The problem is not really specific to your company, we've been in the same situation also, although we were quite experienced, and I guess it happens to lots mo

The problem is not really specific to your company, we've been in the same situation also, although we were quite experienced, and I guess it happens to lots more companies. Fortunately we managed to turn it around. We've started our company ~4 years ago and got our first customer immediately without even having a product. We build carrier-grade VoIP platforms for internet service providers, so it needs to be really reliable, and it needs to handle hundrets of thousands of customers. So we started out building the platform on a tight time-line (~6 months from nothing to go-live), taking all actions necessary to deliver. It was a great success, but it was really tailored specifically to that customer. Immediately afterwards, we did another project of that scale, and then another one. All of them worked really well, we've always been profitable, but it was quite hard to maintain them, let's put it that way. Beside that, it was next to impossible to scale the business in a reasonable way while keeping up the product's quality. In order to fix this issue, we decided to make a bold move and planned to release the product as open-source (we're quite deeply involved in different large open-source projects, so we know the business behind it quite well). This forced us to convert the platform into a stage that literally everybody can install and maintain it. We hired two people to help us ripping apart all the different parts, review, package and document them, re-put them together in a standardized way and create a software bundle which allows reproducable builds (there are like 100 different software components involved, half of them from other open-source projects, half of them from us, and they need to be integrated with each other really tightly). The result was a clean, well-documented platform, which now can be installed within 15 minutes with very small manual intervention. It now also allows seamless software upgrades, and we can plug different commercial modules on top of it to still have a viable business model. We're going to release it to the public next week, so we definitely succeeded cleaning up our mess. It took us 18 months to do so though, so it's hard, it costs a lot of resources (money, time, dedication of the people behind it), but it's definitely possible. We did a presentation (sorry, German only, but you'll still get the idea I guess) about the concepts of it, see http://glt09.linuxtage.at/slides/hochverfuegbare_voip-systeme_im_carrier-umfeld-glt09.pdf http://glt09.linuxtage.at/slides/hochverfuegbare_voip-system...