Perspectives on business rescue, bankability, infrastructure finance, corporate restructuring, and strategic futures.
Suppliers are watching you before your bank is. The ways they respond to your payment behaviour (or fail to respond to your requests) tell you what they think about your business. What to look for and what it means.
Stretching suppliers is the most common way distressed businesses buy time. The time is expensive, and the true cost is usually hidden. What working capital stretch actually costs, and why the number is bigger than the owner thinks.
A board's engagement with strategic futures work depends on the artefact it receives. A well-designed one-page foresight brief holds attention and drives decisions. A poorly-designed 30-page report ends up in the pre-read pack and is not opened.
Every serious bankability report has a sensitivity analysis. Most are decoration. The one slide the credit committee actually reads shows what the project is genuinely sensitive to, tested against the assumptions that could realistically move.
A section 150 rescue plan either wins its section 152 vote or it does not. What distinguishes plans that win from plans that lose is rarely the headline recovery number; it is the anatomy underneath. Four disciplines that separate a defensible plan from a plan awaiting a rejection.
The mechanics of ranking one creditor behind another are not glamorous. Subordination agreements are what allow multi-layered restructures to close, and the terms hidden in the drafting are where deals fail during execution.
A board's role during a corporate restructuring is different from its role in ordinary times. Faster decisions, tighter information flows, and directors willing to take positions on matters that would normally be left to management. The disciplines that make the difference.
PESTLE analysis is the most misused tool in strategic planning. Done well, it changes decisions. Done badly, it produces a generic list of trends that sits in an appendix and is never read again. What separates the two.
Cost-benefit analysis is the discipline that separates infrastructure investment from infrastructure spending. What distinguishes a defensible CBA from a decorative one, how National Treasury's BFI framework treats CBA, and what a CBA that will survive review looks like.
Business rescue practitioner remuneration follows a gazetted tariff, unless a court adjusts it on application. The mechanics matter to creditors because practitioner fees are a preferred claim under section 143. A short guide to how fees are set, contested, and communicated.