Great advice for the furniture business...worst possible advice for Evernote. Good luck using screenshots on a website to get someone to pay $8/month for Evernote. The only realistic way to convert someone into a paying customer (at such a high price point) is to get them to use the product heavily.
I would argue basically the opposite. If you're selling sofas at $4500 and your main competitors are giving them away, you're only going to sell to customers that really like your particular sofa. If you sell them at $500, and they're quite a bit better than the ones your competitors are giving away, you might be able to stay in business.
Burn the furniture pile (or move it into a warehouse or build a fence around it or something).
Hire a new COO who is the head salesman, and compensated purely by how much furniture they sell. Give them freedom to hire whoever they want so long as they are also being paid based on commission (and don't let them hire anybody already at the company).
As for the factory floor workers, optimize this later, sales is the focus so don't get distracted trying to optimize production until you forecast that it will fall behind sales. Get out and Sell! Get that furniture into stores.
Don't even fire the 300 people in the office, it's not worth the time you would put into it. Hire a consultant that specializes in downsizing to do it for you. Anyone who works in the office is considered contagious so no exceptions.
> Hire a new COO who is the head salesman, and compensated purely by how much furniture they sell. Give them freedom to hire whoever they want so long as they are also being paid based on commission (and don't let them hire anybody already at the company).
Oh, so magic the problem away?
And no one wants to work for your company on commission.
I guess you have never heard of a sales team before? Every sales team in the country works mainly on commission, and most executives have most of their compensation based on meeting performance metrics. So what are you even talking about?
I would argue basically the opposite. If you're selling sofas at $4500 and your main competitors are giving them away, you're only going to sell to customers that really like your particular sofa. If you sell them at $500, and they're quite a bit better than the ones your competitors are giving away, you might be able to stay in business.