Customer Reviews

The Six Month Fix: Adventures in Rescuing Failing Companies

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great book on business turnarounds. It is eminently practical, humorous in spots and filled with interesting stories that highlight the advice being given.

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

There is big difference in 20 years of experience and one year of experience twenty times.Sutton?s experience is worth far more than the number of years he has invested. He writes in a lighthearted style for such a serious subject as business turnarounds, that makes this an easy but powerful read.

With success in reversing the dismal fortunes of several companies in a variety of industries, the author gives a sharp insight in how to correct it in your company and better yet how to avoid it altogether. A quick glance at the table of contents will load you with ideas for improvement for any company.

Some ideas are obvious and simplistic- "Eliminate Sex", "Attack Drugs and Alcohol" and "Fight Politics", for example. Most of the examples, however, are valuable and brief. Some ideas challenge the obvious: "Downgrade Education?", "Reverse Discriminate" and "Cash Makes You Stupid."

This is a good book to have on your shelf to scan for ideas to improve your business. A straight read will be a great checklist for weaknesses in your organization that can come back to hurt you later.

For those business rookies fresh with the theories about how business is supposed to work, here is a great source to show you how it really works in the world of obstacles.

A smart man learns from his mistakes, a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. There are plenty of blunders here to learn from. But you can also learn how to fix them.

I have spent a year reading a host of turnaround books and this is the One. Fantastic Book. Easy to Read. Humorous with very clear direction after each chapter of real world implementation plans.

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.

Gary Sutton does a wonderful job of writing a book that is an education on turning around companies in distress (the right way) and fun to read at the same time.

It is clear to me that becoming a turnaround CEO can be fun but requires a relentless attention to the bottom line, a lot of creativity and most of all the guts to do what you know is right.

Even if your not a CEO looking into turn arounds the book is a great read with lots of interesting (and frightening?) anecdotes. I recommend this book to anyone that finds the business world interesting.

Most of the ideas in this book seem like common sense once you read them. The catch is that most people don't think this way until they read it. I found the book an enjoyable read and gave some clear step by step ways to improve a business that's in trouble. I would recommend it to any and all even those of us who are "Recovering MBA's" can be reminded of a thing or two.

This is a fascinating book and a distinctive one. To begin with, the author does not claim to have a magic formula for success and instead focuses on the many conceptually simple but difficult tasks required to make a success of a failing business. Some of the suggested strategies make me uncomfortable because of the implications for employees, but never do the strategies seem mean-spirited -- they just seem necessary.

The book was given to me as a gift, and after I started reading it, I couldn't stop. It ended up reading it in less than a full weekend, but parts of it have always stuck with me. I can't summarize it any better than the front flap: "Direct, funny, and brutally honest".

This is an excellent book. It's written in an easy to read, irreverent style ("Boards Suck. Here's How to Cope" is an example). It's full of practical, specific advice from a guy who's actually done it, and is full of real world examples from his own experience. It's written as a series of brief, to the point, pieces of advice, many drawing on specific examples ("Make What Sells", "Slash Costs", "Kill Meetings", "Use Lawyers Less"). As a Harvard Business School grad with a lot of management experience, I found this book cuts through a lot of the mystique, to the often common sense things that work in a difficult situation.

The other reviews give details I agree with. I found Sutton's name on the Turnaround Management Assoc website, got the title of the book and read it. Great stuff. From my experience as a corporate Internal Audit Director for big firms for 18 years, his experiences match many of mine regarding what causes problems and the fixes. A big consideration is that Sutton actually works to turn the company around and save it, rather than get heavy debt, sell off the pieces and shut it down so the lenders of BK capital make the money, not the shareholders. I bet Enron could use Sutton, but many of their execs might not last long (but I have read Enron has just named another turnaround specialist).

Garry sutton has written a useful book on turning around a business. Jammed with real world examples, "The SIX MONTH FIX" moves the reader to a world where actions speak louder than words. I find it particularly neat by having the book partitioned into three phases: Loss, zero profit and making money. This helped me focus more on the first steps I have to do. Short chapters makes it real fun to go through it with a minimum boredome. And ,of course, alittle bit of scattered humor qualifies it for a reread..Thanks, SUTTON!

I did a quick web search on Gary Sutton and found very little info about him other than in the Teledesic episode. At least what he said about himself is true: he does not self-aggrandize. His track record seems genuine so I gave the book a shot. The book turned out to be quite fun to read. Sutton packaged his valuable experiences into 60+ chapters of easy-to-remember sound bites. Some of the advices are real gems.

All this and without insulting your intelligence (unlike those E-Myth/Rich Dad junk). This book may be about fixing troubled companies, but the advice here can probably be applied to startups as well.