The week-four creditor pack from Board-Led Restructure Studio was the first document our bank actually annotated. We still disagreed on covenant headroom, but the argument had numbers instead of adjectives.
Field notes
What people said after the mandate left the room
These notes name real modules from this studio. They are not interchangeable praise.
★★★★☆
Useful, occasionally slow. Mara would not let us skip the payroll waterline even when the landlord wanted a faster story. That friction was the point.
Distressed Cash Discipline made our collections look smaller and more true. I came for a neater dashboard and left with a named owner for every outflow over five thousand dollars. The dashboard can wait.
Stakeholder Narrative Lab stopped us sending the same email to staff and suppliers. We still tripped on the warehouse rumour mill; the lab does not fix gossip, only the first sentence you actually send.
Case: a fabrication shop that froze the wrong SKU
A family-owned fabricator joined the Operating Model Recomposition program after a second quarter of late BAS. They had already announced a product-line “pause” internally. The clinic mapped contracts and found the paused SKU was the only line a key customer would still prepay. The freeze list was rewritten. Cash recovered enough in seven weeks to keep the night shift. The reservation they asked us to print: they wished week one had been shorter; inventory felt academic until the customer call in week two.
Case: a distributor and a too-polite mandate
A wholesaler arrived with a draft board paper full of adjectives. In Board-Led Restructure Studio week two they voted a freeze that did not name a speaker for the landlord. The letter in week four went out unsigned by a director. The landlord noticed. They rewrote the mandate, named the chair, and completed the ninety-day hold with a Continuity Partnership month. Working capital recovered 2.1× on their own measure — not ours — over the following half year. They still think the Thursday clinics ran long.