The 100-day blueprint for business turnarounds

0:00This is Britain's growth moment. Do you want to be part of it? On 26th of March, 750 of the UK's most ambitious founders, CEOs and investors will gather in London to shape the future of mid-sized business. The company's driving our nation's success. The Business Leader Summit 2026 isn't just another conference. It's a day built around the three forces that define growth, ambition, policy and capital. And as one of our valued podcast listeners, you can be there in person. To secure a discounted ticket, visit the events section of our Business Leader website and use this code. BL Podcast, all one word, all uppercase.

0:41We look forward to seeing you there. Leicester City are champions of the Premier League. The greatest story ever told has its happy ending for Claudio Ranieri and his players. The ultimate underdog is now the undisputed top dog. There's something magnetic about a comeback, about a turnaround. A team defying the odds, a brand reborn, or a person rewriting their own story. In business, the need for a comeback or a turnaround can sneak up on you before you know it. At some point, every leader faces the question, what do you do when the numbers stall? The culture sours, or the future goes foggy? Our guest today knows a thing or two about what it takes to pull companies back from the brink and propel them further than they imagined.

1:38I'm Josh Dornbrack and this is the Business Leader Podcast. In today's episode, we speak with Bill Kennedy, who has spent more than three decades leading businesses worldwide, from under a million dollar startups to multi-billion dollar enterprises. Over his career, he has earned the reputation as a turnaround specialist. Kennedy has distilled his experience, both successes and lessons learned, into a book, From Panic to Profit.

2:11You know, when I look back over my career, I can't believe it's been over 30 years. I was looking at myself in the mirror. I was like, who is this old person? But if I can be as egotistical as saying that I'm pretty good at what I do, it's because I've made so many mistakes getting here, right? And I put a good team around me and I'm blessed to have people. But really, you know, what we've done is through the years, we've learned a couple of things that make a huge difference. The first is you got to have a team that's dedicated and wants to go make something happen. Where people get off track a little bit is they do two things.

2:42One is they start following their gut. Like this is interesting, but it may not be important. So we drive change through data. It takes more than data. Otherwise, we'd just be a bunch of robots and AI doing everything. But it is important to have that. And tools like AI make it so much easier. What used to take us sometimes days to analyze data, we can dump that into a model today and within moments, have it down to kind of what's actually happening. But it still takes that person. It still takes that experience of looking and saying, now, given this circumstance, what are we going to do, right?

3:18And so having that process, we've learned through the years what works. So today, I've been blessed to be CEO of many companies and lead them all over the globe. And today, I'm CEO of a big, it's pretty big business, middle market, about a billion and a half dollars. And we're in the power sports industry. You and I were just talking about that. But I'm also involved in industrial products. I'm chairman of that. That's about a billion dollars. And we use these models on companies that are under a million dollars to companies that are over five billion. and you get the same results because it comes back to just looking at the data, understanding what's happening, then take your culture, the tools, the processes you have, put those two together, and we call it the 3L process.

4:01Listen, learn, and leverage, right? Let's find out what's happening, learn about it, leverage that together with our experience, and then take it out and try to make something better. Alongside his book, Kennedy runs the 80-20 Institute, which offers services ranging from 100-day accelerators to 12-month transformation programs, all designed to help companies begin a turnaround. The standardized process they have when working with new clients starts with a very simple question. Why are you talking to us, right? Like, what are you looking for? And it comes down just to three things, and it's the three things every time, right?

4:36And it's one of them. One of it is, it's, I want more. I need to get bigger. I'm stuck. I'm not sure how to go forward. Typically, this is a company that a founder has bootstrapped himself up or herself up. They've got a team around them that were good at maybe the million dollars, but now maybe they're 2 million or 3 million pounds and they're not sure what to do next, right? Because they're the driving force. The second type is fear. If I don't fix this, I'm going to go out of business, right? And there's a lot that drives it into that. Declining revenues, losing your cashflow. You can have declining revenues and you can lose money, but if you don't have cash, you're going to go out of business.

