Turnaround & Insolvency/Painting Sinking Ships
The turnaround philosophy

Painting Sinking Ships: The Illusion of the Turnaround

Clear the tax debt, restructure the creditors, hand back a shiny business — and watch it sink again. After years of doing this work, here's the pattern nobody in the industry wants to say out loud.

Sovryn Consulting·Turnaround & insolvency guidance
Before you read on — why I can write this

I'm not an advisor guessing from the sidelines. I've been the director in that chair.

I didn't come to turnaround work from a textbook or an accounting degree. I came to it the hard way — through my own business, under my own pressure from the ATO, taking the advice that was put in front of me. And some of that advice was bad. Expensive, confident, and wrong.

That's how I ended up doing this work. I know what it's like to open the letter, to feel the weight of payroll and the tax bill in the same week, and to sit across from an expert and not know whether what you're being told is right. So when I talk about painting sinking ships, I'm not pointing at other people's failures from a safe distance. I've lived this from the director's side of the table — and I've spent the years since on the advisor's side, watching the same pattern repeat.

In my pre-insolvency days, we had a distinct saying for certain projects: "We're just painting a sinking ship."

A company would contact me, usually under intense pressure from the ATO or creditors. Their explicit request was clear: fix the business, build new structures, prevent a wind-up. I would enter, overhaul systems, restructure debt, and implement sleek new workflows. On paper, the ship looked new. It was shiny, efficient, and — temporarily — buoyant.

However, after performing this complex repair multiple times, a stark pattern emerged.

The captain vs. the system

I observed that regardless of how reinforced the hull was or how modern the engines were, the ship eventually sank again.

The issue, consistently, was that the captain hadn't changed.

In many cases, the same leadership style, the same ego, and the same distinct blind spots that steered the company toward the rocks the first time were still firmly at the helm. Leaders choose their heading. A leader can possess a multi-million dollar vessel — if they prioritise steering toward icebergs over safe navigation, the outcome remains a choice.

Why "systems" are not a cure-all

I see this constantly in the consulting world today. Experts are hired to implement external "fixes":

  • New CRM systems
  • Aggressive cost-cutting
  • Brand refreshes

These interventions are all, ultimately, coats of paint. If the leader makes the deliberate decision not to inspect their own role in the initial failure — if they decline to take "sailing classes" and accept that they are a component of the problem — the "fixed" business is simply on a longer fuse toward the same explosion.

The choice of top-down change

True transformation begins when the leadership chooses to look in the mirror before they analyse the balance sheet.

"It is a fallacy to believe your systems are broken if your leadership makes the choice to break them."

Saving the ship is a choice. That choice starts on deck, with the captain being ready to unlearn the habits that caused the initial leak. The alternative is also a choice: wasting expensive paint on a vessel deliberately destined for the bottom of the ocean.

Sovryn Consulting

Turnaround & insolvency guidance for owner-led Australian businesses. We deal with the debt — the Director Penalty Notices, the ATO pressure, the wind-up threats — and then we stay to work on the captain, because that's the part that decides whether the ship sails.

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