The diagnosis exists. Now someone has to act on it.
A business in difficulty rarely needs another diagnosis. What it needs is a senior operator with a mandate to change things, in place within weeks.
What a business in difficulty tends to face
Problems tend to arrive in clusters:
A view of cash that ends within days
Nobody can say with confidence where the bank balance will be in six weeks, so every decision is a gamble.
Lenders and suppliers running short of patience
The bank and the long-standing suppliers want a plan they can believe, because the last one did not hold.
Staff who are owed honesty
People know something is wrong. Silence costs more than bad news, and the best leave first.
An owner too close to it
Not a criticism. It is the reason an outside operator works.
We match you with operators who have been through this and come out the other side. They step into the seat, stabilise cash, rebuild the plan and take the conversations the owner cannot take alone. On a services agreement, so it ends cleanly when 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 business in difficulty
Authority without oversight is a risk in a crisis. We provide the oversight so the operator can act.
Close oversight in the hard weeks
We check in often while cash is tight and tell you plainly if the plan is slipping.
Decisions tested before they land
A supplier, cash or staffing decision can be put to an experienced peer in the collective first.
No restart mid-recovery
Should the operator leave mid-recovery, the position is already documented with us, so the replacement search moves quickly.
Chosen for straight talk
We look for someone who can tell staff, the bank and suppliers the truth in the same week.
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 Copenhagen provides operational and executive leadership support. Where a situation requires insolvency, legal, restructuring or regulated financial advice, we work alongside the appropriate specialist advisers.
