When what is missing is not insight, but capacity.
Many restructurings do not fail because of the concept. They fail because there is nobody to implement it, because management is fully occupied with day-to-day business and talks with banks and creditors, because a position is vacant or because the experience needed for the decisions ahead is lacking.
In such situations, we take on responsibility for a limited period: as Chief Restructuring Officer, in commercial management or in a clearly defined project role. Time-limited, with a defined mandate and with the aim of handing the task back in an orderly manner.
What you gain
- 1Implementation instead of recommendations. We work within the line organisation, not alongside it, with the powers this requires.
- 2Able to act from the first week. Experience from restructurings and insolvency proceedings that a company rarely has in-house, and does not need to have.
- 3Relief for management. You regain the headspace for the decisions only you can make.
- 4One point of contact for banks and creditors. Anyone who regularly negotiates with lenders knows what they expect in terms of figures and conduct.
- 5A clear end. An interim role is time-limited from the outset. We prepare the handover to a permanent appointment.
Three scenarios
Chief Restructuring Officer (CRO). The CRO is responsible for the restructuring as a whole, steers the measures, negotiates with banks, creditors and shareholders and reports to management and shareholders. The appointment of a CRO is often a condition set by financing partners for further support. A CRO provides the independence a bank wants to see without the existing management having to be replaced.
Interim CFO. If the head of finance drops out, needs to be replaced or is not familiar with crisis situations, we take over the function for a limited period: accounting, controlling, reporting, financing and communication with banks. This usually includes setting up the management tools that are missing in a crisis, above all reliable liquidity planning.
Project and implementation management. Not every situation requires a management role. Often it is enough to have someone who tracks the agreed measures: who delivers what by when, which measure is lagging behind and what that means for the result. We set up this tracking and run it until the company can carry it itself.
Transparency first, then speed
It always starts with the same question: how long will the money last? Before measures are discussed, we put the company’s ability to pay on a reliable footing, week by week, with clear assumptions. Without this foundation, any planning of measures is speculation.
At the same time, we separate what has to take effect immediately from what will hold in the medium term. Immediate measures are aimed at buying time: extending payment terms, reducing inventories, selling non-operating assets, freezing cost blocks, talking to banks about credit lines and a standstill, examining alternative forms of financing such as factoring or sale-and-leaseback. They do not restructure anything, but they create the time in which the actual restructuring becomes possible.
Only then do the measures that address the causes take effect: in the business model, the product portfolio, the cost structure and the processes. This sequence is not negotiable. Anyone who reverses it loses the company to the liquidity situation while working on the strategy.
Measures that do not peter out
Every measure is given an owner, a deadline and an amount. Anything that cannot be expressed in euros and a date is not a measure, but an intention. Progress is reported at fixed intervals to management and, where required, to a steering committee of shareholders, financing partners and advisers.
These reports are also what banks and creditors want to see: not the promise that something will happen, but evidence that it has happened. In standstill negotiations, this is often the decisive argument.
