If you want to check out Part 1 of this series in order to get up to date on the situation and lessons thus far, I’ll be happy to wait for you. Just come back when you’re ready.

Cooperation is Key

In order to effectively implement proactive growth strategies, your company needs a management team that cooperates and openly communicates internally and externally. As CEO, think broadly about your team, which may include management, the Board of Directors, your bank or vendors and your team of turnaround professionals.

In the case of our bankrupt restaurant, the Board of Directors and the CEO were not pulling together effectively to expedite what should have been their common goal: helping the company survive. There needed to be buy-in earlier from these key stakeholders, but instead they were tearing each other and their company apart.

This proved challenging for our GGG team, whose first job is always to get everyone aligned. No matter how good we are at workouts, it’s tough to succeed when your C-Level executives and your board disagree and refuse to set a common goal. In crisis situations, more so than any other time, people need to focus on the higher level goal of the company.

As a result of this discord, we had to assist the company in a ‘363’ auction sale of pieces of the business rather than do a traditional restructuring.

Solve Puzzles Creatively

This was a complex and interesting case to work on due to the variety of challenges we faced, one of which was the frequency with which we were required to come up with creative solutions on the spot.

The puzzle pieces of our restaurant were all scattered, some of them on the table before us and others on the floor (and the dog probably ate a couple). As a workout guy my task is to put these pieces together, but recognizing that the pieces don’t always fit properly and that there isn’t time to put everything in its proper place is important to prioritizing problems – and their solutions.

When solving problems in this fashion, you have to cut the pieces to make them fit and make game-time calls. This approach allowed us to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing crisis.

One example that comes to mind is the memorabilia. They have memorabilia all over these places, and I found myself sitting in the corporate offices admiring what was on the walls and wondering how I could sell off these valuables in order to create cash to fund the business. As I looked around, I noticed that the “t” in a lot of the signatures looked weirdly similar. I’m no handwriting expert, but I couldn’t shake this weird feeling.

Acting on my feet, I made a phone call and got someone to assess the value of the memorabilia, all of which was purchased from one of the board members for a quarter million dollars. Turns out it was all fake. Though we didn’t have the money to sue this board member we took certain actions to coerce him into refunding our money.

We also had to act on our feet when we noticed the board self-dealing. The board had to be reminded of the change in its fiduciary responsibility once the company had become insolvent. Their interests were legally required to change from themselves to their creditors. We had to protect the board members legally by making sure they kept their fiduciary responsibility in mind and quickly curbing actions that went against this premise.

Taking Smart Risks

At GGG we always think long-term. We don’t want our clients just to survive; we strive to implement strategies that will make them successful in the long-run. And we don’t make compromises on this point.

Part of long-term success involves risk taking. But never bet the ranch – take smart risks. On this project, we were challenged by the disparate goals of the Board of Directors, yet we consistently managed to get their approval in order to take smart risks and solve major problems.

Our risk was evaluating and cutting unprofitable locations fast enough to allow the rest of the company to survive with a core group of profitable bars. The subsequent auction of the company resulted in several competing bids and the completion of the ‘363’ auction sale. Today, a few years after the bankruptcy and in a much tougher economic climate, the client continues to operate several locations profitably.

Join me next time for Part 3 to discuss why it’s important not to make rash decisions about the fate of your company and the tools you can use to make better decisions.