(FORTUNE Small Business) – The workday is winding down at Timeless Message, an e-commerce company headquartered in a warehouse off a flat, brittle stretch of blacktop in the Deer Valley section of Phoenix. But even as dusk cools the desert air outside, temperatures inside the building are rising fast.

"I have never seen these numbers," company founder Mike Trott says angrily.

"Yes, you have," his brother Jeff snaps.

"No, I haven't," Mike insists.

"Look, you're never here," Jeff's wife, Jackie, says with a hint of sarcasm.

An awkward silence ensues. Jeff rolls his eyes and rattles ice in his paper cup. Jackie scribbles figures on a sheet of paper. Mike folds his arms resolutely. Mike's ex-wife, Angela, is in Tennessee visiting her mother, who just had a triple bypass. But it's unlikely that Angela would have much to add to this entrepreneurial soap opera. These days there is only one thing that the Trotts seem to agree on: Selling sweet messages in bottles hardly ensures a cheerful workplace.

Mike Trott, 41, is the visionary behind Timeless Message. Back in 2001 the Central Intelligence Agency veteran traded in his trenchcoat and shades to create the sentimental-bottle business. "This business," Mike declares, "has always been my baby."

True believers were scarce at first. Only Angela, who was an administrative employee at the State Department at the time, saw promise in her husband's hunch that people wanted a fresh alternative to greeting cards. She liked his motto: "When flowers and cards aren't enough." Mike envisioned his product as a work of art: custom calligraphy on rolls of premium paper that would be tucked into fancy glass bottles and shipped in hand-crafted wooden crates. Some of the bottles would contain miniature ships, emblazoned with diabetes-inducing messages such as "Every drop of your love brings amazing warmth to my world."

Not since Kevin Costner's disastrous 1999 film, Message in a Bottle, has a man tied his ambitions so closely to words tucked inside a glass container. Yet the gamble paid off at first, as Mike's bottles rode an early wave of success. Sales were $250,000 in 2000, the company's first year in business. They hit $541,000 the following year. In 2003 revenues peaked at $787,000.

But nowadays the company is foundering in a perfect storm of business woes. Timeless Message has never been profitable. Saddled with more than $300,000 in debt and an expensive new warehouse lease, the company is hemorrhaging cash. Its creditors include key suppliers, some of which have cut the firm off. Copycat firms have appeared on the scene, one of them boasting lower prices and a slicker website. And after 17 years of marriage, Mike and Angela are now divorced.

Mike has sunk around $180,000 of his savings into Timeless Message and is beginning to wonder whether he'll ever get it out. "I'm Mr. Optimistic," he says with a sigh. "But for the first time, I'm not sure we can make it."

With tensions thick and funds too tight to pay himself a salary, Mike moved to California a year ago in search of new business opportunities. His departure left a power vacuum that Angela, 40, and his brother Jeff, 48, have been competing to fill. Jackie Freeman, 47, the firm's bookkeeper, has sided with Jeff, whom she married last year. While neither Jeff nor Jackie has any money in the business, the two have worked hard and are loyal to Mike. "We don't want Mike to get screwed," Jackie says. "He's got a lot of money on the line."

After Angela Trott wrote to us requesting a makeover, FSB recruited three experts to steer Timeless Message away from the rocks. Forrest Koch runs the Omega Group, a technology consulting firm based in Portland, Ore. Marlon McClinton is a marketing strategist and the CEO of Utilivate, a strategic consulting firm in Chicago. And Kevin Dougherty is an independent consultant from Tampa who specializes in finance and accounting.

A no-nonsense Vietnam veteran, Koch marched into Timeless Message on a Wednesday morning to sit down with Jackie, Jeff, and Mike, who had flown in from California for the occasion. (Angela had planned to attend until the morning of the makeover, when she got the news about her mother's heart surgery.)

Koch rapidly diagnosed poor fiscal discipline and even worse bookkeeping. While Jeff monitors the website traffic and statistics closely every day, no one in the organization knows what the break-even sales are on an annual, monthly, or weekly basis. Jackie routinely hits the panic button when sales fall below 40 units a day, but Koch dismisses that as an arbitrary figure.

The consultant estimates that Timeless Message's total monthly costs are about $65,000. Based on current production and shipping costs, the firm's daily break-even point is about 60 units. But Timeless Message has been moving fewer than 40 bottles a day since the start of 2004, down 10% from the previous year. Koch figures the company is losing about $10,000 a month. Jeff nods his head. "It sucks to spend most of the day dealing with creditors," he says.

Another barrier to profitability is the company's $300,000 debt, which costs it $7,500 to service each month. The debt includes $100,000 that Mike borrowed from his girlfriend. She is now pushing to be repaid, which Mike won't be able to do unless the business starts turning a profit.

Mike didn't want to tell Angela about that loan during the divorce proceedings. "I knew Angela would be livid not to be informed," Mike admits. "But we needed the money to buy inventory for Valentine's Day." In a later phone conversation with FSB, Angela retorts, "My problem isn't that Mike's girlfriend loaned us money. My problem is that I was never even warned that my husband had a girlfriend."

