Well, the first step basically is to stop the cash bleeding and communicate with your creditors. As someone who already experienced that necessity 3 years ago I can say that stopping the cash bleeding can be a lot of work because cancelling lots of services and subscriptions takes a lot of administrative work. It can feel like stopping a big container ship which heads full speed towards an iceberg.
But it never should take anywhere near 40 days to do this first step. If you take this long, you'll crash badly ( assuming that you are currently in a cash crunch ).
You have to make very efficient use of your time.
Some suggestions:
- Set priorities, e.g. stop larger expenses first, so don't waste time with $10-expenses when there are still $1000 expenses to be cut.
- Don't overanalyze. Don't spend more than one minute per expense for the decision whether to cut it or not. If in doubt, cut the expense. ( only keep expenses which provide a very short term positive ROI with very high reliability. )
- Talk with your creditors as soon as possible. It'll take much less of your time if you act proactively than when they contact you as soon as they find out. Be honest with your creditors. This builds up trust which is a big timesaver.
- If you have so many expenses that you have lost overview or if you don't have contact information for canceling services anymore due to sloppy record-keeping you may have to do drastic steps such as cancelling your credit card and/or bank account and restart with a new credit card and bank account where you migrate any necessary expenses ( so you do a positive filtering rather than a negative one. )
But you have to be prepared for some problems if you cut payments by cancelling the credit card, i.e. all the providers of these services will contact you and will probably be somewhat angry. And you still have to cancel all these service and possibly pay the last few rates depending on the terms. So cancelling the credit card just helps you with finding out how to cancel these services...
(Please note: I didn't do that step three years ago but I was already thinking about doing it. So this is rather theoretical.) - Also if you think it'll take you such a long time for doing everything, chances are high that your business cannot (yet) be turned around fast enough. In this case you could also do like I did 3 years ago: Get an employee job and continue to work on your business on a part-time bases besides that job. This basically replaces a crash crunch by a time crunch and/or energy crunch but there are tacticts to deal with that.
Of course, if you are not in a situation where you need an immediate turnaround, IMHO there is no problem to do this course slower and use it primarily as a precautionary educational exercise so you are prepared to execute a turnaround, should there ever be the necessity to do so, and so you can then devote 100% of your resources to execution because you don't have to use time for learning anymore. I think the knowledge on how to properly do a turnaround can provide some level of comfort if you are running a business.
starting 7 day business turnaround 
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