CASE STUDY
NORDICS
REMOTE
Business Process Outsourcing
From a year of waivers to a clear recovery framework in under 2 weeks
✅ Five-scenario recovery analysis covering going concern to insolvency
✅ Stress-tested financial model built on entity-by-entity projections
✅ Delivered in 11 days, enabling a critical funding decision within 48 hours
THE BUSINESS
A Nordic business process outsourcing group with a distressed lender as the client
The company was a multi-entity, asset-light business process outsourcing group operating across the Nordics. My client wasn't the company itself, it was the bank holding the outstanding debt: a revolving credit facility and a term loan that had been under sustained pressure for more than a year. The group's asset-light structure meant the bank's entire security position rested on share pledges. There were no fixed assets to fall back on.
THE SITUATION
The bank had extended every form of support available and was running out of runway
By the time I was brought in, the bank had already provided a year's worth of interest waivers, amortisation waivers, covenant waivers, and maturity extensions. The company had a turnaround plan in place and was supposedly executing it, but the first months of actual results told a different story. The business was already tracking well behind its own projections, and management's numbers couldn't be taken at face value.
Then a winding-up petition was filed by the tax authorities for unpaid VAT. An immediate funding gap opened up, and the bank had to make decisions fast. The question was no longer theoretical, it was: what is each option actually worth to us, and what do we do in the next 48 hours?
What made the situation harder was something that should have been dealt with long before I arrived: despite more than a year of forbearance, the company had never produced a robust short-term cashflow forecast. No 13-week cashflow forecast backed by real invoice data, concrete assumptions, and weekly granularity. The bank was navigating a serious liquidity crisis using monthly management budgets stretching three years into the future, figures that told you almost nothing about whether next week was survivable, let alone next quarter.
WHAT WE DELIVERED
A five-scenario recovery analysis delivered in under 2 weeks
In just under two weeks, we built a full options analysis for the bank across five scenarios: going concern (company continues trading and services the debt), consensual restructuring (orderly disposal of profitable subsidiaries to recover value), enforcement of share pledges (bank takes ownership of the business), sale of the debt to a third-party credit fund, and insolvency.
For each scenario, we modelled the bank's likely recoveries. To do that, we stress-tested management's budget across three variants: a flat revenue case with modest EBITDA margin improvement, a case running at roughly 75% of management's projections, and a hybrid case built entity-by-entity, assessing each subsidiary individually for realistic revenue growth and margin trajectory. That last case became the central view, and it gave us a credible picture of the group's cash position and debt-servicing capacity over a two-year horizon.
For the restructuring and enforcement scenarios, we pulled EBITDA multiples from recent comparable exits in the market to underpin the valuation work. We also built in a separate overlay for the winding-up petition, modelling what the bank's recoveries would look like if they were required to bridge the immediate VAT funding gap themselves, or absorb an equivalent haircut on the outstanding loans.
The conclusions were unambiguous. Insolvency returned very little, no surprise given the asset-light structure. A debt sale was equally unattractive: any credit fund would need to price in enough discount to double their money, which meant the bank would have to accept roughly 10–15 pence on the pound. Enforcement carried serious execution risk, taking ownership of a distressed, management-dependent business risks exactly the kind of staff attrition and operational deterioration that would destroy the residual value the bank was trying to protect. The analysis pointed clearly toward going concern or consensual restructuring as the most viable paths forward.
We finished the work on a Friday. The presentation went to the bank on Monday. By Monday night, they were in active discussions with the company's owners about how to address the immediate funding gap, with a clear, documented framework for what each path was worth and what the trade-offs were. The analysis gave them the clarity to act rather than extend again.