When the cycle turns against you, the seat needs someone in it.
Resource, development and hospitality businesses in British Columbia ride cycles they do not control. When one turns, the options narrow quickly, and the room for advice shrinks with them.
What makes a turnaround hard
The causes differ. The shape of the problem rarely does:
Cash is falling faster than the plan
Lenders are watching, and the forecast is more of a hope than a working tool.
Everyone has a view, nobody holds the pen
Management, the board and the lender each hold a different one.
A project is stuck half-built
Capital is committed, completion needs more, and the partners disagree about whether to continue.
Formal protection is a last resort
A court-supervised process is public and expensive. Acting early leaves room to choose.
A fractional or interim executive steps into the seat straight away, with a mandate to stabilise cash, reassure the lenders and set the direction. They hand over once the business is steady.
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 an interim engagement works here
An interim leader with a clear mandate, agreed with you and shaped around the lenders, and our governance close by.
Tight check-ins
When the cycle turns, we meet more often and raise it straight away if cash and plan diverge.
Been through a downturn
The collective includes operators who have taken resource and development businesses through a turn in the cycle.
A process, not a stand-in
We keep the recovery plan and the brief up to date, so a replacement, if one is ever needed, starts from where things stand.
Steadiness first
Lenders, partners and staff take their cue from the person in charge. We match for calm.
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 Vancouver provides operational and executive leadership support. Where a situation requires insolvency, legal, restructuring or regulated financial advice, we work alongside the appropriate specialist advisers.
