Turnaround Consulting: Crisis Management and Restructuring

The Objective: Stabilise cash immediately—buying the time and space needed for every other element of the recovery to work.

Cash is the oxygen of any business. When cash flow fails, operational performance, market position, and long-term strategy become irrelevant. The immediate priority in any business crisis is to stop the cash bleed, recover what can be recovered from debtors, and create enough breathing room for beginning recovery work.

This is the work that cannot wait. Our Cash Flow Crisis Management engagement begins within 48 to 72 hours of instruction, and most clients see measurable stabilisation within the first 14 days.

What We Deliver:

• 13-week rolling cash flow forecast with daily monitoring through the crisis period
• Emergency cash preservation measures were implemented within the first week
• Working capital optimisation, recovering trapped cash from receivables and inventory
• Payment prioritisation framework protecting the relationships most critical to business continuity
• Cash generation initiatives are creating immediate liquidity from existing assets
• Treasury management protocols are preventing future cash crunches once the immediate crisis passes

A Birmingham retail business was carrying £175,000 in receivables but had only £12,000 in the bank, with £85,000 due to suppliers within seven days. We implemented an emergency collections programme -- direct contact with every overdue debtor, with escalation protocols for non-responders -- and recovered £65,000 within 10 days. We negotiated 60-day payment extensions with five key suppliers, identified £18,000 in unnecessary recurring costs that could be cancelled immediately, and restructured the payment schedule for the remaining obligations. The immediate crisis was stabilised within 14 days.

The Objective: Protect the business from enforcement action whilst negotiating the time and terms needed to execute the recovery.

Aggressive creditor action accelerates business failure faster than almost any other factor. A winding-up petition from HMRC, a bank calling a loan, or a critical supplier withdrawing terms can each individually tip a recoverable business into insolvency. Managing these relationships -- proactively, professionally, and from a position of structured knowledge rather than panic -- is one of the most important things a turnaround consultant does.

SGI acts as your representative in all creditor communications during the crisis period. We have extensive experience negotiating with HMRC, major lenders, landlords, and trade creditors across many sectors.

What We Deliver:

• Creditor threat assessment and prioritisation -- identifying which creditors pose the greatest immediate risk and in what sequence they must be managed
• Direct creditor communication, managing all difficult conversations so you do not have to do so in a state of crisis
• HMRC Time to Pay arrangement negotiation -- typically 6 to 12 months, structured around the business's realistic recovery cash flows
• Supplier payment renegotiation, maintaining the supply of the materials or services critical to business continuity
• Debt restructuring and settlement negotiation with secured and unsecured creditors
• Legal protection strategy identifying and deploying the formal and informal mechanisms available to prevent enforcement.

A Leeds-based manufacturing business was simultaneously facing HMRC enforcement action for £115,000 in outstanding PAYE and VAT, a formal loan default notice from its bank, and withdrawal-of-supply threats from two major component suppliers. We negotiated a 10-month Time to Pay arrangement with HMRC, structured around the business's recovery cash flows; extended the bank loan term by 24 months through a restructuring agreement; and secured 90-day payment deferrals from both suppliers. This bought eight months of operational stability -- sufficient time to execute the operational turnaround that followed.

The Objective: Right-size the cost base immediately—eliminating what is not essential without destroying the operational capability needed for recovery.

Cost reduction in a crisis requires precision. Cut too aggressively, and you remove the capability the business needs to serve customers, retain key people, and execute its recovery. Cut too cautiously, and the business runs out of cash before the recovery work has time to produce results. The balance requires experience—knowing which costs are truly discretionary, which appear discretionary but are actually load-bearing, and which must be addressed even though the short-term pain is significant.

We identify and eliminate non-essential costs as a matter of priority in the first weeks of any stabilisation engagement, typically finding more savings than the leadership team believed existed.

What We Deliver:

• Emergency cost audit identifying immediate savings across all cost categories
• Fixed cost reduction without sacrificing the operational functions critical to recovery
• Supplier contract renegotiation, reducing overhead across all major expenditure lines
• Headcount review conducted with legal compliance and operational continuity in mind
• Discretionary spending elimination with immediate effect
• Cost structure realignment with the realistic revenue level that the business can achieve during recovery

A Manchester professional services firm had built a cost base structured for £2.1M in annual revenue, but it had declined to £1.3M over 18 months under market pressure. The business was losing £28,000 per month against its fixed cost structure. We identified that office premises were 40% oversized for the current headcount, that three back-office roles had become redundant as revenues fell, and that technology subscriptions and contracted services contained £6,500 per month of spend that could be eliminated. Monthly cash burn reduced from £28,000 to £7,500 within 45 days, extending the business's runway from under three months to over nine months, which proved sufficient to execute the restructuring.

