A business in trouble needs someone with authority to act.
The diagnosis is rarely the missing piece. What a company in difficulty lacks is an experienced operator who can act on it, starting soon.
What a company in difficulty normally faces
Several pressures at once, usually:
A short view of cash
Nobody can say with confidence where the balance will be in six weeks, so each decision is a bet.
Lenders and investors waiting for a plan
They want something credible, and the last plan did not survive.
Staff and unions expecting to be told first
Where agreements apply, early consultation is expected. Silence does more harm than the news itself.
Leaders too close to the problem
Not a criticism. An outsider can see what a close observer cannot.
The operators we match have taken a company through a crisis before. They step in, get a grip on cash, rebuild the plan and take on the conversations an owner cannot manage alone. The services agreement ends cleanly once the business is stable.
Who this is for, and who it is not
Best for
- A cash crisis that needs visibility and control now
- A business in operational or financial distress
- Lender or investor pressure that needs a credible plan
- A leadership vacuum that has stalled key decisions
- Stabilising the business before planning recovery
Not for
- A business that only needs advice or a written report
- A situation whose primary need is a formal insolvency practitioner
- A stable business planning improvements at its own pace
- A one-off review with no mandate to act
How we support a company in difficulty
A crisis needs authority and oversight. The operator brings the first; we provide the second.
Frequent reviews in the hard weeks
We check in often while cash is short and say plainly if the plan slips.
Decisions checked with peers
Cash, creditor and staffing decisions can be put to experienced peers in the collective first.
No standby, no restart
If the operator cannot continue, the next search starts from what we already know, and we run the change.
Chosen for steady nerves
We look for someone who can face lenders, unions and staff in the same week without losing the plan.
The turnaround engagement
Each engagement moves from crisis to recovery with structured urgency.
Rapid assessment (week 1)
Financial position, operational status, commercial pipeline and team capability, mapped with a structured diagnostic framework.
Priority triage (week 2)
The 3–5 interventions that will have the most impact on stabilisation are identified and begun. Ruthless prioritisation.
Stabilisation (weeks 3–8)
Cash flow is visible and managed. Acute operational failures resolved. Lenders or investors briefed with a credible recovery narrative.
Recovery (month 2 onwards)
Processes rebuilt. Commercial momentum recovered. Financial infrastructure strengthened. Business guided from crisis to sustainable operation.
Turnaround triage
The leadership a situation calls for depends on where the business is breaking.
The roles a turnaround usually calls for.
For a complex turnaround, we can deploy more than one operator at once and layer in further specialists as recovery progresses.
Restructuring experience from
The questions buyers ask first
Fractional Stockholm provides operational and executive leadership support. Where a situation requires insolvency, legal, restructuring or regulated financial advice, we work alongside the appropriate specialist advisers.
