AN ATHLETICS drug cheat tried to ruin Zef Eisenberg’s MaxiMuscle business when he tested positive in a drugs test.

But Mr Eisenberg turned the damaging publicity around and said it actually boosted his company’s sales and reputation in the end.

Maximuscle was rocked when, more than a decade ago, it was linked to a string of positive tests of British athletes. The booming company was sponsoring more than 300 stars across all sports at the time.

‘Within hours of getting a tip-off, we were all over the newspapers who were trying to make out that I was a drug lord who had just ruined Great Britain’s gold medal hopes.

‘I decided this was war. I wasn’t going to let a drugs cheat blame me and ruin my company and brand.’

Mr Eisenberg was confident that his quality control processes were second to none. His legal team sprang into action and he invited Trading Standards to test all his products for illegal substances.

‘I knew I was squeaky clean and had nothing to hide,’ he said. ‘I invited journalists for a breakfast briefing and more than 50 turned up.

‘The results of that were amazing. I had TV and radio interviews, I was featured across all the newspapers. I was on the centre pages of the News of the World, who published the website address and our phone number. I couldn’t have bought that kind of publicity and we didn’t have the stock to keep up with demand. It was a PR dream.’

Mr Eisenberg kept his interview schedule high over the following weeks and months and the period proved to be a time of amazing growth for the company, which he sold last year, having founded it from his home as a teenager.

He believed that his actions after the drug cheat crisis helped him to go on to sell the company too.

He admitted concerns about British drug-testing procedures and feared wide-ranging bans on supplements could have been proposed as doubts were continually aired about the supplement industry. So he invested £250,000 to pioneer a testing programme for supplements to prove his products and ensure that such claims could never arise again.

Soon, other companies were paying to take advantage of the tests too and although starting the process cost the company money, eventually the clean bill of health it gave the products made the business much more marketable.

n Mr Eisenberg was the keynote speaker on how to turn business nightmares into profit at the Chamber of Commerce one-day business seminar, which was sponsored by NatWest.