5:16So fear is the next big driver. And then the third one is kind of a little bit of a combination of those. It's the exit. They want to go do something else. They want to sell this at some point or put someone in it to run it for them some point. So we typically are working with the owner, founder, CEO, whatever they call themselves, but they're the person who has taken this company basically from nothing and got it to this point. And they're like, what do I do next? And so once we understand that, we ask them two very simple questions, right? First of all, what's your goal? What's your three to five year goal?

5:49Is it, as we said, save the company, grow the company, exit the company? Typically it's one of the first two and people want to do something with the company. And a lot of times just they want to have a lifestyle back, right? They're working themselves to death and they're thinking, well, maybe I can get someone else to run. Once we understand that, The next question is, how big a number do you have to get to in order to make that work? And let's just say, I always just use percentages. They're at, say, 50 % of where they want to be, and they want to get to 100 % of where they want to be. And so if they're at a million pounds or dollars or euros, whatever it is today, and they want to get to 2 million, we ask them, own that gap to get there, right?

6:33How much of that do you think you have to organically do? like you have to grow it, you have to go find it versus what you're going to acquire. We typically focus on the organic side. Then we take them and this is, it's a really simple, we say, all right, tell us about your products and your customers. And we'll segment that out. And this is where the magic happens. This is it. The things that they're doing money and making good money and growing on, we say, go do more. And the things that they're not making money on and they can't figure it out, we say do less of that. And it's so simplistic, but just think about it maybe in your own life today.

7:08You've got all these different revenue streams coming in, and there's some kind of product for you. Maybe it's a podcast. Maybe it's a product you're selling. Maybe you're writing books. Some of those are producing revenue. Some of them are not. We find that falls into Pareto's principle, 80-20. 20 % of what you're doing is actually getting you where you want to go. The other 80 % is distraction. People fight that, right? They'll see the data and they'll go, well, to themselves. I don't know how to get out of it. Maybe they believe it's actually going to turn around, whatever it is, but they know the data is correct, but they're not sure what to do.

7:41And having somebody with a proven process, taking their data and putting it in front of them and then helping them develop a plan to gift the resources from where they're not affect their time, their capital, their team over to what is. That's a huge journey. There's a lot of change management that goes in that. Then taking and saying, all right, now how do I take and actually grow it? And because most of us don't have extra money or time or people, it's taking that resource and making sure it can go on. That may mean you stop doing something. You have a different type of employee. You upskill your employees.

8:17You stop doing products, whatever, or maybe you just price it differently. So that's really our model laid out in this most simplistic form. Find out where you're making money, go do more of it. We help you get there. Kennedy says that you can have the best process, best plan and best intentions to make change, but none of it happens without the people in your organization. For leaders of businesses in particular, you need specific types of people with clearly defined roles to lead the organization to profitable growth and give you the best chance for turnaround success. This is the key of how a company runs.

8:52It takes three types of individuals to run any business. The first is the visionary. That's generally the CEO, the founder, the business owner, whatever they call themselves. They have to decide where they're going and what the goal is. That's their job to set, right? They have to own that. They may have people they have to inform, but that's theirs. The second one is the operators. Those are the presidents, vice presidents, directors, call them whatever you are. They run the day-to-day of the business. If you're going to be successful, their job is to take the owner's goal, wherever that's going, and create the strategy.

9:25It's important that they create the strategy. If they don't own it, they won't follow it. They'll just say, oh, no, no, Josh came up with that. He's crazy. The final one is we call the profit. The profit is our play on words that they see the future, and they also profit. We like money, so that's our play on words. But it's really the trainer. They're the one that has the playbook. They're the expert in the process and their job is to get that process inculcated or put into the company. So they either work for the company, they can be a consultant. A lot of people hire external experts to come in and do it.

10:00But that's really that you need all three. If you only have one and if it's the owner, the visionary, the change will take seven to 10 years. That's our experience, right? Because they drive it and they keep firing people. That's what happens. Then finally they get someone. If you have the operators who will do the work and an owner who makes the condition of employee, it generally will take three to five years. Sometimes it's a little bit less than three because they're going to go, but they have to figure it out. They don't know how to do it. If you have all three, you can generally get your company turned around and running in about 18 months or less.

