April 2025

From Panic to Profit by Bill Canady is a refreshingly honest look at the challenges of turning around a struggling business and a collection of helpful tools for making the hard decisions required to do so successfully. It’s the kind of book that most business leaders hope to never need, but if you find yourself needing a turnaround, I strongly recommend giving the book a read to see if it might give you some ideas for tackling the challenge.

Bill is an executive brought in by Private Equity firms to turn around struggling businesses. In this book he presents his Profitable Growth Operating System (PGOS) — a 4 step process for turning around struggling companies so that they earn the right to grow. Based on the Pareto principle (e.g. 20% of products produce 80% of profits), the premise of the PGOS is to over-resource the “critical few” and under-resource the “trivial many.”

The 4 steps are:

1. Get a goal.

2. Frame the strategy.

3. Build the structure.

4. Launch the action plan.

In the book, the author introduces a number of tools and frameworks related to performing each of these steps and walks through the process with a very helpful example from one of the companies he was asked to fix. While the author lays out a very specific approach to engineering a turnaround, he acknowledges that every situation will be unique and dynamic. You can’t just implement his 4 step plan and assume everything will work out perfectly. It won’t. As one of the chapter titles explains “Thinking is Required.”

I really like the author’s writing style. It’s not your typical fancy business speak. It is practical and direct — exactly what you need to hear when your business is struggling, when urgency and a bias for action are required if you hope to survive. I also really like the conceptual framework he provides. The approach the author outlines resonates with my personal experience.

Read my full review here.

The old saying goes “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.” But, probably more accurate is Yogi Berra’s version: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.”

Whether leaders have written it down or not, there’s a deeper reason behind every company’s existence. If you haven’t thought about what that is for your company, then you’re likely to be disappointed with what the business becomes.

Too many businesses define their purpose or mission in purely functional terms. We exist to make this. We exist to serve these customers. We exist to maximize shareholder returns (i.e. make money). Those details about your business are important, but they don’t provide the compelling reason for you and your team to fight for the company’s survival through the tough times that inevitably come for all businesses.

Read the full article here about creating a mission and vision for your business that glorifies God.

If we have the right attitudes, if we are disciplined in spending time with God, and if we focus on growing in Godliness, by the grace of God, then we will act like mature Christians. As business leaders, our actions are most evident in the decisions that we make. As mature Christian business leaders, our decisions will honor God, love people, and reflect the character of Christ.

Of course, our decisions will also be focused on operating our businesses with excellence. They will take into account all available information; will demonstrate wisdom relative to trends in our business, our industry, and the broader world; and will seek to ensure our business is increasingly successful in achieving its mission.

So, we will be wise stewards of the business God has entrusted to us, but our approach to hard decisions will be different from the non-believing business leaders around us. We will be self-sacrificing, gracious, and focused on God’s glory. 

We will do this because we have the right attitude and because God has developed in us the right character.

Read the full article here.