When advice is not enough and someone has to take the seat.
A business in trouble usually has the diagnosis already. What it needs is an experienced operator with the authority to act.
What a business in difficulty is facing
Rarely one thing. Usually several pressures together:
No reliable view of cash
Nobody can say with confidence what the bank balance will be in four weeks.
Lenders losing patience
A facility under review and a covenant conversation that is going badly.
HMRC arrears building
VAT and payroll taxes left unpaid, with the tax authority now ranking ahead of many other creditors if the company fails.
Directors unsure of their own duties
Once insolvency is a real risk, directors must weigh creditors’ interests, and wrongful trading is a personal exposure.
We embed an interim operator with authority, who stabilises cash, runs the lender conversations and builds a plan the board can stand behind. They work alongside your lawyers and any insolvency practitioner, and they do not replace them. Only a licensed practitioner can act as administrator or liquidator.
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
What a business under pressure gets
Interim operators in difficult situations are familiar to London lenders and boards. We find one with the authority and record the moment needs, and keep governance around the work.
Governance when it matters most
We review progress with the board on a set rhythm and say early when the plan and the cash are diverging.
Specialists behind the operator
Lender negotiations, a supplier squeeze or a people question: the operator can draw on others in the collective who have faced them.
We run any handover
Should the operator leave before the work is done, we search again from the brief we hold, so the plan is not rebuilt from scratch.
Matched for steadiness
In a turnaround, temperament is half the job. We look for operators who keep lenders, staff and suppliers calm.
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 London provides operational and executive leadership support. Where a situation requires insolvency, legal, restructuring or regulated financial advice, we work alongside the appropriate specialist advisers.
