Business restructuring often starts with stabilizing chaos and rallying people behind a shared vision. Paul Swaney sits down with turnaround expert Lars Vaule to explore the art of fixing struggling companies and building a thriving culture. From demoralized teams to cash flow dilemmas, Lars shares actionable insights and inspiring stories about leading through tough times. He also delves into balancing urgency with strategy, the power of creative solutions, and why great leadership means creating opportunities for every team member to grow. If you have ever wondered what it takes to transform a failing business, this conversation is for you.
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Mastering Business Restructuring With Lars Vaule
Introduction And Lars Vaule’s Career In Turnarounds
We’re sitting down on our show with Lars Vaule, an industry veteran that’s focused on turnarounds and getting things done, and fixing broken companies. Super nice to have you out. Why don’t you give us a little bit about your background and then we can just dive right in?
It’s a pleasure to be here, Paul. I’m thinking back to when my friend of mine first DMed me one of your posts on Twitter. I was like, “Who the hell is this guy?” You were on this trajectory of followers that was going stratospheric. I was like, this guy gets it, so it’s a pleasure to be here in person and chatting a little bit.
Super good. Was that the time when I was still anonymous?
Totally anonymous. I actually did some intel work.
Did you figure me out?
I figured you out, but I hesitated to reach out until you came clean. I’m glad I did. It’s a pleasure to be here.
There were a couple of people at my former firm that were seeing this happen and there was definitely a quest and the way they figured it out was some slides I had posted on LinkedIn for our veteran series matched the slides that I was posting on Twitter.
I did a geographic industry and then there were a couple of similarities that I saw.
You’re in good company with the special ops guys out there because they 100% are with that approach. Go about your background.
My background as you mentioned, I’ve been doing turnarounds probably for the last five years or so and stepping in as an interim executive in the lower middle market, primarily manufacturing-oriented businesses and it takes two basic steps or two basic shapes. I’ll come as an interim CEO to effective turnaround, which by definition means that things are hitting the fan. Sometimes I’ve come in as a fractional CFO or COO, where you have leadership that is sound but recognizes they need more depth or they’re at an inflection point in their growth, and they need to understand what do we need for that next level executive? I can help guide that.
Challenges Of Restructuring Companies On Day One
You’re day one at a restructuring asset. The team is probably demoralized. The creditors are on the fence. Usually, when I would get the call in my former life, it was okay in July, it was okay in August. Wait a minute, it doesn’t look like they’re throwing off much cash. We were in the second lien, and then we got a call in October. We cannot make payroll. The team’s demoralized, and we saved the payroll, obviously, but what’s that like day one in the chair of an asset that just isn’t making it happen?
Let me give you an example. My background spans manufacturing of all kinds of different stuff. Stepped into a situation where the investors in a business felt that Zio was not turning things around. Production was on a decline, revenues were on a decline, and it was a very toxic relationship between the board and the CEO was a major shareholder. I was on deck for a month, during which time the court was reviewing shareholder votes before the board’s decision to terminate the CEO was approved by a judge. That came down on Thursday, and I showed up Monday morning.
Was this a public company?
No. I’ve worked in one publicly held business before as the chief operating officer. The bulk of my experience has been again, in the lower middle market, $5 million to $50 million in revenue where these companies are typically privately held.
What was the constraint where the ownership group didn’t have the decision-making capability for the CEO?
I would say that was just legacy stuff in terms of doc stuff the document stuff in terms of who had voting control. They had to they had to pull together a majority which was disputed.
What were the big three problems that drove the company to be in solvent?
There are the nuts and bolts, which are always the same. Yields were down, quality was down, as a result, sales were down. There was no clear path in place to rectify that. In my experience, that comes from three different fundamental issues. Either you have a very insecure leadership that is not able to rally the team together. They don’t want to give up their control. They’re dictating stuff. You have a CEO perhaps who starts to view the company as their own.
They forget about the fact that people have invested capital into this thing and they have an obligation to support and serve that investment or you have people that are well-intentioned or just not operations people or not finance people. They’ve founded this business because they got great sales acumen, but it gets away from them and they need some help. In this case, I think it was a combination of A and B where you had a very insecure leader who was out of his depth, very controlling, and also viewed it as his business.
Steps To Stabilize A Struggling Team
Notwithstanding the multi-millions of dollars that were invested in it by outside parties. Step one when you show up is just to stabilize everybody’s mindset. There is not a single person in that building who is not thinking about their job at that point. The only progress you’re going to be able to make in the first day or two is simply getting people to calm down and take a breath. That’s really the key focus. I cannot tell you what we’re going to do because I don’t know enough about this situation yet. I may have some preconceived notions.
