TL;DR
A parent group bought a subsidiary and never once made it profitable; six years later it was ready to close it. I was handed the operation with a free hand to fix it, and 18 months in the unit was profitable: the team was rebuilt, the model moved from mass-email selling to subscriptions, the platform was modernized, and the business expanded to operate across seven countries.
The situation as found
The unit was Astrocenter France, an international astrology and tarot business whose sites and newsletters ran in four languages (French, English, Spanish, and German), with content partnerships around the world through the Microsoft Network (MSN), and telecom-operator portals. Six years after the parent group acquired it, the unit had never been profitable, and the parent group was weighing whether to shut the business down. That is when I was handed the last-chance operation: operational control of the business with a free hand to restore unit economics and find the path to profitability, the mandate this site calls a rescue and turnaround.
A few constraints made it genuinely hard:
- Remote management from day one. The operation was run from Paris, while I worked from Clermont-Ferrand, so the team was a remote team.
- A platform that was aging and complex, needing ultra-specialized developers just to be maintained, and that made creating new products, the heart of the model, slow and expensive.
- A catalog of more than 100 highly specialized digital products, with the constant need to invent new ones for a large historic client base.
- Marketing built almost entirely on historic email lists and millions of daily promotional sends.
- Editorial teams of journalists, constantly pulled into producing paper content for their magazine network at negotiated prices, with deadlines that were hard to meet.
The diagnosis
The presenting symptom was an unprofitable subsidiary. The cause was not a bad team or a lack of effort. It was a business model and a technology stack that could not scale. Revenue leaned on historic email lists and millions of promotional sends. The platform could not produce new products quickly or cheaply. And the production economics were built for paper: journalists paid per piece, magazine contracts that drained the editorial team. Every part of the structure cost more than it could earn.
What was decided, and why
The option that framed the whole engagement was closure: the parent group was thinking about shutting the business down, and the last-chance mandate was the counter-decision. I took it over to make it work under the Crisis-Proof Builder identity. I chose a path in three parts: redesign the business model from mass-email selling to subscription-based audiences, restructure the team and the cost base, and modernize the platform. And I led the team through it, I did not do it alone.
What was actually built or changed
- Team. The incumbent staff were reclassified into other departments of the group, and I recruited a dedicated six-person team in Clermont-Ferrand (one developer, one integrator, two writers, a marketing project manager, and an audience project manager) absorbing the reclassified skills through the transition. A level-2 support contract kept the historic developer close for two years.
- Model. Paid-per-piece journalists gave way to in-house multilingual web writers, and magazine contracts were renegotiated to be profitable or outsourced.
- Technology. A new, modern front-end and back-office; a catalog profitability audit that cut the unviable products, then a tranche-by-tranche migration of the rest, with web services letting the new and old systems work side by side while the migration ran; and automated horoscope generation to cut maintenance.
- Partnerships. Big audience-platform contracts were renegotiated to set a noindex tag (a setting that keeps a page out of search results) on the sections they hosted, so the new content strategy was not cannibalized.
What broke, and what it cost
The year-long refactoring came before the new sites were live. I closed the English-language market outright and kept Germany only as outsourced. Part of the catalog was cut. And the dependency on the historic developer was not a clean break; it is a real residual risk, held in place by a negotiated support contract. None of it was easy; the softer option would have been to avoid those trade-offs altogether.
The outcome
- Measured. Profitability was reached in 18 months. The new sites went live after a year of work. The catalog numbered more than 100 specialized products at the start.
- Qualitative. The audience recovered and grew on its own, no longer dependent on the historic email databases.
- International expansion. The modernized platform opened Italy, whose growth was rapid, then Portugal, both feeding the parent group’s own platform. Then the English-language market was reactivated while US operations launched, which enabled the renewed worldwide MSN content-production partnership. This is one of the mandates behind the who I am page.
If this is the shape of your problem (an operation no one else wants to own, under a hard deadline), let’s talk.