This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Cutting costs is not a turnaround. It is a tourniquet. It buys time and it answers none of the questions about why the business stopped earning.

What a turnaround actually is

Three things happening at once, in a specific order, and most attempts get the order wrong. The company cuts first, because cutting is fast and visible and there is pressure to act. Six months later the costs have returned as overtime and contractors, output has fallen further, and the people who could have fixed it have taken other offers — because the strongest people always have somewhere to go, and a badly communicated reduction tells them exactly when to start looking. Meanwhile nobody has established where profitability actually broke, so the second round of cuts will be as blind as the first.

What this course covers

Forty lessons in the order recovery has to happen. Stabilising first: what a crisis does to processes that look unrelated, hiring when the future is unclear, the methods for reducing payroll, retaining people without revising salaries, bonuses funded from value actually created, cutting benefits in the least damaging order, developing people with no budget, assessing quickly when there is no time for a process, choosing who goes on a basis you can defend, and building a contingency plan. Then diagnosis: 5W1H and SCQA, MECE trees, five whys and Ishikawa, confirming a cause is real, Pareto and the theory of constraints, the impact-against-cost matrix, structured idea generation, TRIZ, and the specialist frames — including breaking revenue and cost down until the dip is visible. Then rebuilding the economics: the operating model, turning strategy into financial goals, model evolution by stage, mission inside the numbers, finding the process black holes, goal setting people believe, the strategy pyramid, budgeting as a decision instrument, KPIs across customers, people, processes and finance without distorting behaviour, Lean Six Sigma in financial processes, and scaling. Then the people: why they leave, measuring turnover properly, calculating what it costs, the retention programme and the manager training inside it. Finally communication: the audit, segmenting employees, message design, channels, managers as carriers, delivering bad news, and measurement.

A note on two blocks

Two of the five blocks were recorded for a people-function audience: the stabilisation block and the retention block. Their examples are reductions, salaries, benefits and departures. In a recovery that is not adjacent material — payroll is usually the largest single cost, and losing three key people undoes any financial plan you have written — but it is worth knowing that the vocabulary comes from that side.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 40 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working models: 5W1H, SCQA, MECE, 5 Whys, Ishikawa, Pareto, the theory of constraints, the decision matrix, the 7S model, the financial model, the four-dimension KPI set, the turnover cost calculation, the message template

• The sequencing treated as the whole point rather than a detail

Where to start

Write down what you would cut tomorrow if you had to, and then write down what you think caused the decline. If the second answer is vaguer than the first, you are about to run the standard failure. Enrol now and start today.