In this case, I had a month to look at some of the financials but it’s always different on the ground. As your team here, it’s amazing the parallels between this stuff and what the folks with the special operations background have shared with me. Until you are boots on the ground, you don’t really know, and then you’ve got to start digging. Step one is just to stabilize people, begin to get to know people, and reassure them that I’m well-intentioned, we’re here to turn this thing around, and I’m going to need your help.
The first step every leader must take is to get to know their people and reassure them that you are well-intention in making real change within the team. Share on XGiven that, I always find it’s a people issue. It’s a people issue. I call people nows, laters, and nevers. It’s you’ve got people on the bus that are ready to go. It’s usually N minus two guys that are waiting for someone to come in and rescue them. Laters that some people, they’ll get on board if they see it getting good. There are the nevers you gotta get rid of. I have a process for collating them. What’s your process for doing the Harry Potter sorting ads and deciding who goes and who stays and how fast do you make that decision?
The decision’s driven to an extent by how much runway you’ve got. My first order of business is always to understand the cashflow of the business and how much runway do we have here. What do we have to work with? I call them the early adopters, the mass market, and the Luddites. They’re never going to buy an iPhone.
That’s good.
The early adopters, they’re great. They’ve been itching for someone to come in and lead this thing in a way that is constructive. The mass market, many of them will come along when they start to see the progress. The Luddites, honestly, I might spend as much time with them as I do the early adopters early on. I want to understand how toxic is their opposition or their attitude. Also, understand where’s that coming from. I’ve seen many examples of folks who were difficult and they got to that place because they were so disillusioned and bitter. They could be an amazing contributor, but they’ve gotten shut down enough that they’re now opposed to everything. If they can turn around, they can be outstanding. Dividing between those and the folks who are just not going to get on the bus can take a little time. That’s where the runway becomes a little bit helpful.
It’s interesting. If you can get a negative person that’s complaining all the time and flopped around, they’ll become your biggest standard bearer. Let’s go into your career a little bit. When did you figure out that good company on a bad day was what you wanted to be doing? I’m in a similar way. I like it because the metaphor I always use is if your kid if you’re in the bathroom with a restaurant and your four-year-old starts choking, you expect me to do the Heimlich while you’re gone. If you’ve got a typical private equity asset, it’s a bank run process that’s growing at 5% a year, you cannot really move as fast. There’s lots of syndication. That’s why I like the space. What happened to make you make the decision that you like the space?
I started my career out of college working for a business that my dad bought with a couple of his friends before I was born. I was working on the plant floor making stuff with a team of people that ranged from chemists on down to guys on the line who had an eighth-grade education. That was my formative early experience. I went off and I did a couple of startups before and after business school.
The excitement of that startup energy became an addictive element. I was working on a startup, this is now fifteen-plus years ago, working on a startup and my father passed away suddenly. I had to re-engage with our business that our family is involved in. I ended up then running that business for 4 or 5 years. There were some things that we had to address and to work on and were able to take that business to double the revenue over the span of four years.
Along the way addressed some of the issues that had occurred and where I saw people’s eyes light up because they were engaged in a better way. That brought me back to manufacturing, back to operations. Without any major detours, I’ve really remained in that space since then but I find that the combination of that startup, turnaround, pace, and energy is really exciting and fun. I love working with a really wide range of people.
It’s interesting because a startup and restructuring have a similar feel. Everybody’s doing everything. You’re burning cash in both situations and there’s a time.
You’ve got runway.
You got to go to a raise or you got to go to the creditors and ask for another liquidity and you fold or you’re done. I never thought about the point. Super interesting. Let’s go back to the business where you were on the side for a month. You’re going to take over. How did you determine this thing was worth saving or you were able to save it from an outside in perspective?
The investors were committed to getting it back on track. My engagement was to stabilize it and do exactly that. The challenge was both operational and financial structure. In my first 30 days, I spent time on the floor and brought in some colleagues who could help on the floor, but I was also holed up with the controller for probably five hours a day trying to untangle the books. The company was going through an audit in parallel.
There was a lot of back and forth with the auditors, asking them questions, and feeding them information. I basically uncovered a million-dollar swing in operational profit that let’s just say had been mischaracterized. That added to the ire amongst the shareholders and there was quite a bit of litigation going on. They wanted to get that shareholder litigation resolved, clean up the slate, and then in the meantime, I was working on stabilizing the business.
