I’m always amazed at how many struggling businesses I speak with. After laying out exactly how bad things are, I check back a couple weeks later and find they’ve made a few minor tweaks and think they’re “turning it around.”
If your business is in trouble, incremental changes aren’t going to save you. A 5% improvement might feel productive, but when you’re bleeding out, it’s like putting a Band-Aid on a severed artery. You don’t need small adjustments—you need radical change. That means rethinking your business model, overhauling your processes, cutting deep where it hurts, and making decisions that feel uncomfortable but are necessary for survival.
And this isn’t just about business—it’s the same in life. If you’re buried in massive debt or you’re grossly overweight, you don’t “incremental change” your way out of it. You need a complete reset. So if incremental change can’t fix those personal crises, it’s definitely not going to fix your business problems.
Once you’ve come to the realization that radical change is needed, the most common mistake I’ve seen is owners telling their management—or worse, their employees—“go implement that radical change.” Hey Bob in operations, we need to cut 50% of expenses—can you do that this week? Hey Jane in accounting, our margins suck, can you figure out a way to increase them from 5% to 20%? This is a sure way to guarantee you’ll see little to no real change. In most small to mid-sized businesses, management teams and employees aren’t truly capable, empowered, or willing to make the kind of deep, risky moves required. They’ll default to minor tweaks, because that’s what feels safe. If you want radical change, the hard work of defining exactly what that means for your business—and then actually implementing it—has to come from you, the owner.
If you’re too afraid to make these moves yourself, a good business coach can help you work through that fear. But this is also the moment to look in the mirror and ask: _Am I really cut out to lead a business through this?_ This is a good time for radical honesty—and maybe, a radical decision.