Business Development Advice

I have recently had the pleasure of reviewing the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit from Mark Joyner and Simpleology.

Objective

The 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit has been put together to provide a low cost, practical training program to help small businesses survive in the short term and then go on to prosper in the longer term.

The Problem

Far too many small businesses fail and while bankruptcy has been a learning experience for many well known entrepreneurs who later became successful, it is a very painful and stressful process and best avoided.

Unfortunately few people receive adequate business training before they start a business so they rely on “learning on the job” hoping that the price paid to the university of life and school of hard knocks won’t be too high.

But the simple fact is that it is a lot easy to spend money than earn it and that is particularly true in the tough times that lie ahead.

If you find yourself in a business which is in serious financial difficulty then you will know that it is a very confusing time.

You probably think you have to work harder, better, faster but what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working or no longer brings the same level of benefits. You need new ideas but you also need to lift the heavy burden which seems to paralyse your mind and body.

I have worked with a number of businesses in severe financial distress and I know the strain when your house is on the line and you can’t see how you can get out of this mess.

The 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit

This is where the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit comes in and it is designed to perform what will seem like miracles.

Whatever the size of your business, there are four things that you have to do:

1. Stop the bleeding - both time and money.
2. Stop the stress - move from uncertainty to clarity.
3. Inject the business with cash - Mark Joyner’s tip is to aim for 2 months of operating expenses to give you time to breathe.
4. Refocus the business.

When you read the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit sales letter you will see that the claims made are bold and I believe it is right that I should give you a few warnings:

1. The 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit is an excellent program but it is not a magic wand. It relies on you really wanting to rescue your business, turn it around and grow it into the future.
2. The program is intensive and will push you to your limits. There are a lot of training materials included in the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit but watching and learning isn’t enough. You have to take action and implement the ideas ruthlessly.
3. Seven days is a very short time and gives only limited opportunity for even the best ideas to work. I recommend that the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit is used to help businesses prepare for the tough times or when the early signs of financial difficulty appear. The earlier you start your business turnaround, the more successful it is likely to be.

Check Out The Guarantee

Mark Joyner is an expert marketer but his risk reversal strategy is superb and is a tribute to the man’s ethics.

Mark Joyner knows that your business is in trouble and that you can’t afford to waste cash so he is letting you try out the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit for up to seven days before the money is charged.

That’s right.

You have the opportunity to work through the entire program before you have to pay and even afterwards you still have a 90 day money back guarantee (as per the turnaround sales letter at the time of writing this article - please confirm this by reading the letter yourself).

What is the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit?

The 7 Day Business Turnaround program is a day by day lesson in how to turn around your business:

Day 1 - Establishing what the success or failure of your business means to you and gathering the facts about your business.

Day 2 - Taking action to regain control over costs and payments. You will hate this day but feel so much better when it is over and the burden the business has to carry is lightened. Tough times call for tough decisions and tough actions. When you are making money you can afford to be kind and tolerant. When you are bleeding cash, you must put the tourniquet on and tighten it up.

Days 3 to 6 help you to find enough cash injections to cover the next two months worth of operating expenses. The aim is to give you 60 days to make longer term changes to your business.

Day 7 helps you to prepare for the future. After all it would be a mistake to rest on your laurels and find that you waste the next 60 days.

The 7 Day Business Turnaround program basically consists of:

1. Daily videos from Mark Joyner giving you the overview of the business turnaround actions for the day. These are also available in mp3 form if you want to re-listen to them.
2. Short quizzes to make sure that you have picked up the essentials to help reinforce your turnaround learning.
3. A work book detailing what you should do each day for your business turnaround and a Virtuosity book in pdf format.
4. Supplemental documents and spreadsheets to help you plan and implement your turnaround actions.
5. Guest turnaround coaching videos from a wide range of different experts although there is a bias towards copywriters and Internet marketers.
6. Recordings of daily turnaround coaching calls which Mark Joyner held with a few volunteers when the program was first put together plus their own turnaround stories.
7. A mass of bonus materials including the training programs for Mark Joyner’s best selling books “The Irresistible Offer” and “The Great Formula”.

Copywriting & Internet Marketing

I mentioned earlier that many of the guest advisers were copywriters or Internet marketers which may seem strange and “not what you need” until you stop to think about it.

The challenge Mark Joyner has set is a business turnaround in just 7 days so that means:

1. Communicating your selling messages for your cash injection actions in as compelling a way as possible. This is the world of the copywriter who is the expert in direct response marketing. Since the assumption is that you are in a cash crunch, you can’t afford to employ a good copywriter (and why bother with a cheap bad one) and marketing has probably been a problem for you during the earlier stages of your business, it makes sense to teach you the rudiments of copywriting.
2. You need to communicate your marketing messages quickly and what better way than the quick, low cost methods of emails, blogs, forums, your own website (of you have one) and the content sharing sites (like Hubpages and Squidoo which can give you great Google rankings very quickly although you should aim to be informative rather than “selling”.)

