How to Turn Around a Failing Business

Over the last 20 years, I have been the leader or the No. 2 person in four companies that needed to be resurrected. The skills needed to turn around a company are similar to those needed to build a start-up, but they're not identical. Unlike at a start-up -- where people are jacked up on caffeine and the high of starting something new -- people working in a floundering company look like survivors of war.

At the first turnaround I worked on, I was the 24-year-old COO of a mom-and-pop mall. I worked for a 31-year-old entrepreneur who was a cross between Tony Soprano and P.T. Barnum. The mall, which was outside Philadelphia, had been written up in The New York Times in the 1950s as the eighth wonder of the world, but by the '80s it had fallen on hard times. My boss was a genius at coming up with attractions and selling people on the future, but he was not a good manager, he had no ethics and he spent money like a rapper in a bling store.

For my second turnaround, I was head of a trade association that acquired a sister organization. The founder of the acquired organization was a visionary with good sales skills; he also had poor people-management skills, paid no attention to detail and had no understanding of how to roll out new products and services.

The third turnaround, I was an investor in a group of magazines whose board was made of big-league business leaders. I made the grave mistake of letting everyone know that I had run newspapers and could, without a doubt, fix the problems of the magazine. I had visions of being Caesar returning home after conquering another country, foreseeing the board and staff showering me with flowers and coin of the realm. ...