Most Businesses Have Dragons That Need Slaying
May 6, 2025
Sometimes the dragons are guarding the castle, sometimes the dragons are chasing you up the tallest tower of the castle, and sometimes, inside the tower is where the dragon resides. Sometimes you don’t know where the dragon is, but it’s waiting for you when you get to where you think it’s not.
There may be multiple dragons – and sometimes the heat of the flames from the breath of those dragons makes it uncomfortably warm for different people in and around an organization. Sometimes the dragon flames tickle the tushies of the cushies – the señor managers or the board or the owners.
It’s often not a cute story like Shrek and Donkey trying to rescue Princess Fiona.
It’s more like Dante’s Inferno.
The cash flow dragon. Many businesses struggle with cash flow, and what we’ve seen over the years is that many businesses – both product and service businesses -overestimate their margins and underestimate their expenses, and often in the course of a year the business runs dry on cash. This is why the standard guiding document for a company in turnaround transformation or distress is the 13-week cash flow. The 13 WCF shows a rolling forecast of inflows (collections, deposits, receivables) outflows (payroll, vendors, supply chain, payables, e.g.) and illustrates what is happening with cash. Are we burning cash? Building cash? Does equity need to throw more money in? Are we tapping our credit lines? What does our borrowing base look like? We often get asked to provide a great controller or CFO to clean up the incumbent mess.
The people dragon. To paraphrase author Jim Collins who wrote Good to Great, the people dragon that needs slaying is usually a function of not having “the right people in the right seats on the right bus.” Sometimes the people can’t drive, sometimes the board is driving your bus and drives over you at the bus stop. Sometimes things aren’t going well and you just feel as if you got hit by a bus. Sometimes you missed the bus.
If your organization does not have the right people – especially in the C-Suite, and also at the board level – the company is doomed to fail. You can have the greatest team in the world – but if senior management and governance is a clown show, you will never drive growth and proper financial and operating results. Never forget when the clowns come to town, all you get is a brief circus and rigged games. Even if they are on a shiny bus. You know the song…”the wheels on the bus…” Nothing changes unless something changes.
Maybe they are ‘draggin their feet…
The process dragon is usually where the company is struggling to understand how it does business, how it makes money, and the operational components of delivering products and or services to their customers – whether they are B2B, B2C, B2G or other customers. We always insist, in manufacturing and distribution companies, for example, that we engage a LEAN/5S/6Sigma or general process mapping exercise to “3M” it – map the process, measure it, and modify it. If it’s not fixing, fix it.
Perhaps the biggest dragon in the castle and the fiercest is the culture dragon; as founder and CEO of QORVAL Jim Malone often said “culture is determined by the worst behavior that the organization tolerates.” As a six-time Fortune 500 CEO and an advisor to two presidents, and a member of several public company boards, Jim had extensive experience in understanding the role of culture as it relates to performance. We at QORVAL Partners have continued that tradition across a wide range of industries and situations for business owners, private equity, hedge funds, family offices and ownership groups.
A culture of valuing “forgiveness over permission” motivates employees who know that their thinking and innovation is valued more than playing politics and appeasing their superiors. Companies that operate under a shadow of leadership where it’s “my way or the highway” tend to have high turnover, low morale, weak cultures, low margins, demotivated teams and are usually destined for failure.
We can help you slay your dragons. We have been doing in since 1996.
Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP, is the CEO & Managing Partner of QORVAL Partners, LLC, a FL-based advisory firm (founded 1996 by Jim Malone, six-time Fortune 100/500 CEO) Qorval is a US-based turnaround, restructuring, business optimization and interim management firm. Fioravanti is a proven turnaround CEO with experience in more than 90 situations in more than 40 industries. He earned his MBA and MPA from the University of Rhode Island and completed advanced post-master’s research in finance and marketing at Bryant University. He is a Certified Turnaround Professional and member of the Turnaround Management Association, the Private Directors Association, Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Association of Merger & Acquisition Advisors (AM&MA), the American Bankruptcy Institute, and IMCUSA. Copyright 2024, Qorval Partners LLC and/or Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP.
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