Restructuring is hard. Leaders who know how best to approach it can help their organizations emerge as strong as possible from a restructuring. BCG assists clients in managing this daunting challenge.
Companies that fail to quell a profit crisis through a business turnaround risk seeing their problems escalate into a liquidity crisis. If they continue to burn through cash and fail to surmount their capital and balance sheet challenges, they could also face insolvency—and possibly bankruptcy.
For companies struggling to move from insolvency to revitalization, the stakes are incredibly high. After all, restructuring situations involve failing or close-to-failing companies, and the solutions center on ensuring their survival. Our restructuring consulting teams work shoulder to shoulder with businesses to help them navigate this complex process.
Our corporate restructuring services help companies focus on managing their liquidity and capital. The goal? To strengthen their balance sheets, boost cash flows, and transition out of survival mode.
Recently recognized by ALM Intelligence as a market leader for our results-driven approach to turnarounds and restructuring, BCG's turnaround consulting team combines the practical experience of our experts, who are well versed in every aspect of the restructuring process, with BCG’s equally deep expertise across a wide range of industries and functions. This combination puts us in a unique position to push beyond restructuring and help our clients transform.
Our seasoned advisors understand the risks facing stressed and distressed companies—including disclosure risk, legal risks in insolvency support, open invoices from filing for insolvency, reputational risks, and de facto directorship. To help clients mitigate these risks, our consultants combine hands-on expertise with advisory skills, leading the way through the restructuring process.
BCG on Transformation LinkedIn Showcase
Follow the BCG on Transformation LinkedIn for a collection of timely insights on enhancing performance trajectory and accelerating growth.
Our corporate restructuring services cover all aspects of a liquidity crisis—not just for companies experiencing corporate distress but also for healthy enterprises indirectly affected by distress.
Turnaround and Restructuring
We help clients excel at essential restructuring tasks, such as rapidly resetting strategies, managing liquidity (including 13-week cash forecasting), building a turnaround plan, handling complex capital structures, and managing stakeholders.
Chief Restructuring Officer
Advisors from BCG’s vast network of restructuring consultants can serve as chief restructuring officers (CROs) or chief transformation officers (CTOs), or our clients may choose to team up with CROs and CTOs from our network.
Board Advisory
Our board advisory professionals specialize in activities critical to restructuring efforts, including governance structures and controls, financial decisions and directors’ duties, and stakeholder engagement and negotiations.
Accelerated M&A and Carve-Outs
Our restructuring consultants help clients prepare for sale analysis, manage commercial diligence and market-potential assessment, define deal parameters, liberate cash and working capital, and plan as well as execute carve-outs.
Net Working Capital Management
To strengthen a company’s balance sheet, our advisors use digital tools and benchmarking to uncover and set targets for cash generation on such fronts as trade receivables and payables, inventories, and fixed assets.
Acquisition of Distressed Assets
For strong enterprises indirectly affected by corporate distress, we help identify and value prospective targets for acquisition, craft an acquisition strategy, and manage the complexities of cross-border transactions and out-of-court processes.
Supply Chain Stabilization
Our advisors partner with clients to assess the supply-continuity risk presented by corporate distress. They also directly support their most crucial suppliers to help mitigate risk.
Acute Performance Improvement
BCG’s senior execution teams, drawing on our deep industry expertise, help clients generate performance improvements—in entire enterprises, business units, or divisions within larger companies—within a matter of weeks or months.
Our restructuring consultants have a long track record of partnering closely with clients to help them navigate the complex restructuring process. Meet our leadership team.
Our restructuring consulting services have supported numerous business and operational restructuring programs across a wide variety of industries. Examples include:
HSH Nordbank´s CEO, Stefan Ermisch, discusses one of the greatest turnarounds in the history of German banking.
A private equity firm asked us to help craft a restructuring program for a struggling company in its portfolio in order to secure the financing essential for a smooth exit. We analyzed the portfolio company’s performance on multiple criteria, pinpointed the root causes behind performance shortfalls, and jointly defined a corporate restructuring strategy with the enterprise’s management team. We also established a program management office to drive implementation and prepared refinancing negotiations with lenders. Our disciplined approach paid off: the plan supported an EBITDA uplift and provided sufficient liquidity for the portfolio company to meet financing obligations, ultimately leading to a successful exit for its private equity investors.
A family-owned manufacturing company needed financing to improve its EBIT margins. We analyzed the company’s production sites and designed a plan for optimizing its production footprint. The plan called for closing several sites and establishing lean productivity practices in the remaining sites. We also identified ideas for reducing nonpersonnel costs and implemented a firm-wide cash office to manage the development of liquidity measures, including a rolling 13-week liquidity plan. As a result of our work, the company was able to prioritize initiatives that could generate $97 million, which was essential for achieving its EBIT-margin target. It also secured short-term bridge financing as well as $324 million in long-term financing.
When a company’s existence is on the line, the finance department needs a laser focus on short-term liquidity.
Working capital optimization can be invaluable—building profits, reducing debt, and boosting corporate strength—whether in day-to-day operations or in the face of a downturn.