We had to put in effect a turnaround plan, which I’m sure, it’s the same fundamental playbook that you’d see in any operations business where you put in some lean principles. You start to get people engaged. We did a 5S where they couldn’t believe that I’m picking up the broom. Just working with folks to try to identify what are the issues, how are we going to iron them out? Trust me, I’m not here to bite your head off. You start to make progress.
It’s funny that you said to pick up a broom. One of the leadership lessons I learned when I was in the Navy is that the worst job is using the trash disposal unit, which is you’re smashing trash and the floor’s got like sludge in it of broken it’s on a submarine.
The smell has nowhere to go.
It’s got nowhere to go. They would say it’s a filter, but it’s not. I remember the stories of the captain, like going in there the first day or halfway through night, which is halfway through deployment, and smashing trash for four hours. The new captain that got to the boat when I was there, these green coveralls when it’s nasty, really nasty. He was field daying in the electrical space with us cleaning in the electrical space.
I asked my chief, “Are we supposed to stop him?” he’s like, “I don’t know, he’s doing a good job. Let’s let him keep going.” I learned that day, you don’t have to do everybody’s job every day. You have to be willing to. The takeaway from that is like the first job when I took my first plant manager job on day one, I was out there making batches and dumping 50-pound bags into the mixers. Now I did it for eight hours, but it’s a little bit of a shock and awe for the team. Was there a situation, where I’m going to stay on this one asset, in this one asset where like it was really dark and you were like, this thing isn’t going to make it?
I try not to ever let myself get there. Just as in a startup where you have to have a certain amount of irrational optimism and faith. The team cannot see you despondent over the prospects. At the end of the day, I think there’s a transition between you go in nothing. All you can do is go by first principles and say, listen, I know if we apply the framework that we know generates results. I’m a big believer in a healthy process, a good process leads to a good outcome. It’s not a cookie cutter, but there’s like a transition probably where you’re doing the things that should work and it isn’t necessarily paying off immediately. That’s the roller coaster that comes with the territory. I think I’ve built enough resilience to say, “Listen, our yields are still abysmal.”
What’s abysmal percent-wise, like the first time, or whatever you want to call it, like 70% or is it like 20%?
I need to be a little cautious.
Fair enough.
I want to be respectful of the confidentiality that comes with jumping into a turnaround. Nobody wants to see their dirty laundry aired. Let’s say in my career, I’ve dealt with, just to step back to give you an example. I’ve dealt with turning around and improving businesses in a wide range of industries, plastic molding, machining, and cannabis, for example. In plastic molding, you’ve got cycle times that it’s measured in the seconds. Cannabis, your cycle times are measured in months.
It’s growing season.
It’s growing. Let’s just to make it, to simplify it from the time you plant a seed to harvest something it’s sixteen weeks. In that sense, you may have put in all the right things but you don’t know for a really long time. In an injection molding operation, you start putting in the right things. The feedback loop is a whole lot tighter. That’s really challenging, and you have to convince people that they’re going to see results within a reasonable timeframe. It’s different for different businesses.
Balancing Urgency And Strategy In Restructuring
I got you. What’s the balance between urgency and strategy when you’re in these restructuring situations?
That’s a great question. Again, I come back to how much runway do you have. What’s the cashflow situation? I know you’ve talked a lot about thirteen-week cashflow.
Always.
Huge believer. There really isn’t any other metric that I would use or tool to put in place, and you’ve got to watch that like a hawk. To your question like urgency versus strategy, the strategy is let’s get better at a plant level, at an operational level. Let’s get better. Whether you’re implementing lean or I always make the goal, for example.
I always make the goal required reading for anybody in a supervisory role. With some luck, they start talking about it and people start asking if they can borrow it and you start getting people to get intrigued by the path that we’re on. Urgency versus strategy if the pressures on I’ve certainly dictated changes. I hate to do it but when you see something that’s really obvious and you need to put a financial win on the table and you need to fix something fast, that is evident. If you’ve spent your career in manufacturing and resolving these kinds of issues, it can make sense to just dictate it.
That’s not a good long-term strategy. You have to get the people embracing a different process, a different culture, and if everything is just forced from above, that culture isn’t going to really change. They’re just going to be jumping to a different tune, but they’re not going to be humming their own tune and making progress together. I don’t know if that answers your question.