10:39So it cuts out a huge amount of time. What we generally find in smaller businesses is the team is more doing whatever the owner wants, right? And so they need the expert to come in. And if it's a good culture and everything, they can get themselves going. They can understand what they need to do in 100 days or less, depending on the owner's desire. And they will be off and running like a shot. Within a year, they've made all the difference. That 100-day marker is an important one in Kennedy's concept. It has its roots in politics, But there's another reason why it's so important. Well, 100 days goes back to Franklin Delano Rosano, FDR, President of the United States back during the Great War and the Depression and all that.

11:24And he got elected and he called Congress back in and said, we're going to pass laws in 100 days. They passed 44 laws. It was the first time everyone had done that. And it's since become kind of a standard of what can you get done? because what you do in that first 100 days is going to set the whole tone and what you can accomplish over the next three to four years, right? I always tell my team, you know, when you come and you have fresh eyes, write down everything you think needs to be done and you will spend the next five years working on that list, right? Because as soon as you're kind of in, you get a little blind to it.

11:58So one is it sets a tone and a pace and it forces everyone to fall in line. You don't actually need more time. People will want to take more time and there's a variety of reasons for to do it. But if you're in trouble and you have a sense of urgency, 100 days is more than enough time. And it forces everyone, particularly the CEO, to get on board and go after it. So the timing is excellent. Now, here's the key. You don't turn a company around in 100 days, but you lay the plans. And when you look at the three key pieces that you're going to deliver to a company, The first one is you're going to grow profitability.

12:34Profitability is the easiest one to grow primarily because of pricing. You can pull that lever in a day. You can know it and you pull it and it's totally frictionless. In other words, you decide you want to do it. You set your new price. The next person that buys it, it flows through the P &L. Costs you nothing. May cost you the customer if you get it wrong, but that flows through quickly. That hits quick. And if a company's in trouble, that's the first level you pull and you pull hard depending on the situation. The second one that you go through is productivity, which is getting costs out, right?

13:05To cut contracts, if it's a shipping contract, I can go to UPS or DHL or FedEx or whoever. I can cut that contract at any time. And then I just have a transition from my old shipper to my new. Generally, I can get that done in six months or less because it's just a matter of negotiations, right? And that will start paying immediately. But if you have very complex products you're making, let's say you're making castings, iron stuff made out of molten metal, and you're getting those around the world. A lot of castings of the A come out of Southeast Asia. That generally will take you more than a year because you got to go through testing and everything else.

13:42So productivity, procurement, like cost savings, generally we say that comes in year two. Your big stuff comes in year two. Your third one is growth, right? you're going to get growth immediately because you're focusing on your key customers, but your growth typically ties to your product cycle. So if you can come up with something and launch it immediately, you can start selling it. Most companies that are selling something actually have to get their product cycle to align with their customer's product cycle. And let's say you're doing engines and you're making engine parts for Caterpillar, big global manufacturer.

14:17They run on between a three and 10 year cycle, depending on the engines. So you may come up with a great widget, but you're not actually going to sell that until that new product comes out. So that is the third one that comes in. And typically the big growth, if you're in manufacturing, you'll see in year three. So all of that, we lay that out. We look at the data and we go, you can pull your levers here and you can start seeing profitability really quickly. we typically experience between, I talk in basis points, I'll explain what it means, but between 200 basis points and 500 basis points of profitability the first year.

14:53So in other words, if you're at 10 % profitability, however you measure it, we can get you generally to 12 to 15%. So 20 to 50 % profit increase the first year. Most of that is around procurement and pricing. Then the Next year as you go, it typically levels itself out to about 100 or 1 % per year. So you look at over a three-year period, and let's say, just for sake of argument, you're making a million dollars, right? End of year one, you should be around a million three. By the time you get to year three, four, and five, you should have doubled yourself in profitability. If you've got a growing market and if you've taken the appropriate steps to go do it.

