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Melissa A. Craig Overview
Melissa Craig is a corporate turnaround executive who specializes in companies that need to improve their performance, and have a sense of urgency about it. She leads or co-leads the renewal efforts of companies who:
• are healthy and want to stay ahead of the curve, or
• suspect they are underperforming but don’t know how to identify or fix the problems, or
• know they are in distress and need someone to step into the crisis and do triage.
Ms. Craig has 12 years of direct experience as CEO / CFO / Director, having founded one company, General Telecom, and growing it to 50 employees in three US cities. This company was subsequently sold to a NYSE-listed company for $30 million. She has also overseen the turnaround and acquisition of another technology company by a NASDAQ-listed company. And she has worked with senior decision-makers and boards to identify the cause and scope of declining performance and take necessar steps.
Ms. Craig won the 2000 Ernst & Young ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ award in New York City for her work with General Telecom. In addition to her operating experience, she's trained in accounting, finance, quantitative analysis and organizational behavior – the disciplines underlying the practice of turnaround management. She graduated magna cum laude from Bentley University, outside Boston, with a BS in Corporate Finance and Accounting, and in May 2010, graduates from George Washington University with a MS in Accountancy.
The experience of working with underperforming and distressed companies, coupled with her training in the field of turnaround management, led Melissa to conceptualize and develop the Corporate Renewal Timeline and the ‘Practical Turnaround Management’ website:
"Among the first three tools a turnaround manager reaches for at the beginning of an engagement are: 1) analyze the early warning signs, 2) cut working capital, and 3) create weekly cash forecasts and budgets. When the initial analysis is completed and the findings presented to management and the directors, there is one thing that everyone agrees on: they wish they'd been tracking the early warning signs, cutting working capital and maintaining tighter cash controls one year ago -- when there was more time and money to fix the problems.
"I developed the Corporate Renewal Timeline as a visual aid help management and boards understand the continuum between underperformance, distress and crisis. The timeline is valuable because it shows the positive results that can come from taking certain actions today, as well as the negative results that come from denial and inaction.
"The "Practical Turnaround Management" website is designed to focus attention on the core turnaround tools because doing these things every day is how 21st century management teams can stay ahead of the curve."
- Know the early warning signs and your key performance metrics, and keep a constant eye on them;
- Reduce working capital to its absolute minimum; and
- Maintain tight controls over cash.
Of course there's a lot more to a successful turnaround than this. But just incorporating these three activities into the company's standard operations cannot help but improve performance and, ultimately, create value. This is Practical Turnaround Management.
Management teams, boards of directorsand lenders who need to discuss an underperforming or distressed company should contact Melissa Craig for an informal conversation.