Fixing Internal Problems with Interim Management

We determine with the client what skills and personnel are required to fix internal problems and whether ASiQ needs to provide these skills through interim managers such as CEO, CFO, CTO, and controller, or, at a more junior level, SWAT teams of technicians.

Interim management provided by ASiQ is tailored to resolve specific problems, designed to be short term in nature, and will be terminated by recruiting a full-time replacement for each interim position which has an ongoing role in the company. One of the major benefits of using interim turnaround personnel is that, until the serious problems are fixed and the company’s future no longer in doubt, it is hard to attract the talented industry professionals required and able to take the company forward.

Creating Functional & Focused Teams

The most common single thread in troubled companies is that anything that can—and will, as Murphy assures us—go wrong in the affairs of humankind may also go wrong in a business. Thus, just as the most important asset of a successful company is its people, the most noticeable liability in a troubled company is often a few of its people—typically just one to three problem individuals in key functions.

Fixing a company requires that turnaround executives have very strong skills to rapidly assess the teams and their members, to accurately read individual people, to manage them in urgent situations, and to quickly remove any who are incorrigibly toxic. The turnaround executive must be sure that the company, in the phrase of business writer Jim Collins, “has the right people on the bus,” and if it does not, we start at once to fix that.

Corporate Finance & Corporate Restructuring

ASiQ has had to create, lead, and manage the refinancing and financial restructuring of almost all troubled companies with which we have worked. No matter what the root causes of the problem, a turnaround team is usually brought in when boards or shareholders are forced to do so by very serious financial problems stemming from those roots. Stopping the bleeding, stabilizing cash flow, and arranging financing are the necessary first steps of the process.

In the early stages of a financial restructuring, as company need requires, we must often work with banks and other debtors to forestall payments, or agree to temporarily pay interest only, or to restructure the entire debt.

• We work with vendors to secure ongoing supply and manage cash flow.
• We work with customers to maintain optimism and to assure continuity of sales and deliveries.
• We segue into the middle term of the financial crisis driving the company with cash flow management and optimization, converting some assets to cash and improving gross margins.
• We complete the process either with an internally repaired cash flow or by seeking the additional financing required.

All successful turnaround executives must be very strong in corporate finance. ASiQ’s founder was first trained to restructure corporations’ finances and financings in operational financial turnarounds. Later, as a venture capitalist, he refined those skills while financing startups and troubled companies from the outside. In response to its markets and client needs, ASiQ has assembled a very strong roster of interim CFOs. ASiQ knows how to take immediate control of financial crises. As in an emergency room, we move with speed, care, urgency. We arrest the crisis, and then we rebuild the finances.

Business Process Improvement

Among the many root causes of trouble in companies are business processes that are insufficiently defined and executed, bypassed by events such as new products and/or a significant change in scale of the operation, or simply nonexistent in a vital zone of the business.

Finding and fixing these problems begins with a rigorous in-depth analysis of each business process—prioritized, of course, by which process deficiencies would most likely have led to the company’s performance deficiencies. Typically, when the process breakdown is located, the repair or creation of new business process is straightforward.

ASiQ always works with the teams involved or impacted by the deficient process to devise and thereby own the solution. By its nature, business process improvement is business performance improvement.