When a business is either in financial difficulty or heading that way, I would always advise getting expert help and the earlier the better.
Leave it too late, to when the business is formally insolvent, and the opportunity to restructure and survive becomes much more constrained.
But insolvency, whether actual or approaching, is characterised by a cash flow problem and advice doesn’t come cheap.
This is because advisers need in-depth knowledge and experience in a wide variety of disciplines. They include experience of business processes and finances including the ability to analyse accounts, cash flow forecasts as well as know the various legal compliance issues including HR and redundancy, insolvency law and litigation. They also need to be familiar with options for restructuring and negotiating them with stakeholders including banks, shareholders, HMRC, creditors and enforcement officers.
While restructuring and turnaround advisers and insolvency practitioners generally have this knowledge and experience, their approaches are very different.
Insolvency practitioners are appointed by creditors and work for their interests, while restructuring and turnaround advisers are appointed by the company and primarily work for its interests.
When a company is insolvent all board advisers essentially become shadow directors and as such their advice should be in the creditors’ best interests, however this does not mean the company should be liquidated, which is the normal outcome that follows the appointment of an insolvency practitioner.
Consensual restructuring with the approval of creditors should offer them a far better outcome providing the underlying causes of the financial situation are addressed – hence the need for turnaround alongside any financial restructuring.
The crucial difference between the two is that the restructuring and turnaround adviser will have your company’s best interests at heart. Their fees ought to be success based and linked to their ability to save your business and their rates are generally far less than those for insolvency practitioners. Call them in early enough and let them carry out an in-depth investigation of all aspects of your business and they will identify what, if any, parts are unprofitable and should be discontinued as well as ways of restructuring debt that can save the company, albeit in a modified form.
Although a business in difficulty can enlist the services of an insolvency practitioner as an adviser, their focus and experience are more likely to have been on recovering creditors’ money at the earliest opportunity. They may not, therefore, be open to options that could lengthen the time it would take for creditors to be satisfied and their focus is more likely to be on realising the value of your business’ assets and preventing further losses, therefore the likely outcome is liquidating the assets of the company rather than saving it.
While insolvency practitioners claim to do restructuring and turnaround work I believe this is a conflict of interests since they cannot serve two masters: creditors and the company. If they do restructuring and turnaround work, they should not take formal insolvency appointments.
It would be better, therefore, for restructuring and turnaround advisers to be entirely separate from insolvency practitioners.
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