Creative Problem-Solving For Manufacturing Operations
It did. Let’s go into like a specific example. I’ll talk about an innovative solution I did real quick. I was doing a glass company that did the double pane windows. One of them had the like the E-coding on it. The inside one, they had a bottleneck machine. I thought it was because of the goal. We went to the team and they were running, they were making the panels on the exact same machine. I was at a meeting. I’m like, “Why don’t you just make the e-glass and buy the regular glass?” The company was so close to their problem, they couldn’t even see that. Can you give me an example of something creative you did? I agree with you that it’s standardized, but I’d love to hear an example of something creative you did in restructuring.
One of the things that I always worry about is be really careful about what you measure. I came into a plastic molding operation and they were in a death spiral where product as productivity was declining, they were starting to raise prices, and which reduced demand. You look at it and I couldn’t understand why the plant manager was staffing the machines the way that they were. these are machines that could operate, let’s say, with anywhere from 1 to 3 people, because you got a couple of secondary operations as well. Every single one was manned by one person. The result was the cycle times were like 2 to 3 times what it would be if you had 2 or 3 people on it.
Be careful what you measure in business. The wrong focus can drive the company into a death spiral. Share on XWhat I learned was the previous regime that dictated that you watch your labor cost. That was the number one focus. Be careful what you wish for. The solution was never to staff these three machines with anything more than one person, which absolutely blew your contribution per hour out of the water. Like it just was terrible. In that case, I said, “Let’s get crazy. Let’s put two people on this thing and see what happens.” Lo and behold, they started producing three times as much in the course of a day.
What did you get? What pushback did you get when you were approaching that scenario?
No, I’m going to get my head bit off when corporate hears about this. I said, “Time out. I’ve got enough.”
“I’m corporate.”
“Think of me as corporate. I’ll take the heat. I know this will work. It’s just an experiment. Let’s see what happens.” We did. Now, I will say that within a matter of weeks, I determined that the GM of the plant just didn’t make sense on an ongoing basis. Just couldn’t get out of that mentality. I said, “Let’s put some money into brightening up the plant a little bit. In my mind, I’m thinking maybe some new lights, fresh paint on the production floor, whatever. The next time I come up, to the conference room there’s a guy installing drapes in the conference room. I’m like, “Not in the right direction here.” Anyway, I ended up having to terminate that individual and ran that plant on an interim basis for a few months while we searched for a full-time GM.
It’s interesting. It looked like a light manufacturing casting a little bit, but supplied auto, and the first time I was on a site, I saw a siren come on one of the machines, the machine went down and I got against the wall because I expected an operator to come running. That just was the mentality. I expected it to be like beeline it over to the thing. 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes. I’m just seeing the OE chart just go down in my head.
We dig into the hood, they’re running 20, 25 OEs. People are very expensive when you run your machines at 20 OE. When you run them at 85, they’re very cheap. It just doesn’t cost that much money to add another body. How would you measure success in restructuring beyond just we’ve paid our creditors back and we’re at a steady state and we’re not going to die?
We’re not going to die. I think that my view of that success is rooted in having grown up in a family business. When I returned to a leadership role in the business, my dad had bought with some friends years ago in the plant that I knew the best. There were 50% of the employees I knew from when I’d worked there 20 years before, real longevity. In my view, the success of the organization is if we’re growing and we’re creating opportunity. We’re not just throwing off cash for the team, but who wants to work somewhere where there isn’t an opportunity for you to grow personally, grow professionally, and you cannot do that if you’re just hanging on.
In my opinion, businesses that are not thriving and providing opportunity for people throughout the organization are not going to be able to attract and keep good people and grow it. I know that’s probably not like the thing you may have had in mind, but to me, it covers a lot of stuff because you’ve got to be healthy, you’ve got to be growing and you’ve got to have a culture in place that is engaging people where they feel like there’s an opportunity for them to advance in life.
That makes a lot of sense. One of the things, and I’m going to try to get him on the podcast too, is there was a guy with a GED that was at my plant, and I helped pay for him to go to school. Now he has an MBA, and he’s a safety director, an environmental health safety director. He just found safety as a passion in the plant. This was a guy that he was farting around a lot if he was like 20 forward 25 at the time. Look back now he’s like I saw on LinkedIn is like a director promotion and I still does never my cell phone is like, “What a difference some support makes.”
