The contract ended or the funding stopped. The costs did not.
A recompete went the other way, a grant lapsed or an agency changed direction. The organisation needs someone with authority to resize it, starting this month.
What an organisation in difficulty is dealing with
It is rarely one problem. Often it is several arriving together:
Revenue gone, payroll not
A staff built for one award or programme and nothing for them to bill to.
Overhead sized for a larger company
Rents, systems and indirect costs that made sense at peak and now consume what remains.
Lenders and funders asking for a plan
The bank, the board or the donors want to know what the organisation will look like in six months.
The leadership is too close to it
Loyalty to the team makes the hard calls on people and sites almost impossible to take alone.
Our operators have run an organisation through this before. They step into the seat, steady cash, redraw the plan and lead the difficult talks with lenders, funders and staff that management cannot carry alone. The services agreement ends cleanly once the organisation is stable.
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
Steady leadership through a hard stretch
Losing a recompete or a key contract needs an operator with authority and a frame around the work. We provide the operator and keep the frame in place.
Frequent reviews while it matters
We check in often with you and the executive during the recovery, and tell you quickly if the plan starts to slip.
Specialists on call
Your executive draws on our collective of 800+. A cash question that turns out to be a contracts question reaches someone who has handled one.
No stall if someone leaves
If your executive steps away, our replacement search starts from the recovery plan we hold and we steer the changeover.
Fair and steady
In a hard stretch, fairness and steadiness matter more than a title. Both go into the brief.
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 Washington DC provides operational and executive leadership support. Where a situation requires insolvency, legal, restructuring or regulated financial advice, we work alongside the appropriate specialist advisers.
