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Our Client

A long-standing family-run Commercial Printing Company, spanning three generations, had been consistently undergoing financial losses, compounded by a fatiqued senior lender.

The Situation

Over the past 6 years, the company has experienced net operating losses in 5 of those years, and for the past 23 months, they have experienced losses in 22 of them. Unfortunately, their negative sales trend has contributed to a significant loss in shareholder equity during this same period. To further complicate matters, their senior lender has moved the relationship to the Special Assets Group due to the on-going negative sales trend.

The Solution

Cascade Partners’ Restructuring Team was hired by the company as their Chief Restructuring Officer with the mission to turn things around. We began by selling non-performing assets to raise cash and pay down debt. The team was also successful in reducing breakeven costs through targeted cost cutting, which resulted in a significant one-third reduction in the permanent workforce. To account for business variability, temporary workers were brought in to manage workload fluctuations. Furthermore, the board of directors’ role was redefined, and a non-family general manager was hired. The team also implemented daily flash reports and a weekly scorecard that included key sales and operations metrics to keep everyone accountable.

The Cascade Advantage

With Cascade’s Restructuring Team’s help, the company achieved profitability in just one month by liquidating a non-core business unit, selling under-utilized real estate, and reducing the breakeven point by 29%. Plus, day-to-day operations were successfully handed over to a new general manager. We negotiated a new line of credit and covenants with the incumbent senior lender. External quality incidents were reduced from 2-3 per week to just one per month. And finally, delivery times were improved to less than 5 days compared to 2-3 weeks prior to the restructuring engagement.