Restructuring Your Business
Changing from a caterpillar to a butterfly
Quite often you will hear news stories about businesses restructuring
Those stories regularly relate to organisations that are in some form of financial strife, cutting costs and laying off staff.
However restructuring itself, whilst has the demeaner of a unpleasant process, is actually important for businesses to grow and flourish.
Most businesses will go through some form of restructuring, even if the term is not explicitly used, at some form in their formative growth periods.
And with good reason, quite often the term used is transformation.
As an organisation grows it goes through a number of stages – from start-up, survival, expansion, maturity to decline or regeneration
At each stage of development and expansion resources are allocated on the basis of need at that time.
A number of additional factors then come into play such as:
- A changing business model
- A changing customer base
- Product development changes
- Organisational structure changes
- Personnel changes
What was important yesterday, is not what is necessarily going to be important today or tomorrow
An organisation needs to change and adapt its resources to the right places to ensure it remains efficient.
It should go through a transformation, or restructuring, process on an ongoing basis and this should be part of a senior management team’s strategy thinking; do we have the right resources in the right place, are our customers changing, are our markets changing, what are our strategic threats, is our cost base efficient.
However sometimes seismic events happen that require immediate action to enable an organisation to continue, if not survive, and generally these events are in control or outside control.
In control events might be subtle changes in markets, customer needs or costs base.
A bit like an earthquake pressure will build up over time and suddenly jolt, requiring a quick correction. This typically happens when senior managers get drawn into the detail of the business and take their eye of the outside world and fail to see or register the changes happening around them and allow ongoing continual change to be overlooked.
Depending upon sector this may be years, in other sectors it could be months, but at some point, a refocus, correction or transformation is needed.
Sometimes there are seismic events that are out of the sphere of control
When these occur they can have immediate and lasting changes to income, markets or costs.
These may be generational events such as COVID, market cyclical events such as a recession or natural disaster events such as volcanoes or weather events that can change supply chains.
In these types of events transformation is needed quickly.
Our FD’s provide help and assistance on a number of practical levels
They are experienced in these types of situations.
They know how to unlock balance sheet value to free resources, and more importantly, they cast an expert eye over the business allowing the senior management team more time to focus on their own core activities, knowing that experienced help is to hand.
Client’s Who Trusted Us
Six months later I cannot believe how one day a week has made such a difference, not only to our business, but also to myself.
I not only understand more of what is happening within the organisation, but I have had time to concentrate on the tasks that urgently require my input, which has had a significant impact on our bottom line as well as myself being personally less stressed.
I just wished we had gone down this route years ago.
Initially working 1-2 days per week their wide commercial knowledge and experience of working with other legal firms helped me. They also assisted the other partners manage the firm strategically, and operationally, through challenging times and supported us in planning ahead for wider changes expected in the legal sector.
Our part-time FD’s previous experience enabled me to delegate to them the management of our central service operation, which freed up my time to focus on critical strategic matters including a potential merger, succession planning and the existing partners’ future exits from the firm.