I think your comment lays out a lot of interesting parts of the realities and problems at this hypothetical company (which is pretty much everywhere I've ever worked to some degree). I don't think that these learnings are enough to actually achieve success though, if for no other reason than you have not defined what "success" looks like for this place. Not a criticism, but a place to start thinking from.

Before you can actually accomplish anything at this furniture company, I think a few other things have to happen:

1. Who has the power to fire you? The owner is the obvious answer, but maybe there are more people -- perhaps they are people who report to you. What do they want done? Can you get some political capital by executing on those things, even if they don't really matter?

You are coming into a dysfunctional place and at some level trying to make it functional. You will inevitably be subjected to backlash and are a candidate for host rejection, and you need tools to fight against that if you are going to succeed.

2. Find allies. This is a 500 person company, and you may be the boss but you can't be everywhere. People already inside the company could make great allies, but you have to worry about whether they are already too institutionalized or if there are political dynamics that you are unaware of. People from outside the company will be seen as outsiders, but may otherwise be more able to share your vision.

3. How long do you have to execute? The company is obviously burning a ton of money, so how much longer can that / will that be allowed to continue? You don't want to plan to use every second of that time, but knowing the order of magnitude (6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years) can be hugely helpful. Slow changes may be easier to roll out, but you most likely don't have 20 years to right the ship. If you don't have enough time to get to your end goal, then you need a new goal.

4. Is the product actually any good? What is the core institutional strength that you're working with? In this case, is the furniture actually made well? Is it made quickly? What do you have -- even if its a very small thing -- that gives you any kind of edge? Find a way to make that the core of your business.

5. What is the goal / what does success look like? This is the big one. You need to pick something (and get buy-in) and work towards that. Trying to fix everything about a company at once is doomed to failure. Trying to do twenty things and getting 10% on all of them is probably a waste of time. You need to be able to clearly articulate this for different audiences in different mediums in order to get the resources to execute on it. You may not be giving the same message to all groups.

In the case of the furniture company, I could see success as a few different things.

Option 1: Reduce burn and gradually spin down the business. This might sound like failure, but if you have no core strength and no way to get one, making the inevitable company collapse more gradual and graceful may be the best win you can get for yourself, the owner and the employees. If you had any customers, it would be helpful for them as well. This means figuring out who to cut in what order, what resources can be sold to return funds to the owner / other investors, and so on.

Option 2: Divide the business into the working and non-working parts, in order to contain and eventually excise the diseased parts. If the existing operating constraints and burdens are too great, you may need to give up on parts of the business.

Find teams or individuals who seem to execute well (if there are any) and quietly move them to work together on something that can be made, sold, marketed and shipped isolated from the teams that can't handle those tasks. You might need to outsource large parts of this vertical, or maybe even every part of it. Eventually you separate the businesses throughout a spinoff or an acquisition, unless you get the right signals and proceed to Option 3 instead. This is a way to succeed now without having to also pay off all of the debts of the past however many years (which you leave with the old business).

Option 3: Actually fix the entire business. You have all of that furniture piled up that people are taking for free, so that could mean that people will pay for what you make if only you sold or marketed it effectively.

This could also be a false signal. People will take things for free that they wouldn't be willing to pay for -- you have polluted your potential market by devaluing your product -- and you may not be able to overcome that. You also have the twin problems of the humongous historical costs and current operating overhead to produce product at this level. You will have to greatly increase your ACV or profit margins in order to not only pay for today's operating costs but to eventually cover all of the costs of getting to this point.

This option seems to be what Evernote has tried to do, by moving up-market into more enterprise-y things like team chat. I think that path is hopeless for them, and they will never achieve success that way. It might be too late, but they should probably try to get to a different successful outcome.