15:33So that's kind of how it works. but you have to do the work and expect it to come in in the proper places. You know, I guess if we, again, look at the kind of culture side of things, you know, you can come up with the best plans. I know you talk about this in the book, but you can come up with the best plans in the world. But if you don't bring your people on the journey with you, you're kind of fighting a losing battle, aren't you? Because the last thing you want is for people to see changes and they're just confused as to what these changes are and why they're happening. Just talk a little bit about how important it is to bring people on and be as open, as honest as you can to really help people buy into the mission and their role in it?

16:09You'll fail without it, right? There's all these things about culture, strategy, and all that. It's all true. We have kind of a mnemonic that we talk about all the time to help us think about how we deal with things. And these are no particular. One is be on pace. So as a leader, you can't go too fast. You leave everyone behind and you can't go too slow. You're a bottleneck. So you have to be on the right pace to accomplish the goals and what your team can handle. The second one is be data-driven. If you have less than 20 % of the information you're guessing, if you have more than 80%, the market's already moved past you.

16:44Someone else has figured it out. So you've got to be able to be comfortable with ambiguity and trust your instinct, right? Because we've earned those, but use data. The third one is no surprises. So fish, relatives, and bad news all stink after three days. So you talk to people, be honest, tell them what's going on. They can handle it, but you got to get out there and be front of it. And the fourth one I think is the most important one. And that is results matter. We will not be a best efforts company. We actually have to sell some product and deliver it and keep people happy and make our employees happy.

17:16Otherwise we'll fail. And then we'll go back to where we were at. So those four things in the hands of the team, if we know this is how we, we're open and honest, we treat people with dignity, respect. We just be good people. But transparency, just follow the facts, right? You can stay on pace. It keeps it going. And people start realizing it's about progress, not perfection. In other words, it's okay to make mistakes. Let's not make the same ones again and again. But have that open and safe culture. You can accomplish anything.

17:48We all love romance, don't we? And we all love fairy tales. This was a club that 30 years previously was relatively unknown. In 1996, they were playing National League 2 South, which was the fourth division. People started going, oh, there's this team, Exeter Chiefs in the second division, who are trying to get up and beat Bristol in a playoff game to get into the premiership. They had the kind of homespun stadium with the coach that used to be the player, who's the farmer who lives around the corner, and it all just felt like it surely can't happen. I don't think anyone at the time would have foreseen where this would take them.

18:33They were not on anyone's mind in terms of the big English powerhouses, and in a very short space of time, they were playing in the greatest domestic day that English rugby could offer. And actually, they're kind of the complete exception that proves the rule that you can't do it. You don't see a side coming up the leagues and storming their way to the English title and then the European title. But you have to say that by being aware of what they'd done at the time, they were certainly laying the groundwork to build something decent on it in the months and years that followed.

19:21Hi, I'm Josh Dornbrack from Business Leader, and I'm here to tell you about our new podcast series, The Turnaround, which takes a closer look at organizations that have changed their fortunes. In this series, we go inside Exeter Chiefs. We talk to players, coaches, pundits, and organizational psychologists to uncover the strategies, resilience, and leadership that turned the course of the club around. Listen to new episodes wherever you get your podcasts.

19:47Turnarounds often lead to a reshaping of a team, even when that means that tough decisions need to be made and tough conversations need to be had. This is the CEO's job, the visionary's job, you have to make it a condition of employment, we're going to go do this. We may not know exactly where we're going, but we know what our goal is, and together we're going to find our path. Typically in the third step is where people start revealing where they can do it or not. So the first one is the CEO sets the goal. The second step is the team builds the strategy around it. The third step is where they start implementing it.

20:20They start shifting. They start organizing the company. They go, well, I may need different people. I may need to shift people. I may need to quit doing some things. They have to organize around it. What's Einstein, they said, definition of crazy, keep doing the same thing, expect a different outcome. You're going to have to do something different. This is where it reveals whether the team can actually do it or not. Now, what I mean by that is not are they perfect, it doesn't matter, but can they take the steps forward? Are they willing to have those hard conversations? Are they willing to say no to things and yes to other things?

