A company in difficulty rarely lacks advisers. It lacks a conductor.

A company in difficulty rarely lacks advisers. It lacks a conductor.

Around most distressed files sits a full orchestra: an accountant who closes the books, a lawyer who drafts the petition, a banker who manages the exposure, a court that supervises, a management team that keeps the doors open. Each is competent. And yet the file drifts because each is playing from a different set of numbers, on a different calendar, with a different definition of "the situation".

The problem is not the quality of the parts. It is the absence of a score.

Three principles that separate the files that recover from the files that merely accumulate reports :

1. One set of numbers, or none. In a difficult situation, the same company produces several versions of itself: the accounting result, the bank's view of the exposure, the lawyer's creditor schedule, the director's cash intuition. Each is correct in its own frame; together they contradict each other. Nothing serious,  a plan, a negotiation, a filing — can be built until someone owns a single reconciled position: creditors, cash, commitments and calendar, on one page, refreshed as the situation moves.

2. Advisers advise. Someone has to run the file. A restructuring is a project with a deadline, not a sequence of consultations. The court, the tax authority, the bank and the payroll do not wait for the next meeting. Between the lawyer, the accountant and the director there is a permanent gap: the person who turns advice into a decision, the decision into an action, and the action into a document delivered on time. Where that role is vacant, the file is managed by whoever's deadline is loudest.

3. Coordination is the multiplier, not the overhead. The instinct in a crisis is to add expertise: another opinion, another report. It seldom helps, because the constraint was never knowledge, it was integration. A good lawyer, a good accountant and a willing bank are worth far more when their work is sequenced, fed with the same figures and pointed at the same outcome. The scarcest resource in a distressed company is not advice. It is the capacity to carry it through, week after week.

The strategic lesson is simple. Restructuring is a management discipline before it is a legal or accounting one. The instruments exist and the professions are competent. What is missing, in most files that fail, is the function that connects them: the team that owns the numbers, holds the calendar, and turns a circle of advisers into a single, executed plan.

Our own trade has always been exactly that: the coordination of the numbers. Increasingly, it is also the coordination of the professionals around them. More on that soon.

Word from the field : the first thing we do on a new file is not legal and not financial. It is a table every creditor, every deadline, every commitment, one column per source, one reconciled figure per line. Within days, the lawyer, the accountant and the director are finally discussing the same company. Most of what looks like a legal problem or an accounting problem is, at that stage, a coordination problem that nobody had been assigned.