The book gives the precise focus and direction needed in the first 30 days of a turnaround or need to change any current business. Key chapters which focus on the basics of any good turnaround are:
Chapter 6 - Specialize or Die & Slash Costs ( Reduce Burn)
Chapter 11 - Crawl into your Customer's skin ( Customer focus)
Chapter 25 - Tighten the ship ( Profit enhancements)
Great stories and advice on Board management as well as the search for a New CEO.
Great for turnarounds, Start-ups and any exisiting business trying to improve profits.The benchmark for Turnaround Books.
The author offers 69 small chapters of advice. There's everything from what to do first on a turnaround... to how to get the best price selling your company. Nearly every page is heavily underlined in my book.
The topics that I particularly found valuable were: "Find the margin, cut all other costs"; "Specialize, do it where the margin lives, stop everything else"; "franchising is more about real estate than the business";his chapter on "make what sells" and the importance of low cost and his abundant advice on how to cut costs; his recommendations on increasing price on certain product types; setting your debt levels at the "10 year flood plain" for your company; demoting IT because it operates with its own agenda; stopping the CFO from gambling; cutting down on consultants and moving them over to more of a performance basis... well the topics go on, but you get the idea.
There's lots of advice. It's blunt and somewhat in your face. The text is easy to read and interesting too. There are lots of small stories that illustrate the points.
Overall I recommend this book most highly, not only for business turnarounds, but for any CEO or CEO wanna-bee. It would make a great book to take on business travel and read on the airplane. It's easy to read with the small chapters, and many topics. This is easily a 5 star book.
John Dunbar