Help Saving a Dying Business

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this so if it's not I can move it somewhere else. Here is my dilemma. I was hired about a month ago at a small custom cabinetry shop in my city. My brother has been working there for about a year doing the installations and I've been hired to do design and sales.

The business has been around for 35 years and has always been pretty small. The owner has been doing cabinetry his whole life and has +45 years of experience in the industry. It seems to me like he has made enough to get by and support his family throughout his life (he is currently 71) but hasn't made much more than that.

The nature of the work is quite involved and projects will take us about 2 weeks for a small job around $5000 and about 4-6 weeks for a big job like a kitchen which we would charge about $30,000. The process is quite involved as we have to design, measure, build, and install.

In terms of the market things are not looking good. We are usually quite slow around Christmas time as most people don't want renovations done to their home when they are expecting family over, or will be on vacation. On top of that the economy in the city I live in is heavily based on oil and with the lowered price over the last year businesses everywhere are really feeling the squeeze and not a lot of people are spending money or buying homes over a mil right now.

So far I've developed an adwords campaign which had quite a few leads in the first week and has really fallen off since then. We are still getting clicks but not very many calls. I've sent out emails to custom builders and tried to pump up our marketing through social channels but nothing seems to be working.

The owner has invested his whole life into his company and if it fails now he's going to lose everything he worked his entire life to build. Honestly seeing that would break my heart because he truly cares about what he does and he works really hard.

He told me he hasn't paid rent in two months and we recently got a CNC about 6 months ago that hasn't been busy at all which was a $150,000 investment. His landlord paid for it and wants to start seeing some money from us, but there is no money since work has been slow for quite a while before they brought me in.

My question is this: What can I do to make some sales or close a deal as soon as possible? We need money now so that the business can keep going and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make this work. I know it's going to be really tough to close something right away because people don't want to spend money right now but I'm willing to try anything at this point.

Posted Dec 2, 2015, 11:29 PM UTC · edited

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