Impact Of Leadership On Turnaround Success
I’ll tell you something probably the most personally meaningful moment in my career was having turned a plan around it’s on that trajectory where it’s healthy or on its way to really being healthy and we needed to hire more people. We gathered a group of folks around, I gathered the leadership of the facility. We went out to one of the machines and promoted the machine operator right there, socked him on the floor. We promoted him to a supervisor, like a team lead role, which came with a few more dollars on an hourly basis and a position of responsibility and leadership on the floor. That change for him, I mean he broke down crying.
That’s incredible.
Most of my friends from business school are in finance, they’re in consulting, and they’re not engaging with folks who are making $15, or $20 an hour. The difference between $15 and $20 an hour is really meaningful and it’s material to people. He said it’s just a huge change for his family. At that time, married with a young kid. I’ve always carried that experience with me for some perspective on the challenges that we’re going through.
The difference between $15 and $20 an hour is life-changing for some people. Share on XLet me ask you, so every single leadership book you read, whether it’s one of the Simon Sinek-type gurus, or it’s John Maxwell’s a little more spiritually grounded, says, “Take care of your people, create opportunities for them.” Why do so few leaders do those things?
You got me. I came to that early in my career, I thought being smart and working hard was the right thing. I realized you just cannot do everything yourself. You need to work with people. You see it and you see the impact on the organization and the personal rewards that come from that is apart from the financial. I don’t know why people don’t get it. I think it’s a different mindset. It can be all numbers all the time, or what’s in it for me.
As I said I think that in my experience, the leading cause of getting a phone call where there’s a company this size that needs somebody to step in, it’s almost always leadership that is thinking about themselves and not thinking about it from a standpoint of like servant leadership where I want to work myself out of a job. That’s how people are going to make things happen.
That’s true. I’m going to pivot over to career advice because all the younger readers like that. What is one mistake you made early in your career that you wish you learned something impactful for? Not that you’d go back and change it, but it was a big learning lesson that we can teach some of our younger readers that are either in college or first job to help them prevent from making.
I think the biggest step I took in my career was when I realized that perfectionism had gotten me to where I was, and I realized that I had to set that aside because perfectionism is the enemy of the good or what have you. I’m trying to think of a couple specific examples. Early in my career, trying to move things forward on the plant floor. You drive people crazy. If it’s constant perfectionism, particularly if they’re not engaged and excited about leading that effort themselves and excited about making progress, you’ve got to encourage the small steps that people are taking. That was the biggest shift for me. I don’t know if there’s a marketing viewpoint where people are either what they call satisfizers or optimizers.
You could drive people crazy with perfectionism, particularly if they are not engaged and excited about leading. You have to encourage them to take small steps. Share on XSay that again, satisfier?
Satisfizer or an optimizer. A satisfizer is someone, let’s say you’re looking for a new cell phone. Satisfizer walks into the cell phone store, looks at a couple of different ones, and says, “I like that one, it’s in blue, and it’s got a nice camera, perfect, good. Let’s do it.” An optimizer might walk in and spend two hours talking and looking at everyone and then leave and research them online and finally pick out a cell phone a week later. Different strengths and weaknesses. It’s one thing if you’re picking out a tile for your renovation at home and you want it to be just right.
If you’re trying to make progress in a business, it’s awful tough to be an optimizer. That optimizer mindset where you want to optimize every single decision with analysis is paralysis. You cannot find the right solution. It’s only by taking a step and seeing what happens as an outcome of that step and then using your best judgment to make the next step. That’s t tied in with the whole the perfectionism stuff. Like you’re not going to figure out the solution from here to there from sitting here. You’ve just got to start walking.
Career Advice For Junior Employees In Leadership Roles
It’s interesting. I always I tell my team, “I’d rather you make ten aggressive quick decisions with imperfect data and three of them be wrong. You try to stew on three perfect decisions and 1 or 2 of them is going to be wrong anyway.” That’s what I say. If you’re in decimal point land in a turnaround, you’re in trouble. Given that, one of the questions I get a lot on X is what do I need to do to get noticed by senior team members? The mid-level VP that’s running me, they don’t think they’re given advice to handle the work of the day. What do I do to get the senior team to put me in the good column?
Bearing in mind, my experience is in the lower middle market, lower end of the middle market, and in startups where the organization is probably a lot more flat than some of the folks that may be asking that question. If I as a leader don’t have some degree of visibility into folks throughout the organization, just in the sense of what they’ve got going on, then I’m not really that on top of things.
