Business Restructuring
Business challenges can put pressure on cashflow, operations and stakeholder confidence. The right turnaround support can help stabilise the position and shape a credible path forward.
Helping businesses navigate financial challenges and restructuring
All businesses, from the largest to the smallest, will face challenges from time to time and need help to navigate turbulent waters. Financial restructuring is often about creating breathing space and restoring confidence. This may involve reviewing cashflow, assessing funding options, engaging with lenders and creditors, or reshaping debt obligations so the business has a realistic platform from which to recover.
Where a credible and reasonable turnaround plan can be crafted, it’s our experience that most stakeholders will support a proposal, even if that involves sharing some short-term pain, so long as there is visibility of a longer-term gain for all parties.
Why do I need external support if I know my business best?
The truth is that you do know your business and your stakeholders best – that’s undeniable, and we wouldn’t pretend otherwise. After all, you live and breathe the business, day in and day out.
Working alongside you, we bring situational expertise and an independent voice. While you know your business and your sector, we know the tools and strategies that have helped other businesses navigate similar challenges. Together, we combine your knowledge of the organisation with our turnaround experience to shape a credible rescue plan and a bridge to a stronger future.
How Crowe UK can help with your Business Restructuring
Understanding the questions stakeholders ask before backing a turnaround helps address concerns early, clarify the likely financial outcome of supporting the plan, and set out the alternative strategy if they choose not to.
Extensive knowledge
Reviewing companies’ performance, breaking down complex situations into simple causal factors to understand what’s changed and where the pressure points sit. We identify the stakeholder impact of different strategy options that could be pursued in a specific scenario.
Broad perspectives
We have an understanding of what motivates different parties in a restructuring and view issues through a wider lens, as we have acted as advisors for corporates, lenders, shareholders, landlords and trade creditors previously.
Led by experienced partners
Our engagement leads are licensed insolvency practitioners and partners in Crowe UK. While a business restructuring is not about using statutory powers, that experience adds weight with stakeholders – particularly when setting out the downside if the turnaround plan isn’t delivered.
Reviewing companies’ performance, breaking down complex situations into simple causal factors to understand what’s changed and where the pressure points sit. We identify the stakeholder impact of different strategy options that could be pursued in a specific scenario.
We have an understanding of what motivates different parties in a restructuring and view issues through a wider lens, as we have acted as advisors for corporates, lenders, shareholders, landlords and trade creditors previously.
Our engagement leads are licensed insolvency practitioners and partners in Crowe UK. While a business restructuring is not about using statutory powers, that experience adds weight with stakeholders – particularly when setting out the downside if the turnaround plan isn’t delivered.
Business restructuring advice tailored to your business
Our initial free-of-charge consultation allows us to take the time to understand your business and the challenges being faced. During our engagement with you, we will explore the available options, identifying the advantages and disadvantages of each, empowering you to make informed decisions on how best to proceed. We will work with you to manage the difficulties affecting the business and its stakeholders with empathy.
Specific workstreams that may form part of our work
- Business review and options:
- Rapidly analysing the key drivers of the business and stress points, as well as identifying key stakeholders and what support is required to enact change.
- Define and calculate the financial impact on stakeholders of each strategic option and the downside scenario if the restructure is not successful.
- Cashflow management: Reviewing existing cash forecasting to identify how long we have to deliver a turnaround and what actions may be available to stretch the runway to bridge to a rescue.
- Negotiations with stakeholders: Consensual negotiation with stakeholders can mitigate financial pressures in several ways. Third-party involvement in these discussions can reduce or remove emotional tensions and personality clashes from the situation, as well as raise the prominence of requests to improve engagement. We can help management to build and present the ‘story’ of how the company ended up challenged and why the future will be fundamentally different.
- Accelerated Sale: Consider the viability of an accelerated sale of the business and introduce agents where appropriate.
Tapping into support from wider Crowe UK colleagues
- Debt advisory: Working with colleagues who can explore opportunities to introduce additional or alternative funding.
- Tax: Identifying rebates that may be available to improve cashflow and/or support with Time To Pay and other discussions with HMRC to manage or mitigate existing liabilities.
Do I need you to lead on the implementation of the plan?
Not always. The extent and breadth of our involvement varies depending on the specific circumstances of each project.
How our involvement can vary
In some projects, we provide a financial review and recommendations, then the management team develops and delivers the strategy without ongoing advice or support. In others, we embed ourselves alongside the management team throughout – guiding the development of a strategy, preparing detailed financial forecasts and supporting negotiations with key stakeholders.
Right-fit involvement
The right approach depends on the capacity, experience and confidence of the senior management team and the level of support stakeholders expect to see. Our focus can flex to your needs, whether that’s supporting the finance team preparing forecasts or the directors discussing negotiation strategies. The senior team’s available time and bandwidth are often the deciding factor in determining the scope and breadth of our role.
Keeping the business moving
It is important to remember that day-to-day business doesn’t stop during a business restructuring process – in fact, it often becomes more demanding due to the financial strain on trading. The pressures on management’s time should not be underestimated. To support discussions with stakeholders, it helps to point to green shoots of growth and recovery in recent trading, which requires maintaining focus on ‘business as usual.
Extra capacity when it matters
Creating the plan, presenting it and securing support from key stakeholders is time-consuming and emotionally demanding. Alongside ‘business as usual’, it creates immediate pressure – which we can help relieve by providing flexibility and additional resources when required. We can drive key workstreams and keep actions moving.
Our other services
Administration
Administration is a formal insolvency procedure that can be used to restructure and rescue all or parts of a viable business.
Administration
Company Voluntary Arrangements (CVA)
Allowing a company to trade under the control of its directors and come to a legally binding agreement to settle debts over a fixed period.
Company Voluntary Arrangements (CVA)
Solvent Liquidations and Corporate Simplificaitons
An option when a solvent corporate entity requires winding down, often in a tax-efficient manner.
Solvent Liquidations and Corporate Simplificaitons
Insolvent Liquidations
A creditors' voluntary liquidation brings a company to a close, under the guidance of a licensed insolvency practitioner who acts as the liquidator.
Insolvent Liquidations
Moratoriums
An option for companies in financial distress that provides breathing space from creditor action to formulate a turnaround plan.
Moratoriums
Contact us
If any of this sounds familiar, a tightening cash forecast, debt coming up for renewal, increasing creditor pressure/arrears, or a big strategic change, please get in touch and we’ll talk through your options.
