The downturn is here. Reset before it sets the terms.
Businesses in this state learn the cycle the hard way. A project ends, a price falls or a client delays, and costs built for the boom outlast the revenue.
What the downturn exposes
The cracks show first in cash and utilisation:
Plant and people sit idle
Equipment, yards and crews built for peak work now earn nothing while the costs continue.
Receivables stretch
Clients under their own pressure pay late, and the business funds them without meaning to.
Lenders want a plan
Facilities written in good times are reviewed in bad ones, and the covenants are tight.
Directors are personally exposed
Trading on without a clear picture carries real personal risk, and directors need a plan they can stand behind.
A fractional executive gets hold of cash early in the engagement. They build the weekly forecast, reset the cost base around the work that is actually coming, open the talks with lenders and clients, and set out the options for your advisers. If the honest answer is a formal process, they raise it 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
Our part in the reset
A downturn needs one operator in charge of cash and a calm structure around them. We provide both.
Governance through the trough
Directors and the executive hear from us at short, regular intervals, and we call out slippage in the reset the moment it appears.
Specialists for idle plant and tight covenants
Your executive can call on our collective of 800+ when equipment sales, lender talks or a crew restructure need another experienced head.
The reset keeps moving
If the executive steps out mid-reset, we run the replacement search from the plan we hold and see the handover through.
Matched for the cycle
We look for operators who have taken a contractor through a downturn before and kept the core crew together.
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 Perth provides operational and executive leadership support. Where a situation requires insolvency, legal, restructuring or regulated financial advice, we work alongside the appropriate specialist advisers.
