I was there 10 years. The first couple of years were awful, the middle were good, the last few were bad ... Chapter 11 and sell pieces of the company to competitors bad.

The first couple of years - bad ones - we had consultants running around all over the place. They added no value. The executive team got rid of them and said we’re not paying consultants to tell us how to run our business anymore; we’re going to figure that out ourselves. The business improved significantly. We also put all of our efforts into the top 3 or 4 initiatives that would generate the biggest ROI instead of spreading ourselves too thin. Focus and eliminating consultants were the two biggest keys to our turnaround.

That CEO retired and a new one came in. He promptly fired most of the other C-suite execs and brought in his own team. We were a dairy company. None of the new team knew dairy or listened to the people who did.

Dairy is a commodity business, but the new CEO was determined to turn us into a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Company with better margins. Sounds good. But when he attempted to jack up the prices, many of the customers left us and started doing business with the countless other dairies.

So now we have these underutilized plants. CEO freaks out and brings in a major consulting firm to tell him what to do. Their big idea? Close 7 plants (representing over 10% of our plants nationwide) all at once. These consultants were all very smart and graduated from the best colleges and grad schools. And none of them had ever stepped foot in a dairy in their lives.

The closures were the single most disastrous decision in the company’s history. Closing 1 plant is a monumental undertaking because you have to determine where the product from the closed plant will move to, reconfigure your trucking lines, find space in the coolers for the new product, etc.

Closing 7 at once was an unmanageable task. We were drowning. The receiving plants couldn’t keep up. Employees at 1 plant worked over 2 months straight without a single day off, putting in 70 or more hours a week. Deliveries didn’t get made. Big customers fired us for shoddy service.

The goal of the closures was to reduce cost. We ended up spending more post-closure than we did before, with a reduced top line to boot.

The closures looked good on paper and the consultants weren’t experienced enough to understand it wouldn’t work in reality. But at the end of the day, it was our CEO’s fault for trusting them over the management team who said it wouldn’t work.

Consultants are helpful if they’re advising on something that is outside a company’s expertise, like an acquisition. But if your company is paying consultants to tell the executive team how to run the business, run away. It will not end well.