Part 5 (guest): Turnaround Consulting - Three Types, the AlixPartners Model, a $2 bn Marketplace Case, and the Pandemic Twist

Axes: financial health (growth, profitability, cash flow, liquidity) and urgency; states: healthy, troubled, distressed. Strategic turnaround: focus or pivot for healthy companies (GE divesting, Netflix from rental to streaming) - segmentation and market entry, typical MBB work. Operational: broken processes - sales coverage and incentives, marketing demand generation and conversion - detailed, activity-level. Financial/debt restructuring: illiquid, near bankruptcy; 13-week cash-flow projections, invoice-by-invoice tracking, creditor sequencing, bank negotiation, preparing management for court. The types overlap on purpose; the skills are 'very, very different'. He works mostly on operational improvement.

AlixPartners: 2,000+ staff, 23 offices, historically restructuring, now mostly strategic and operational; small senior sector-specialist teams with executives. Case: ~$2 bn two-sided US marketplace, steadily declining revenue, modest profit, below the tech 'rule of 40'; engaged after a PE buyer walked, to free capital for reinvestment - 'never cutting for the sake of cutting'. Phases: due diligence (2 weeks, data room), assessment (6 weeks, CFO and COO access, lever report by function), implementation (G&A first, 4 months). Levers: G&A - outsource recruiting, HR self-service, low-cost AP/AR, 10-12 finance metrics; Sales - coverage and incentives, hunting vs farming; Marketing - ROI on hundreds of millions of ad spend, tech stack from paid media to attribution, agency renegotiation, new CMO; Public cloud - out of own data centres, Azure and AWS contracts; External spend and an operating-model shift to guided customer experience across ~8,000 employees. Results: 18 months, 11 projects, 8 locations, peak team 5-6, EBITDA ~4.5x from public filings.

After the February 2020 close, US retail spend fell ~15%, the company's revenue fell 40% quarter on quarter and cash flow 350%, sliding from healthy toward distressed. Response: five parallel workstreams - labour management, external spend, regional presence, liquidity and cash management - deciding fast 'to stop the bleeding'. His slide shows one P&L with optimisation levers in healthy mode and survival levers in crisis mode: 'that's the core of turnaround'. Contracting: handshakes at the assessment SOW and again before implementation; success-based deals pay cost at minimum and share EBITDA or savings upside; this one was deliverable-based because the client trusted the analysis - no industry standard.