A million a month in losses, taken to break-even
An out-of-home media business losing $1M a month, returned to break-even on less than $4M of additional capital.
- Operating loss at the start
- $1M/mo
- Reached during the turnaround
- Break-even
- Additional capital required to get there
- <$4M
The situation
An out-of-home media company losing roughly a million dollars a month. At that burn rate the question is not what the ideal operating model looks like in three years. It is how much runway exists and what can be changed inside it.
What we did
Three levers, worked together instead of in sequence: revenue, production, and cost control. Pricing and sell-through on the revenue side, the production process that determined what each unit cost to deliver, and the fixed cost base underneath both.
None of those individually would have closed a million-dollar monthly gap. Run at the same time, with the capital deployed against the ones that paid back fastest, they did.
The result
Break-even, reached on less than $4M of additional capital, far less than the alternative of funding the losses while a longer plan played out.
A business burning that fast cannot buy its way out. Every change had to pay for itself out of the existing base, which is the same discipline a lower-middle-market company operates under permanently.
- Loss-making turnaround under capital constraint
- Pricing and revenue recovery
- Production process and unit cost redesign
- Fixed cost base restructuring
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Want the detail behind this one?
We are happy to walk through the architecture, the decisions, and what we would do differently now.