Mark Blayney MBA (1987) talks about his career in the turnaround industry

Before I went to university, I had a gap year job in the head office of a business where a company doctor had been brought in to turn it around. He was young, earning lots of money, drove expensive looking cars, had an attractive girlfriend, houses in London in Florida and what seemed to be quite interesting job. So I thought, I’m quite bright, why don’t I try doing that?

To start with I decided I would need a thorough grounding in good business practice and so taking an MBA at Aston was the first deliberate step of a grand plan that I had decided on to become a ‘company doctor’, or what is nowadays termed a turnaround professional.  After Aston I joined what became PricewaterhouseCoopers and qualified as a chartered accountant and then as an insolvency practitioner, spending the recession of the early Nineties involved in bank investigations and receiverships in the SME sector. After a spell on secondment into the intensive care department of one of the clearing banks I then travelled to East Africa where I spent a year undertaking the turnaround and sale of a match factory and paper and pulp mill which were at the time one of Tanzania's largest private companies. Back in the UK after having stayed on to set up an insolvency department, I was then the project manager for the launch of the first dedicated professional turnaround service provided by any of the big four firms of accountants, as well as being involved in the firm’s internal training.

I left PwC to go into a turnaround in industry and since 2000 I've been working as a self employed SME business strategy and turnaround consultant (www.turnaroundhelp.co.uk) and finance raiser.

Turnaround as an area of activity has become increasingly professionalised over the past decade with the Institute for Turnaround, of which I'm a member, having been created to accredit turnaround professionals through a rigorous referencing and case study process. Membership of the Institute, of which there are nationally only about 150 accredited turnaround professionals, gives companies requiring assistance comfort as to the standards and skills of the practitioner they are engaging, which is particularly important in the current economic circumstances.

It’s the case however that most turnarounds require some funding, either in their early stages to support the restructuring of the business, or downstream to support the business’ regrowth. So another string to my bow has always been my finance raising activities. I have worked for number of years now as an asset finance broker, mainly arranging the refinancing of companies away from their existing bankers or arranging funding for new projects and property development. While this area of activity has become much more difficult since the credit crunch, I’m still finding that there is often scope to raise more headroom for conventionally banked companies by accessing specialist asset based sources of funding.

More recently, I have also become involved in raising equity for business rescues and turnarounds from a specialist network of business angels that can provide funding of anywhere between £100,000 and £3,000,000 and this is keeping me increasingly busy. During the week while I was writing this article for example, I had in enquiries from three businesses, looking for between £500,000 and £1,000,000 each.

Having been working with SME’s in some form of business or financial difficulty since 1990 I had always been struck by how often the same issues came up in company after company and how often business owners felt the same relatively simple bits of advice and specialist information was helpful. So I eventually pitched an idea for a self help guide to a publisher and to my delight was commissioned to write ‘Turning a business around’ which came out in 2002.  The publishers obviously liked it as they subsequently commissioned another three books, ‘Selling your business’, ‘Buying a business and making it work’ and ‘Raising finance for your business’ (all available from Amazon or any good bookshop etc, etc). I did try to interest them in ‘Going to live in the South of France’ but they didn’t want to pay the research expenses.

And I’ve also now jumped the fence from consultant to SME owner. In the last three years I have become involved in buying or buying into small businesses myself with a view to turning them around for growth and eventual sale on my own account. Timing is however everything in life so I now find myself sailing some of these still fragile craft through the current tempestuous seas and trying to keep my own turnarounds, rather than other people’s, on track.   

So what’s the attraction of turnaround work as an area?

Well, the downsides are obvious. There is all the stress and pressures of dealing with businesses in difficulty and the people who are suffering in and around them. There are the very real personal, professional and financial risks of getting involved with companies that are usually by definition insolvent, not to mention the very real and practical problem of establishing how you are going to ensure you get paid for the work you do!

Against that there is the excitement of the new challenge in every job. I find each case is always a new problem to solve, in a new business that I have to get to understand quickly, in a huge variety of sectors where I have worked over the last ten years in or for businesses as diverse as a charter airline, construction, electronics, furniture manufacturers, joinery, musical instrument importer, plastic mouldings, pubs and nightclubs, stockbroker, temporary labour agency, waste management and women’s fashion.

There is also the real sense of personal satisfaction that you get when you have helped someone and their business through what is always a very traumatic time. Seeing a business go on to survive and hopefully thrive really feels as though you have added value.  

So what’s on the horizon at the moment? Well I’m keeping myself busy.

The advisory work continues, I’m involved with clients doing a deal to buy property in Portugal, a battlefield simulation business, a planned launch of a retail chain and a software house looking for a JV partner; while as a business owner I’m looking at a new personal acquisition and am also looking at launching some new joint ventures in the areas of improving Cashflow and supporting teams interested in undertaking buyouts.