Businesses in trouble share a temptation: to begin with the strategy. The new positioning, the restructured debt, the growth story that makes the last two years an anomaly. All of it may be right, and none of it matters if the company runs out of cash in week seven. The first ninety days of a turnaround have one job, and it is not transformation. It is control.
Days zero to thirty: see clearly, stop the bleeding
Everything starts with a thirteen-week cash view rebuilt from source: actual receipts, actual obligations, actual timing, not the forecast that got the company here. Alongside it, a creditor map with contact plans, because silence is how relationships that could flex become deadlines that cannot. And the quick wins get taken immediately: the contract bleeding cash, the discretionary spend nobody defends, the invoicing backlog that is really an interest-free loan to customers. None of this is strategy. All of it buys the time strategy needs.
The earlier the call, the more options exist. Every fortnight of delay closes a door that will not reopen.
Days thirty-one to sixty: reshape
With cash visible and triggers set, the middle month is for the honest version of the operating model: the cost base the real revenue supports, the terms that need renegotiating, the working capital trapped where it helps nobody. This is also when the organisation hears the truth in plain language. People inside a struggling business always know something is wrong; what corrodes trust is watching leadership pretend otherwise. A hard plan, stated plainly, recruits people. Optimism without a plan sheds them, starting with the best.
Days sixty-one to ninety: fund the way forward
Only now does the funding conversation open, because only now is there something fundable: a stabilised cash position, a reshaped cost base, and a recovery plan with numbers a credit committee can test. We prepare that case, the model, the materials, the answers to the questions lenders actually ask, and the conversations themselves run with your accountants, lawyers and licensed advisers in the loop, as they should. A funding case built on ninety days of demonstrated control asks for support; one built on projection asks for faith, and faith is expensive.
What to do about it
- Build the thirteen-week cash view from source data this week, not after the board meeting.
- Map creditors and communicate early. Surprise is the enemy of flexibility.
- Set explicit triggers with owners, so deterioration produces action instead of another meeting.
- Sequence: control, then reshape, then fund. Reversing the order is how ninety days becomes two years.
Our restructuring practice works exactly this sequence, without drama, with everyone looking at the same defensible numbers. That, more than any single move, is what makes hard conversations move.