The number one thing that I look for from a hiring standpoint is initiative. I would add, and it’s particularly among junior hires who may not be coming into the workforce with a lot of experience. They’re fresh out of school. They want to get a job doing investment banking. They want to get a job in a marketing role at a company. Oftentimes, the message that they communicate in a cover letter will be, “I’m really eager to learn. I think your place would be a good place to learn.” To me, that’s a huge mistake.
You’re going to learn a lot wherever you go. Come up with something where you think you can help. Everybody can demonstrate that. Even if you’ve come to it from you’ve just graduated, you’re nervous about applying for a job or interviewing for a job because you don’t have any experience. If you say to me, “Listen, I went to your website, I read some stuff about the industry. I got to think that you’re worried about AI.” I don’t know, whatever it may be or I know you’ve got a new marketing initiative. I don’t have a lot of experience, but I really want to roll up and help you address these problems. The people that voice that go to the top of my list.
I’ve never heard anybody give that piece of advice before. The other side person gets through the door. They’re 23. What’s the biggest mistake you see new people on the bus make?
Thinking that they know what they’re talking about.
Fair enough.
That comes from being young and junior and maybe not being that secure in the role that you’re in. Trying to present yourself as having the solutions as opposed to being candid and saying, “I don’t have the answer to that. Let me go find out.” It may be, a junior banker role, you may damn well need to have the answer to that because that’s your job. Generally speaking, don’t try and bluff your way through. Everybody at the table knows that you’re bluffing your way through. Just admit it and go figure it out.
Do not try and bluff your way through. Everybody at the table knows what you are doing. Just admit it and go figure it out. Share on XThe last question I ask everybody is, what’s the book that’s been the most impactful on your life or career in general?
I’m going to give you two.
Super.
One is The Goal, which we touched on. Terrific book. Goal Thwait?
Goal Rat.
As I said, I make it required reading for every situation I step into. I also really like, Stephen Covey’s book on the Seven Habits. The Goal and Seven Habits, which my dad gave me when I was in college and I looked at briefly and I was like, “This is dumb.” It isn’t. It’s got a lot of really basic fundamental stuff. I also think that Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan is a really good read. It gets pretty technical in some spaces, but he gets at some challenging concepts. The Drunkard’s Walk is another good one if you’re familiar with that one.
I haven’t read that one. No.
It’s in the same vein. It’s by a physicist whose name is escaping me, but he’s basically describing the randomality in life. I would encourage people to read The Drunkard’s Walk as well.
On the same thread here, because you did two books, there is a dearth of statistics capabilities in almost every junior person that I work with to a point that it’s a gap. They don’t understand that going from six and a half times leverage to seventeen times leverage isn’t like 14%, 8% more whatever it is. It’s like 50% more risky. Like not understanding that is how a lot of these restructuring situations happen in private equity today. Lars, it’s been super good to sit down with you. How do we get in touch with you?
Lars Vaule, my website is called PilotAgePartners.com, and try to speak to how you navigate through difficult situations.
Look, our guy Ben set up this sourcing engine. I’m going to open the envelope up to when he does the intent search to liquidity and we got to find someplace to work together.
I’d love it.
I think we’d have a blast.
I think we would too, man.
Budm good to talk to you.
Pleasure.
Important Links
- Seven Habits
- The Goal
- Black Swan
- The Drunkard’s Walk
- Pilotage Partners
- Lars Vaule’s Email
- Lars Vaule on LinkedIn
About Lars Vaule
Lars Vaule revitalizes businesses by bringing clarity to complex challenges, fostering initiative and teamwork, and driving sustainable growth.
Lars began his career on the factory floor of a family-owned manufacturing business, gaining a hands-on understanding of operations and leadership. This formative experience shaped his core leadership principles of honesty, rigor, and respect.
Diverse experience in senior management roles in industries ranging from apparel to venture-backed software equipped him with the versatility to lead organizations through periods of transformation. As COO of a publicly traded cannabis producer, Lars more than doubled retail sales and increased gross margin from $8MM to $26MM.
In 2012, Lars returned to reinvigorate the family business, driving 20% annual growth and preserving over 100 U.S. manufacturing jobs while leading over 450 employees across five global facilities.
Lars founded Pilotage Partners to guide lower middle market companies through turbulent situations. As interim CEO or CFO, he defines clear strategic objectives, stabilizes finances, and empowers teams to improve operational execution. Notable engagements include replacing toxic leadership, addressing financial malfeasance, and strengthening balance sheets to restore stability and drive growth.
Hands-on and pragmatic, Lars combines strategic clarity with a deep understanding of the challenges his clients face. He earned his MBA from Stanford University and his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College.