Not Every Turnaround CEO Needs the Same Fix: Three Businesses, Three Different Playbooks

A turnaround isn't one skill. It's a diagnosis, followed by whichever lever the diagnosis actually calls for.

Sometimes that means cutting a bloated portfolio down to what's working. Sometimes it means expanding a too-narrow one as fast as possible. And sometimes, as I learned more recently, it means building and buying at the same time, because neither alone would have been fast enough.

I've now run this three times, in three genuinely different situations. The differences between them are the part I think is worth writing down.

When the Fix Is Full Reinvention

The earliest of these has the cleanest arc, because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end — a struggling business, rebuilt into something new, and eventually sold.

In 2015, I acquired Ruplee, an in-restaurant payments company that wasn't finding traction on its own. I didn't acquire it to keep running what it was. I acquired it to rebuild it around a much bigger problem I'd identified from Foodpanda's own delivery payment gaps. There was no existing PayLo product to layer on top. The whole business, the roadmap, and the market it went after were rebuilt from the team and technology Ruplee brought in.

What followed was a genuine reinvention, not an incremental fix — in-store payments after demonetisation, an interoperable QR system much ahead of UPI, a crypto wallet. PayLo went from a struggling acquisition to a business substantial enough to be acquired in its own right.

The deepest kind of turnaround isn't fixing what's broken in a business. It's recognising the team is worth more than the product they were originally pointed at, and having the conviction to redirect all of it.

Ruplee's original business model wasn't rescued. It was replaced, by something the same people were capable of building once the target changed.

When the Fix Is Subtraction

When I took over as CEO of Zee Digital in 2019, the business was ranked 9th by Comscore among Indian digital news players. The problem wasn't a shortage of products. Zee Digital had a large, sprawling portfolio. The problem was that the portfolio was undifferentiated, and the org was spread thin across too many properties to make any one of them win.

So the first move was subtraction. I shut down two products that weren't earning their place. I doubled down team focus on the properties that mattered most, for two different reasons — one for reach, one for revenue quality — instead of spreading effort evenly. Once those anchors were strong, the strategy shifted to recirculation: using a large-audience property to feed users into smaller, adjacent ones, rather than building each one's audience separately. We also used one property's TV credibility to help launch a new tech platform, borrowing trust from something established to bootstrap something new.

The results came in stages, not all at once. User growth and breakeven landed in the first year. Profitability followed in the second. Over those two years, revenue grew roughly 6 to 7x, EBITDA swung from a meaningful loss into a profit more than three times the size of that original loss, and our MAU ranking climbed from 9th to 2nd by the time I left in 2021.

No acquisitions were involved here. This was pure organic reallocation — the same assets and the same team, redeployed with discipline.

When the Fix Is Both

The business I run today at Times Network needed a different diagnosis entirely. Where Zee Digital had too many products competing for the same limited focus, this business had only three when I took it on in 2022 — stable, close to breakeven, but too narrow a base to grow from. The job here was expansion, not consolidation.

But unlike Zee Digital, this turnaround has run on two engines at once. Organically, we launched twelve products in eighteen months, deliberately investing through a planned period of losses to build the portfolio and the teams behind it. Inorganically, we used acquisitions to move faster into categories that would have taken years to build from scratch — including the Digit magazine business, which I've written about separately, and most recently Opigo, which is expanding ET Now into invest-tech and wealth-tech.

Neither engine alone would have been enough. Organic launches gave us speed in categories close to our core strength. Acquisitions gave us categories that made more sense to buy than to build on our own timeline.

Since 2022, revenue has grown roughly 4 to 5x, EBITDA has swung from a modest loss to a profit more than six times the size of that original loss, and our MAU ranking has climbed from 12th to 3rd on ComScore.

What I've Actually Learned As a Turnaround CEO

The diagnosis has to come before the strategy, not the other way around. Ruplee needed full reinvention — the original business wasn't worth saving, but the team was. Zee Digital needed discipline and subtraction. Times Network needed expansion, and further into it, a blend of building and buying. Running the wrong one, even competently, would have made all three situations worse.

Some instincts travel even when the strategy has to flip. Borrowing trust from an existing property to launch a new one worked at Zee, and it worked again at Times Network, even though almost nothing else about the underlying strategy was the same.

And all three turnarounds landed on a comparable shape of outcome through very different paths — a distressed acquisition rebuilt into something worth acquiring, a market ranking that moved several places, revenue that multiplied several times over, and losses that turned into profits several times their own size.

That range — knowing when to reinvent, when to cut, when to build, and when to buy, sometimes all inside the same turnaround — is what I think has been my most important learning over the past two decades that has transformed me into a turnaround CEO.