Stabilise first. Rebuild second.
A business that has lost its footing needs someone who can steady it quickly. For a manufacturer, distributor or retailer, that usually means stock, cash and creditors, in that order.
What distress looks like
The signs show up early if someone is looking:
Stock and debtors swallow the cash
The business is busy and short of money, because the balance sheet is carrying too much.
Tax and super fall behind
Arrears to the tax office build quietly, and directors can end up carrying them personally.
Lenders lose confidence
The bank wants a plan, a forecast and someone it believes, and the business has none of the three.
The owner is too close
A founder with a lifetime in the company finds it hard to cut the line that has always been there.
A fractional executive takes hold of cash early. They build the weekly forecast, sort stock and debtors, open the talks with lenders and suppliers and write the plan your advisers need. Where the honest answer is a formal process, they say so early.
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 recovery
A recovery needs one steady operator on cash and a firm structure around them. We provide both.
Close governance under strain
We review progress with the directors and the executive often and plainly, and name slippage in the plan as soon as we see it.
Specialists for the hard conversations
Your executive can call on our collective of 800+ when stock, lending or a restructure of the team needs another seasoned head.
The plan keeps moving
If the executive steps out mid-recovery, we take the brief and the recovery plan we hold, search again and see the handover through ourselves.
Matched for steadiness
We look for operators who have steadied a business before and can keep a long-serving team on side.
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 Melbourne provides operational and executive leadership support. Where a situation requires insolvency, legal, restructuring or regulated financial advice, we work alongside the appropriate specialist advisers.