20:53Because if you're doing 100 things, you're not doing anything. You need to get one, two, maybe three things. Are they willing to do it? That's where as a CEO, you're going to have to make decisions about where that person is going to stay or not. And if the CEO will not do that, they're not going to be successful. You don't need a great potential, right? You don't need a great athlete. What you need is experts at this point who know how to take that journey. And if you have somebody in a key role, and let's say, let's make it really extreme. Today, you're doing HR. Tomorrow, in order to do human resources, you actually have to go get a professional.

21:31If you don't fire yourself as the HR leader and hire someone, it's going to fail. You have to have someone that knows how to pay people, do benefits, train them, get them all on board. You have to be willing to do that. And as the CEO, it has to become a condition of employment. And when I see them unable, I know this is not going to work. It starts with a top. Yeah. And I guess, you know, how many companies and how many leaders have you come across where maybe you see it a little bit ahead of time before they do, but, you know, sometimes you do need to fire yourself because, you know, as leaders, some people are just suited to take their company to a certain point and they're just going to hold them back.

22:09You know, some great leaders we've spoken to have got to that realization that like, actually, I'm holding my company back. We need to give it to someone else to really kickstart that growth. You know, I imagine it's a difficult thing to do, but, you know, have you come across that in your practices? I see it all the time, right? Heck, I've been my own victim of it, where particularly early on, most people are not serial CEOs or serial entrepreneurs and all that. So it's kind of like being a parent. You get this, you're like, I didn't get an instruction manual. What am I supposed to be? Over time, you learn what you're good at.

22:43And that is the greatest gift in the world is knowing what you're good at and more importantly, knowing what you're not good at or what you don't want to do. And then giving those the people who are experts, people out there who are great at everything, whether my example for being a doctor to someone, you know, keeping your books, right? There's people out there. You've got to be willing to share that if you're if you're going to go beyond that. Some people just can't let it go. And when they can't, they'll drive it all right into the ground. I have no idea how you fix those folks. What you do is like when I'm chair, I can come in.

23:13I say, well, you know, Josh, you're having a problem. Let's really address it. But when you're an outside consultant, all you can do is suggest, and I try to be very candid, but not hurtful. I say, look, have you thought about this? And instead of me trying to point, like normally I can sense it, but I'm not always right. But normally I'm pretty on the spot. But because our process is so defined, as a CEO, if you don't know what your goal is, then there's a problem. I have ran many companies and the first meeting I have is I with the team is I get them around a table and I ask everyone what is our goal right like what are we what are we trying to accomplish and I spent a lot of time in private equity and our goal is always to sell the company for a certain amount of money and it's my contract I'll go around that table and I'll say no one I have never yet had a complete group say here it is and they all agree it's always well I've got to sell more product or I need...

24:09No, no, no. We actually do have a real goal. If they don't know that goal, it's not their fault. It's the CEO's fault. And how do you expect them to go accomplish it if they don't even know where they're going? Kennedy stresses that the fact that you need a turnaround in the first place must be framed in a way that allows you to see the bigger picture. As the business owner, as the leader, you can have everything from imposter syndrome, like I don't belong here, to Jesus, I've lost my way and I'm really letting people down. But the reality is you should be very proud, right? Because you've done something that very few people can do.

24:42And that is build a business that is successful and has got you to wherever they are. So I encourage people instead of, I mean, you do need to be vulnerable. But instead of saying how bad everything is, pause a moment and think about you're standing on the shoulders of giants, right? People who have got into all this hard work. Maybe you founded the company. Maybe someone else did. But it doesn't matter. I remember you guys, so celebrate the success that I've got you here and recognize you haven't failed. You're at another inflection point. And that inflection point is how do I go to the next level?

25:12How do I scale from wherever I am? Because either I want more, I think I'm going to fail, or I need to get this so this business can run without me. How do I do that? And just like if you had an issue with your health, I don't think you'd go to the library and check out a medical book and get yourself a knife and start whittling away, you go see a doctor. And there's no shame in that. In fact, if you don't do it, sometimes it gets worse. So go find whoever your prophet is, go talk. It can be your friends. It can be watching a wonderful podcast like yours. It's all of this. Go find some help and start just making steps forward and bring that team with you.

