Advisers to business owners and executives on the decisions that are difficult to reverse.
We take the strategy that already exists in your head or your board pack and test it against cash, capacity and the market you are actually in. What comes back is a shorter list of options, each with the consequences written down.
Forecast models, working-capital analysis, funding structures and covenant headroom — built so that you, and not only the person who built them, can explain them to a lender or a buyer.
Buy-side and sell-side support: preparation, valuation ranges, diligence, deal structure and the negotiation itself. We advise; you decide what the business is worth to you.
A register of what could go wrong, ranked by what it would cost, with owners and controls attached — and a governance rhythm that keeps it current after we leave.
Operational and balance-sheet restructuring sequenced so that trading continues: creditor conversations, cost structure, entity simplification and a plan the management team can actually run.
The decisions that change a company rarely arrive at a convenient moment. A buyer makes an approach in the middle of a bad quarter. A lender reprices just as the expansion is committed. A founder decides to step back, a regulator publishes, a competitor is acquired by someone with deeper pockets. In every case the decision has to be made with what is on the table now, not with the information that will be obvious in two years.
Our job is not to have a faster opinion than you. It is to slow the decision down to the point where its parts become visible, and then to make each part answerable. Most bad outcomes we are asked to unwind were not caused by a wrong choice between two clear options. They were caused by a choice made before anyone had written down what the options were.
We begin by rebuilding the financial picture from source: what the business earns, what it consumes in cash before it earns anything, where margin is actually made and where it is quietly given away. Management accounts are a starting point, not an answer. This stage is unglamorous and it is where most of the value is, because almost every strategic question turns out to be a cash question wearing different clothes.
A recommendation with one option in it is a preference, not advice. We set out the realistic courses of action, including the ones nobody in the room wants to say out loud: do nothing for another year, sell a division rather than the company, take the cheaper money with the harder covenant, close the site. Each is costed, each carries its risks in writing, and each says what has to be true for it to work.
What you end up holding is a short document and the reasoning behind it — something you can put in front of a board, a bank, a family shareholder or a buyer and have it hold up under questioning. That matters long after the engagement ends. Directors are asked, sometimes years later, why they did what they did. A defensible answer is worth as much as a good one.
Owner-led and mid-market businesses, mostly, where the leadership team is capable but stretched, and where the next decision is larger than the last one. We work as a small team, close to the people accountable for the outcome. We say when a piece of work does not need doing, and we say when the honest answer is that the deal in front of you is not a good one. An adviser who only ever agrees with the client is an expensive way to hear your own voice.
Most work starts as one of these and is scoped to the decision in front of you.
For the choice about direction: markets to enter or leave, what to build and what to buy, where the next five years of value comes from.
For the choice about money: funding, capital structure, forecasting and the conversations with lenders and investors.
Buy-side or sell-side, from first approach to completion, with someone in the room who is not emotionally invested in the deal closing.
For boards that need to show, not assert, that the material risks are identified, owned and controlled.
When the shape of the business no longer fits what it does: cost base, entity structure, creditors and the sequence in which to move.
Scope, timetable and fee basis are agreed in writing before any work begins.
You describe the situation and the decision attached to it. We ask questions and say plainly whether this is work we should be doing, and what we would look at first.
Before anything starts you receive the question we are answering, what we will produce, who does the work, the timetable and the fee basis. Nothing begins until that is agreed.
We build the analysis with your team rather than in a vacuum, and we share findings as they emerge. No conclusion should be a surprise at the final meeting.
You receive the recommendation, the models and the reasoning behind them, in a form your board and your bank can read. We stay available while the decision is executed.
Send a short note. It does not have to be well organised — that is part of what we are for.
Thank you — an adviser will read it and get in touch with you shortly.
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