The company's first priority, Koch says, should be to get some relief from all its creditors by presenting a workable plan to repay the debt. Timeless Message's liabilities exceed its assets, so the company could file for bankruptcy protection. But the Trotts aren't ready to throw in the towel. So Koch advises Timeless Message to move into a less expensive office space (the warehouse costs more than $4,000 a month) and outsource order processing and packaging.

On the revenue side, the company must do a better job of persuading website visitors to buy a bottle instead of just browsing the site. Right now, fewer than 2% of all visitors convert to buyers. Koch suggests a few quick fixes to improve the user experience: Raise ordering instructions from below the scroll line to above it; soften the glaring white background, which cheapens the high-end image that Timeless Message wants to project; and slash shipping charges to match Authentic Messages, its newest web competitor, which charges $7.95 for standard ground delivery, compared with Timeless Message's $10.75. "Right now, Authentic Messages looks like a better value to me," Koch says.

Part of the problem is that Angela and Jeff share a distaste for crunching numbers. They all prefer marketing, but they can't agree on a marketing strategy. Jeff likes to develop promotional campaigns to attract new customers. Angela believes the company's strength is rooted in customer service. She has been known to spend as long as an hour on the phone, helping a single customer choose the perfect message for a loved one. "Angela's like a nonprofit," Jeff sniffs.

"Jeff likes to exaggerate," Angela retorts in a later phone interview. "And he also likes to hurt me."

Marlon McClinton, the dapper marketing expert from Chicago, is the next consultant to arrive. He starts with the competition. "Have you ever ordered any product from Authentic Messages?" McClinton asks.

"Nah," Jeff replies airily. "I check out its site now and then, but we've got the highest quality on the market." McClinton shakes his head. "You should be ordering from all your competitors just to know what they're up to," he says. "I can assure you they have bought some of your bottles."

McClinton notes that Timeless Message has a list of 30,000 "members" who have signed up to receive promotional e-mails from the company. With such devoted customers, the company should have a more intimate understanding of their behavior and tastes. Jeff's description of the target audience as "somewhere between 18 and 80 and about half male and half female" is a tipoff that he hasn't a clue. By attaching a simple questionnaire to the online order form, Timeless Message could collect valuable customer data, including income, educational level, the keywords typed to reach the website, and feedback about the company's products.

When the discussion turns to how Timeless Message might attract more black and Hispanic customers, McClinton has just one piece of advice. Peering at the company's logo, which features an Amistad-like sailing ship against a furled parchment map, McClinton says matter-of-factly, "For African Americans, you may want to brand the product differently. Your logo looks a lot like a slave ship, which could turn some people off."

But it is Kevin Dougherty, a stocky finance specialist from Tampa, whose advice most ignites the Trotts. Strolling into the office on Thursday afternoon, Dougherty makes one simple recommendation: "Raise your prices. Forget about what Bubba and Skeeter are selling bottles for down the road," he says. "You've got a great product—you're just not charging enough for it. You're subsidizing everybody else's joy by buying watermelons for $1 and selling them for 88 cents."

You can almost hear the ice thawing in the Trott family. "We've been told many times that our prices are too low," Jeff says. "I know, I know," Jackie agrees. "But we've been afraid to raise them because we don't want to lose customers."

Mike smiles broadly. "Hey, let's try it," he says. "What have we got to lose?"

Timeless Message's prices range from $29.95 to $149.99 for a gift package. Rather than trying to increase revenues by increasing volume, Dougherty suggests that they boost prices about 30%, to reflect their relatively high production costs. "Stop trying to chase the volume gods," he exhorts. "You can sell fewer bottles and make more money."

A couple of days after their makeover, Jeff and Jackie Trott sublet their warehouse and moved the business into their house. They raised prices by 30% across the board and added five new premium bottles in the $60-plus price range. "Everything is selling real well," Jeff reports. "I think we have improved the perceived value of our product." By operating from home and cutting back on part-time staff hours, the company expects to reduce overhead by $6,000 a month. The Trotts are also hard at work on a new business plan that they hope will help rebuild relationships with creditors.

The Trott family psychodrama is a whole different story. Soon after the makeover, Angela, under pressure from Jeff and Jackie, agreed to accept a pay suspension and take a step back from day-to-day operations during the restructuring. Angela's decision required some deep soul-searching. While the divorce settlement left her with a majority stake in the business, she is reluctant to assert control by pushing Jeff and Jackie out of the company. Personal feelings aside, Angela says Jeff and Jackie add considerable value to the business. Besides, Mike is still the brains and checkbook behind the company. Angela knows he will always trust his brother over her.

For all those reasons, Angela feels that she had little choice but to step away. "There's been a hostile takeover," she says.

The tempest at Timeless Message has left everyone a little seasick. "I'm mad, and I'm hurt," says Angela, who plans to move to Knoxville to spend more time with her mother. "But I don't hold grudges. Maybe they want me out because I'm not in the family anymore. Maybe this is really what the company needs."

Although Angela's retreat has left Jeff with day-to-day control of Timeless Message, he is starting to wonder whether that makes up for all the bad blood. "This has really put a strain on our family," he says. Mike strives to remain philosophical. "It's like those messages in our bottles," he remarks. "People marry; people divorce. Somehow, though, you've got to find a way to make it through."