Perspectives on business rescue, bankability, infrastructure finance, corporate restructuring, and strategic futures.
Scenario planning at the provincial planning-team level is not the boardroom version of the exercise. The audience is different, the outputs are different, and the workshop shape has to be different. A practical two-day format that produces artefacts a provincial team can actually use.
Every project has a positive NPV at some discount rate. Every project has an IRR. Every socio-economic evaluation has a BCR. The three metrics answer different questions, and picking the wrong one produces a defensible-looking analysis that leads to the wrong decision.
Every distressed company reaches for one or both of two levers. Operational turnaround fixes the business; financial restructuring fixes the balance sheet. Knowing which is primary changes the sequence, the counterparties, and the outcome.
The first meeting of creditors under section 147 is not the plan meeting. It is the practitioner's first formal appearance, and it sets the tone for every negotiation that follows. What creditors expect, what the practitioner should and should not commit to, and how the advisor team prepares.
Formal warning arrives late. By the time the bank flags a covenant issue or the auditor raises a going-concern note, the business has been drifting for months. Five pre-covenant signals a business owner can watch for themselves.
A distressed but solvent company can be restructured or sold. Boards under pressure often reach for the sale because it looks decisive. The math sometimes says the restructure returns more to shareholders. When to reach for which.
The debt service coverage ratio is the single number most lenders look at first. What it measures, how it hides trouble, what covenant thresholds actually mean in practice, and why the average across a period is often the wrong view.
Two doors open a business rescue in South Africa. A board can walk through the first voluntarily under section 129; a creditor, employee, or shareholder can force the second through court under section 131. Choosing the wrong door, or waiting too long to choose either, costs the company options.
Strategic futures planning is not forecasting. It is a disciplined method for expanding a board's peripheral vision so the organisation stops being surprised by the same class of event twice.
Corporate restructuring is what solvent companies do to stay ahead of trouble. Business rescue is what happens after trouble has landed. Confusing the two costs boards options they did not know they had.