The Situation
A multi-site care homes group was operating under severe financial pressure — the product of three converging forces that have pushed many care providers to the edge in recent years: occupancy levels that never fully recovered post-COVID, relentless upward pressure on staffing and agency costs, and local authority fee rates that continued to lag behind the true cost of care delivery.
The incumbent management team were experienced operators who understood their homes well, but the financial complexity of managing cash across multiple sites — whilst simultaneously dealing with creditor pressure from suppliers and HMRC — had stretched beyond what their existing tools and processes could handle. Without reliable short-term cash visibility, decisions were being made reactively, and creditor relationships were deteriorating.
The Engagement
We were engaged to work alongside the management team — not to replace their judgement, but to give them the financial infrastructure they needed to navigate the pressure and regain control.
The foundation of the engagement was the design and implementation of a 13-week rolling cash flow model, built to consolidate receipts and payments across the group into a single, manageable view. This gave management — for the first time — a clear week-by-week picture of where cash was coming from, where it was going, and where the pinch points lay.
With that visibility established, we worked with management to open structured conversations with major suppliers and HMRC, negotiating payment plans that reduced immediate creditor pressure whilst preserving the relationships the business depended on. Payment scheduling was built directly into the forecast model, ensuring that agreed plans were realistic and could be monitored against actual performance week by week.
We also designed and produce a weekly reporting pack for both management and the group's funders — providing the regular, reliable update that stakeholders required and demonstrating that the business had a firm hand on the tiller during a difficult period.
The Outcome
It became apparent that the current funding partners wished to exit. Through a managed process the incumbent funders exited the relationship, with significant debt relief provided to the business, and the group was able to transition to a challenger bank, with a significantly lower debt burden, setting the group up for future success and the ability to reinvest in the care of their residents instead of significant debt and interest costs swallowing cash.