CASE STUDY
UK
ON-SITE
Healthcare Consulting | Private Equity
From on-site to a winning bid in 3 weeks, backed by our cash forecast
✅ 13-week direct basis cashflow forecast with integrated invoice discounting facility
✅ Built and refined live from on-site kick-off to deal close
✅ PE fund won the bid & company retained us on a monthly basis post-acquisition
THE BUSINESS
An occupational health business acquired by a PE fund specialising in distressed and carve-out deals
An occupational health consulting business providing both lab testing and consulting services, the kind of business with a mix of revenue streams, a working capital cycle that needs careful management, and an invoice discounting facility adding another layer of complexity to the cashflow picture. The acquirer was a PE fund that focuses specifically on special situations: deals where the numbers are messy, the timeline is tight, and the margin for error on the funding analysis is thin.
THE SITUATION
The PE fund needed to know exactly how much capital the business would require post-acquisition before committing to a price
The central question going into this deal was straightforward but high-stakes: how much immediate capital would be needed to keep this business trading post-acquisition, and what did the short-term liquidity picture actually look like? Getting that wrong (underestimating the funding requirement) could derail the business before the turnaround had even started. Getting it right would give the fund the confidence to price the deal accurately and move decisively.
The business had an invoice discounting facility, which was a genuine asset as it provided liquidity. But it also made the cashflow model significantly more complex to build correctly. Modelling the ID facility meant tracking the facility utilisation, eligible debtor balances, and the timing of drawdowns and repayments week by week, not something you can bolt on as an afterthought.
WHAT WE DELIVERED
A detailed 13-week cashflow model, built live over three weeks, that gave the fund the liquidity clarity it needed to win the deal
We joined the PE investment director on-site from day one as part of his deal team, and spent the next three weeks working directly with the company's finance team to gather the data needed to build the model. The output was a detailed 13-week cashflow forecast that clearly set out the business's week-on-week liquidity position, integrating the invoice discounting facility in full, with daily ID facility monitoring built into the reporting.
The model wasn't built once and handed over. It was refined continuously throughout the three weeks as new information came in from both the PE fund and the company: updated assumptions, revised cost positions, shifts in the expected funding structure. By the time we reached close, the model reflected the most current picture of the business's cash position and funding requirement.
The fund won the bid. The cashflow analysis showed that with the ID facility running alongside the planned capital injection, the business had sufficient liquidity to trade, stabilise, and generate the return the fund was targeting. That visibility was central to the investment case.
Post-acquisition, the company has retained 13WEEKS on a monthly basis to keep the model running and to work with the finance team on a full handover, building toward a point where they can run it independently. Alongside the model, we built a suite of bespoke data transformation tools that pull raw data from the ERP system (which comes out in a messy, unusable format) and clean it into structured inputs that can be dropped straight into the model in seconds. A separate tool lets the finance team upload the previous week's model and instantly surface all the manual inputs that were made, so nothing gets missed when rolling forward to the next week.
The model now gives the business more than just a 13-week cashflow view. It includes weekly accounts receivable movement reporting, an overdue tracking bridge chart updated each week, detailed actuals versus forecast variance analysis, and daily monitoring of the ID facility. The finance team has more short-term cashflow visibility than at any point in the company's history, and the tools to keep it that way.