How to help small businesses avoid insolvency

Hi Felix :) At Roland Berger we focus on the medium- to large sized companies during restructuring because we specialize in writing restructuring concepts that are presented to the financing banks, which ultimately approve further financing or not. And this setup is very different for smaller firms. There is obviously no 'one size fits all' approach to avoiding insolvencies for smaller companies, but having a sound business plan, tracking your costs, forecasting market developments and analyzing your customers is a must, esp. planning this in different scenarios to anticipate potential disruptions.

Do you have programs for your consultants to take off time to do pro bono cases that could help companies not typically in the focus of RB? I know the focus of your consultants is on larger companies but i guess some of the concepts are more or less transferable and could potentially have a big impact for those companies (especially smaller ones).

It is of course difficult to generalize, but I would assume that many of the large restructuring measures (e.g. optimizing your footprint of production plants, cutting SG&A costs on a large scale...) are not equally feasible for a small business. But you can take time off at Roland Berger either to do a social fellowship or to do an entrepreneurial fellowship (or a sabbatical, PhD...). So there are many opportunities to apply what you have learned at RB outside of your working hours.

That sounds very interesting :) thank you for the answer!