The Objective: Rebuild the operating model, management structure, and business focus around what is genuinely viable -- making the difficult decisions that leadership has delayed, and creating a business that can sustain profitability at its realistic scale.

Stabilisation stops the bleeding. Restructuring is the recovery. Once the immediate cash crisis and creditor threats are under control, the fundamental question must be answered honestly: why did this crisis occur, and what has to change to ensure it does not recur?

Most crises have structural roots. The business grew into a cost base it could no longer support. It entered markets that required more capital than it had. It made acquisitions that created complexity without creating value. It lost its primary competitive advantage and had not replaced it. Restructuring addresses these structural causes -- not just the symptoms.

What We Deliver:

• Root cause analysis, identifying the structural origins of the crisis, distinguishing what is fixable from what is not
• Organisational restructuring, removing management layers and functions that are not generating value relative to their cost
• Process redesign, eliminating the operational inefficiencies that became load-bearing during growth, but are now simply expensive
• Business model assessment and, where necessary, pivot -- aligning the model with what the current market will actually support
• Strategic refocus on the profitable core activities, exiting the peripheral activities that consume resources without proportional return
• Cultural and governance transformation, embedding the financial discipline and management accountability that prevents recurrence

A Bristol business had grown through three acquisitions over six years, creating a structure of three semi-autonomous divisions with duplicated management, finance, and operational functions. When market conditions softened and revenue fell by 22%, the overhead structure destroyed profitability. We restructured from three divisions to one integrated operation, eliminated duplicate functions, and refocused commercial activity on the two service lines that generated sustainable margins. The business returned to profitability within five months of restructuring completion.

The Objective: Provide an honest, evidence-based assessment of whether the business can be saved in its current form, and if not, identify the best path forward for all stakeholders.

Not every distressed business can be saved through restructuring. Some have structural problems that cannot be resolved within the constraints of the current entity -- a debt level that exceeds any realistic recovery scenario, a market that has permanently contracted, or an operational model that cannot be made viable at any achievable scale.

When this is the case, the most valuable thing a turnaround consultant can do is identify it early and clearly, before further investment of cash, management time, and personal resources makes the outcome worse for everyone involved. The Distressed Business Assessment provides that clarity -- an honest prognosis, an analysis of what value can be preserved, and a structured evaluation of all realistic options.

What We Deliver:

• Comprehensive viability assessment with a frank, evidence-based prognosis
• Asset valuation identifies the value that can be preserved through each available option
• Stakeholder analysis mapping the interests, priorities, and constraints of all creditor and equity stakeholders
• Strategic options evaluation across the full range: restructuring, managed wind-down, asset sale, trade sale, pre-pack administration
• Scenario modelling illustrating the financial outcome for stakeholders under each option
• Actionable recommendation with clear rationale and implementation steps

A Glasgow logistics business was carrying £820,000 in debt against £380,000 in identifiable assets. Traditional restructuring was not viable -- the debt burden could not be serviced from any realistic recovery revenue. The assessment, however, identified that the business's customer relationships and proprietary routing technology had standalone value to a competitor. We facilitated an asset sale negotiation that realised £560,000 -- enabling partial creditor repayment, a managed closure that protected employee redundancy entitlements, and a significantly better outcome for all stakeholders than a disorderly liquidation would have produced.

The Objective: Ensure the business that emerges from the turnaround is built on structural foundations strong enough to prevent the crisis from recurring -- and positioned to grow sustainably from its stabilised base.

Surviving a crisis is not sufficient. A business that returns to the same operating model, the same financial management practices, and the same strategic gaps that produced the crisis will likely face it again. Post-turnaround growth planning builds the governance, financial controls, and strategic direction that convert the lessons of the crisis into durable improvements.

This is also the transition from survival mode to growth mode -- a shift that requires deliberate management. The urgency, cost discipline, and operational focus that characterise the crisis period are genuinely valuable; the challenge is to retain them as disciplines rather than emergency measures.

What We Deliver:

• Sustainable business model development, validated against realistic market and margin assumptions
• Financial controls -- cash flow forecasting, management reporting, credit control -- preventing future cash crises
• Growth strategy building on the leaner, more focused business that the turnaround has created
• Governance and board oversight improvements, ensuring leadership accountability
• Risk management framework, identifying and monitoring the early warning indicators that the crisis obscured
• Exit planning where appropriate -- positioning the recovered business for a sale that maximises the owner's return on the value rebuilt through the turnaround

After completing the turnaround of a Midlands manufacturing business that was weeks from insolvency, we implemented a full set of financial controls -- monthly cash flow forecasting, quarterly management reviews, 45-day debtor payment discipline -- and developed a three-year growth strategy built around the two product lines with the strongest margins. Three years after the turnaround was completed, the business was sold to a strategic acquirer at three times its valuation at the point of crisis. The turnaround not only saved the business -- it created a substantially more valuable one.