Telling people that their entire company is bankrupt = awkward silences

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing what has become my specialty during the course of this trip: analyzing the profitability of a Mozambique company – rapidly.

As I’ve gotten better and quicker at this, I’ve noticed that there are a LOT of Mozambican companies NOT making money. Here’s one of my experiences over the past time …

Unfortunately today I had the responsibility of preparing and facilitating a presentation for a company that, despite the owner’s best efforts, is losing money and is quite bankrupt, to say the least. Our responsibility was to put together an analysis, pure and simple, of the current state of the company – for full view of financiers and creditors.

Nice, slick powerpoint presentations can’t hide the raw emotion of pouring years into a venture that isn’t making money. We spent about two hours presenting graphs, breakdowns, profit analyses and what would need to change in order for the company to make a profit.

Exasperated, the owner and key creditors began to think of inventive ways how profit could be lifted. We entered it into the model – still making a loss (Excel financial models are a bit cold like that. They don’t smile at you either. Except for that stupid office assistant paperclip …).

Finally, the owner turned to one of the financial consultants into the room and asked a question I’ll never forget …

Owner: Honestly, what do you think of our prospects?
Expert: Honestly – you guys are #$%##@!!
(awkward silence)
Owner: (turning to potential financier) What do you think?
Financier: Yeah – you’re $#@#$@!!

It was an interesting day, and there are increasingly more of them ... =)

Blessings
john