Self-disruption leads to turnaround of struggling spin-off

Restructuring / Turnaround + Innovation Management

How we unleashed the creative energy of a workforce, leading to the largest deal in the company’s history

Initial Situation

The spin-off of a medium-sized company (+1.500 employees) was developing software and hardware systems for the aviation and automotive industries.

However, it had run into severe financial trouble.

Due to the related challenges, the new CEO and his team had hardly any time to design the necessary business transformation on their own.

Therefore, he hired viadoo for improvement via self-disruption.

Challenge

As the company was constantly underperforming, there were great fears of job losses among the staff.

Best performers were threatening to leave.

In this situation, creative ideas on how to overcome the crisis would have been necessary.

Instead, paralysing fears prevailed.

Our task was therefore to transform the prevailing negative energy into positive emotions and motivation.

Solution

Collaborating closely with the CEO and senior management team, we at viadoo started by questioning the spin-off’s business model (improvement via self-disruption) with voluntary members of the staff in a Pivoting Workshop we designed.

We first used our pivoting radar to identify disruptive trends and new players in the company’s core and neighbouring markets.

Then we created a paradigm shift in the participants that opened up new perspectives for them. Therefore, we were using innovative methods from the start-up world.

Under our methodological guidance, the participants developed over 70 innovative ideas for further deepening the corporate strategy and associated business models.

These ideas should also touch the employees’ idea of their own possibilities (reframing).

And they should underline the necessary revitalisation of the customer relationship (revitalising) as well as the structure (restructuring).

Last but not least they should increase motivation and qualification of the staff (renewing).

Results

Our Pivoting Workshop ultimately resulted in the company’s turnaround by linking strategic and operational initiatives to stronger financial management.

The SME has returned to profitability by gaining new customers and securing its largest deal in its history.

The spin-off’s turnaround has helped restore investor confidence

As we naturally take the confidentiality of our clients seriously, we anonymize our success stories. However, the cases are real.