25:48They got you this far, lead them to the next level. You have so many great examples in the book of various people who have done various things to turn around organizations, and you've done it yourself, I guess. Is there kind of one or two that really, really have stuck with you that you think people should really know about? And maybe if you could tell us a little bit of a story about one of them. Yeah, in fact, I'll tell one of my own stories. So during the pandemic, something, well, obviously none of us had ever experienced because the last pandemic was what, 1912 or something, the Spanish flu, so a long, long time ago.

26:22And if we were playing in a world that none of us understood. My joke was we're a tribal company and our tribe left the building, right? They all went home and we were not prepared for it. So I show up, I take over the company and there's no one there. I go to my office in Columbus, Ohio. It's not a soul. And so I go into my office and I get on a video call and get them all in. And so away we go. So I decided to go out to the businesses. We have like a hundred locations around the United States. And so I go to one in Indianapolis. And so what I do, I go in every night, tour the building. I say hi to everyone, shake their hand.

27:03And then we have a town hall. We answer questions. Right. And it's so funny because these people hadn't seen each other in some cases months, right? Just months. They hadn't seen it. Some of them didn't even know. They had never met anyone. Right. So I go into this conference room and we start talking and we have lunch brought in. And I look up at the clock and it's like 1145. And they say, you go to 1230, right? We'll do Q &A. And I'm walking. I'm not really paying enough attention, but I just kind of go ahead and finally, someone leaves everyone and goes, why are you still going? Like, it's almost one.

27:37I'm like, no, the clock says 1145. And so what had happened? While we were there, the power company had came and turned the power off to the entire building because the person who had been paying the bill had quit and we had no idea. And so this is my first week on the job. The building has no power. They were there turning. They turned it off while I was there and they were going to turn off the gas. Not because we didn't have the money. People weren't coming to work, right? So that was kind of day one. That's where we started. And we realized we were completely out of control. We weren't collecting our cash.

28:12we had huge price increases coming in. Everybody was giving crazy price increases. We had not got our price increases. So our revenue was dropping. Our profits were down almost to zero. We had just enough cash that 90 days we had to figure out our plan if we were going to save ourselves. So we hadn't crashed, but I always say we could see it from the nose of the plane. We knew exactly where the crash site was. We got that team together. We were very candid and said, here's what we got to go do. And we turned that company around and that company grew 48 % in the next 18 months, right? Not because of any magic I did, I just got it clarified and said, here's what we have to do to save ourselves.

28:55And once we've done that, here's what we have to do to go grow. And holy cow, it exceeded every expectation by everyone, right? But that's about honesty, clarity, getting people back together in a time where people couldn't get back together. We had all the mask and on and on and on. So what a time. It was really one of the greatest times of my life during one of the most horrible times that we were all going through. I'm going to ask you one final question and really put you on the spot and ask you almost an impossible question because I think you've written a whole book on it. But if a leader could do only one thing differently tomorrow to start turning things around in their organization, what would you say they should do?

29:34Wow, that's a great question. Probably the most important thing you can do is go make something happen. Pick one thing. Like right out of the list of your top 10 things, strike off the bottom nine and just pick that one thing and get everyone around it. Just go do that one thing, right? That most important thing. It will change everything because you start having wins. People start feeling like you're part of something bigger. They have ownership of it. Just pick one thing. Forget all the studies. forget running around and all that. You know what your company is good at. Your team knows what it is.

30:09You don't have to be perfect. It just needs to be impactful. You got to get that first win. And as soon as you get it, people start feeling a little different about themselves, right? They say, wait a minute. You can feel like, hey, I work for a company. They turned the power off. Or you can feel like you work for a company that turned the power back on, right? Go be part of the solution. Go turn the power back on and watch people flock to it.

30:40you've been listening to the business leader podcast with me josh dawnbrack bill canady's book from panic to profit uncover value boost revenue and grow your business with the 80 20

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