The seven day time frame doesn’t give you much chance to use other marketing methods but when you’ve drafted a great email offer, there is no reason why it can’t be used as the basis for a telemarketing script or direct mail letter to create sales and cash in Days 8 to 14.

What’s Missing From The 7 Day Business Turnaround?

Mark Joyner and Simpleology have had to make some choices. The bigger the program, the more it will cost and the longer it will take for you to absorb the ideas but time and money are two luxuries you don’t have in abundance when the focus has to be on action.

1. There is no legal compliance advice. The 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit is designed to be sold across the world so you will need to make sure that you comply with your local laws.
2. There is no personal coaching. Everything is pre-recorded on the program and that’s how Simpleology have managed to keep the cost so low.There is a turnaround forum which has been active but with such a short intensive program, I suspect that involvement varies and many people just won’t have the time.Unfortunately the Business Turnaround forum is indexed by Google and public and this has been confirmed by Simpleology support. This is the one black mark I have against the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit since I believe that a public forum is inappropriate for businesses needing this kind of help. While the forum still may have useful information and can be a source of help, you will have to be cautious when you post to it or disguise your name and issues.

   Any business coaching solutions which give you hand-holding advice and accountability from interaction with a coach will be much more expensive than the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit, and is not likely to be as focused unless the coach is experienced in turnarounds.

Does The 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit Work?

This is the critical point about any business program and especially a business development targeted at businesses who may not survive if the program isn’t effective.

Fortunately I haven’t had to put the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit to the test in earnest as I worked through the materials but:

1. The cost reduction process is very similar to the approach I take periodically myself and I know that works. Costs do have a nasty habit of creeping up and the techniques in the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit bring your costs back under control.
2. The stress reduction part of the process works. I have seen from turnaround situations with clients, the relief when the uncertainty lifts, there is a clear plan to deal with the problems and actions are focused on the important few rather than the possible many.
3. The creditor/accounts payable strategies may work depending on your existing relationships. If you have already destroyed all their goodwill through poor communications and broken promises, whatever you do is fraught with difficulties outside of an official insolvency procedure. Your suppliers/vendors may act opportunistically but if you don’t have the cash, there is little they can do.In the UK when I was a business manager I took non-communicating debtors through the courts, won the cases and have been forced to settle for a very slow payment process. It was only when companies failed to present a settlement proposal that I won judgement for immediate payment and could send in the bailiffs to seize goods for immediate sale and payment of my debt.
4. The firesale strategies for raising emergency cash are not unusual. Who doesn’t think of selling stock/inventory off cheap to raise emergency cash? However the strategies proposed and the effective copywriting techniques will reduce the discounts required to create action from your buyers and that means more cash.
5. Some of the cash injection techniques may take longer than the seven days but they are tried and tested revenue generation ideas which you probably won’t think of or consider without the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit.
6. The further regeneration and development of your business is outside of the seven days but the materials provided are excellent and give you a solid foundation to generate a sustaining business that doesn’t rely on fire-fighting cash generation techniques.

Recommendation

Without such an incredible risk reversal strategy in the sales letter where you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, I would have rated the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit as a STRONG BUY.

I don’t know anything like it.

You can buy books on turning around your business and extensive manuals but I haven’t seen a solution as comprehensive as the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit for small businesses.

With the exceptional risk reversal, I believe you must leap into the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit straight away at the first signs of financial difficulty.

Prevention is better than cure and if your business is in decline, the two most important factors are working against you:

1. The longer you leave it without trying to turnaround your business, the fewer resources you will have and while the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit is excellent, it is nice to give the tactics a boost with some cash.
2. The longer you leave your business in difficulty, the more problems you are likely to have and the less time left to fix them.

Think of the situation as a set of scales.

You and your business are perched over the water and the available resources to rescue your business are the counter balance.

As each week passes, your resources weigh less but the burden you carry weighs more so each week you are deeper and deeper under water. First to your knees, then your thighs, then your chest …

I know you get the message so just click over to the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit and sign up. If your business is in financial difficulty and you believe it deserves to be saved, signing up is likely to be the wisest thing you do all year.

The 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit Even Works For Business Start Ups

It wasn’t designed to help start-ups succeed but one of the initial Space Monkey triallists was a new business and it got that business up and running very quickly.

There were no costs to cut or creditors to manage but it does start the business off in the right way with the focus on “lean and mean” cost control and generating quick income.

Find Out More About Mark Joyner & Simpleology

If you would like to know more about Mark Joyner and Simpleology but you don’t believe you need the 7 Day Business Turnaround Kit at the moment, there are two ways for you to sample the Mark Joyner/Simpleology ideas for free.

Simpleology 101 - the simple science of getting what you want. a personal productivity method to help you to gain control.

The Irresistible Offer- Mark Joyner has recently decided to give his best selling book away free as an ebook.

The more contact I have with Mark Joyner and the Simpleology organisation, the more impressed I am.