Finance Monthly - October 2021

The COVID-19 economy continues to challenge many businesses across the globe. What has that meant for restructurings and turnarounds in the US? The predominant buzzword thrown around the business community in 2020 used to describe the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic was “unprecedented”. Despite how overused the term is 18 months later, it still remains a rather accurate description of the challenges companies faced throughout the pandemic and continue to face as the pandemic looms. To that end, COVID-19 has forced business leaders, their management teams, and their financial advisers to make extremely challenging decisions and to push the bounds of innovation. A key fact pattern in restructures consists of the following: assess the current situation and determine knowns from unknowns, gather data and determine quality of said data, craft plans and strategies to enact key initiatives, make assumptions and forecast the various scenarios that could arise as a result of the decisions made. The COVID pandemic has not fundamentally changed that process. What it did change, perhaps, is the extent to which the “equation” is filled with unknowns. In the heat of the pandemic, it took sound judgment and deep experience to swiftly close offices, shutter stores, lay off certain personnel, etc. Today, with the immediate emergency at bay, there is a return to a systematically slower approach that affects change and revives enterprises. How has the pandemic affected Kreshmore Group’s restructuring and turnaround department and how have you navigated this? When it became evident that the attempted containment of the COVID-19 pandemic would grind the world economy to a halt, our team was highly focused on existing restructure clients. We were headlong in numerous files that were inching towards resolution when COVID stopped everything in its tracks. It in many ways it felt like COVID would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Our approach was to reallocate resources internally from M&A activities to Restructure initiatives, understanding that M&A transactions were going to cease Finance Monthly. Bank i ng & F i nanc i a l Se r v i ce s 35