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Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Seven Early Warning Signs Of A Company In Trouble

Management consultant Douglas J. Enns started assembling a list of such signals after he noticed that companies that get into difficulties share common moments of blindness.

Here, in Enns’s words, are seven of those early warning signals:

  1. New competitors are discounted
  2. In-house empires arise
  3. The sales cycle lengthens
  4. Key people start to behave differently
  5. Expansion abroad is used to compensate for slow domestic business
  6. There’s profitability without free cash flow
  7. The company buys a competitor to restore earnings

Read all the details here - and see what happened when companies missed acting on these seven early warning signs of trouble.

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