In my review of the book
Business Turnaround in 7 Easy Steps by John Quinn
posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave it 3 Stars.
Here is my review.
A short guide to help you improve your business
I’m not keen on the title of this book. Turning around a business is rarely easy and, perhaps the most difficult step (not in the book) is accepting that you need to take urgent actions to save your business. Too often business owners leave it too late which is why failure rates are so bad.
Strangely it’s not that that clear what the 7 steps are since there isn’t a chapter headings list at the front and the kindle table of contents isn’t used. Even when you get to each stage in the book, you get to a heading like Step 1 Overview without specifying what the step actually is. This makes the book frustrating to read for the first time and infuriating if you want to come back later to review one particular step.
Let me outline what the steps are:
1 – Firefighting “Cash Flow”
2 – Strategy
3 – Competitive Advantage
4 – Marketing
5 – Operations Strategy
6 – Waste
7 – Continuous Improvement
I could write a very long review about this book because there’s an excellent guide to business improvement fighting to get out of here but there are numerous near misses where things aren’t quite right.
This first step is called Firefighting Cash Flow but doesn’t do the reader any favours by explaining how to reduce costs and increase revenue. These profit items are eventually linked to cash flow but it doesn’t give you the direct, explicit focus on the money coming in to the business and going out of it. Businesses go bust because they can’t pay staff or keep suppliers delivering goods and services. You need a very short term daily cash flow forecast with a longer 13 week forecast to identify where the crunch points might be.
As tips to improve profit, they are very helpful although I found the mind maps for cost analysis irritating in my kindle as I read portrait style and they are presented landscape. When I turn my tablet, they turn with me and even when I look the screen, they are hard to read, especially in the most detailed level. A better approach would have been to drill down on one branch to show the ideas, rather than trying to re-present the entire diagram with extra levels of detail added.
Steps 2 to 5 are linked but as I was reading step 2, I wasn’t aware of how they fit together, which left this first strategy step feel under-developed. It’s basically introducing a diagram for developing a strategy once you’ve decided on the niche your going to target. The guidance on the niche itself is inadequate since it didn’t look at trends or expected developments.
I’ve got to be careful about not picking apart this book, piece by piece so let me skip over the next two steps, even though there’s plenty I could say.
Step 5 is about operations, supposedly broken into three components – people, innovation and money. Strangely the chapter then spends its time talking about leadership and introducing a 4 step planning system. I can relate those to people but the chapter says nothing about innovation or money management.
I’ll skip past the next two steps as well and give you some more general thoughts.
The author is very good at creating or adapting “tools” or frameworks which is to be commended. Unfortunately I had issues with them conceptually, although as a business advisor and coach myself, there is always the danger of “not invented here” syndrome. I also thought the examples could have been much better.
For example, I like the idea of using forcefield analysis (normally a change management technique for identifying forces for and against a specific change) for thinking about a marketing campaign but the example was clumsy as it didn’t make explicit the strong and weak elements.
Then there is the one page plan, another good idea although this is a project plan rather than a business plan. It wasn’t sensible to use a handwriting style font because it makes the example hard to read because it’s either too small or blurred when magnified.
A few things I didn’t like:
1 – the author tries to be funny in places. It doesn’t work.
2 – several times the author has used numbered bullet points but they don’t start at 1. This is just confusing because I went back looking for the start of the list.
3 – the author really wants you to take the free one month trial to his membership site, assuming it still exists, because I was never tempted to click.
I started the book by saying I wasn’t keen on the title of the book because of the “easy steps” and I’m ending it by saying that I have problems with “business turnaround” as well.
This isn’t a book to be read by anyone with a business close to failure.
It doesn’t deal with an impending crisis situation. It’s much more focused on under-performance and making the business better. If you’re trading just above the break even level or you’re just below but you have plenty of resources which mean failure isn’t imminent, then this book has a lot to recommend it. I know I have been critical but that’s because it has the potential to be excellent.
I’ve rated it as a three star book, and as a kindle product that I’ve managed to review within a few days of buying it, I’d normally return it. I’ve chosen not to because the big lesson I’ve taken from this book is that I need to systemise my own improvement techniques better.
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