Q: What work we have done serves that goal, and what work is wasted when we look back for the past 1yr time frame?
Growth
We got a “flat” line for the past 1 yr. It is a fact that our “engine of growth” does not work well.
Q: why is our growth stuck?
Team
We have a team of x in a complete remotely distributed setup.
Q: Do you think we miss any critical skill or role to figure out a growing business?
Execution
The team collaborates on deciding experiments, validating the learnings, iterating with changes.
Q: Do you think the team has collaborated effectively? Sub questions to help think about this 1) Has the team released the max of its potential? 2) Is the execution fast enough? 3) Are those decided experiments aligned with the strategy? 4) Does the process guarantee each experiment has a valid feedback loop to verify its success/failure thoroughly?
Forward Thinking
Persevere vs Pivot
If you choose Persevere, most likely you think there are potential experiments that we have done well to boost the current engine of growth.
If you choose Pivot, please think about from all below angles for the pivot type
- Zoom-in Pivot: Pick a single feature you believe that could change the current situation, and focus on building it to the best state as the next step.
- Zoom-out Pivot: define a list of features missing to make the product look like a complete solution that will win users largely.
- Customer Segment Pivot: pick a specific narrow definition of our current customer base, and serve them only.
- Customer Need Pivot: you see a specific need from customers, current product may or may not be a fit. But we want to build for that need and start new growth from there.
- Business Model Pivot: change the way how we make money, and resonate it with a new biz model in prospect.
- Value Capture Pivot: you have a completely different way to redefine how customers get value from Fina. And that value will spark a new growth engine.
- Distribution Pivot: you have a full plan of how we can build growing distribution without one-time investment. It has to be organic growing, a new channel or new method.
Q: What is your choice? Please do not pick multiple paths, you have to choose one path that best describes your thought. Please make your judgment together with numbers if available to support your statement.
Team Update
If you rate the execution low in the status check part. Do you have thoughts on how to improve the execution? Things to consider:
- Rebalance responsibilities.
- Metrics driven management.
- Re-org
Q: What are some issues you think we should address in the next step?
Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop
This is a very important element in a startup like us. This is a method that keeps us always in the exploration stage to find the best business growth opportunities. I think we have paved some great foundations for build and measure, however, I think we didn’t do well on the “learn” part, and a running feedback loop is working weakly.
To better answer the question, please reference these sources of growth to think about how we build up this engine to acquire that type of growths
- Word of mouth.
- Side effects of product usage. (eg. Network effect)
- Paid advertising.
Q: What do you think we should do to establish a healthy build-measure-learn feedback loop in future?
Fundraise
I think we all agree that we are open for fund support. But in reality, figuring out an engine of growth is way more important than having a fund unless that is the prerequisite for building up the engine. So I have to remind you, do you believe that is the case in your future ideal model?
Q: How important do you think we should focus on fundraising? And how much fund do we need?
Others
Anything that was not captured by the framework, write your short essay here if you want.
I’m currently the CEO of Fina Money, a platform that enables you to control your finance flexible with ease. I hope this framework is useful, let me know if you have any questions.
