Business rescue is not liquidation
Stut is a licensed business rescue practice in Bedfordview. We take Chapter 6 filings for companies that still have a trade worth saving, and we say so in the first meeting if you have left it too late.
Speak to a practitionerWe filed on the Thursday. By Friday lunchtime Marius had phoned all forty-one of our suppliers before any of them phoned us, and eleven agreed to carry on delivering on cash terms. That is the only reason there was still a factory in March, and the only reason the ninety-six people in it still had somewhere to clock in.Willem Kruger · Managing director, Ferroweld Pressings, Alrode
Chapter 6 filings
We take the board resolution, file the CoR123.1 with CIPC and are appointed within days. From the hour of appointment the section 133 moratorium stops the attachments, the repossessions and the summonses.
Turnaround without filing
Filing is not always the answer. Where the balance sheet is still repairable we negotiate the debt down informally, restructure the facilities and leave your name off the CIPC register entirely.
The first seventy-two hours
The sheriff at the gate, a bank that has frozen the account, a supplier winding you up. Phone before you sign anything. Most of what makes a rescue impossible is done in the week before we are called.
Creditors and the vote
We write the plan, meet the big creditors before it is published, and count the votes before the meeting sits. A plan taken into that room without doing that is a plan that gets voted down.
Who takes your file
Twenty-six years, the first fourteen of them as financial director inside two pressed-steel plants in Alrode, so he has sat on the other side of this table. He takes the manufacturing, engineering and construction files, and he is the one who phones the bank on day one.
Nine years in restructuring at a commercial bank in Sandton, writing the memos that decided whether a facility was called or carried. She now writes the plans those same committees read. Retail, freight and food files, and every creditors meeting we hold.
From the phone call to the vote
It usually starts with a phone call on a bad afternoon. We come to you, read the age analysis, the bank statements and the order book, and inside a day or two we tell you one of two things: this company can trade its way out, or it cannot. If it cannot we say so and we do not take the appointment. A rescue filed on a business with nothing left to sell is an expensive liquidation with a longer name.
If it can, the board passes the resolution and we file it with CIPC. From that hour nobody attaches your machines, cancels your lease or serves a summons without the court's leave. We have twenty-five business days to publish the plan and we spend most of them in three rooms: your creditors, your bank and your own canteen. Salaries earned during rescue are post-commencement debt and they get paid, which is the part nobody tells the staff on day one.
Then the creditors vote. Seventy-five percent of the voting interests in the room, and half of the independent ones, and the plan binds every creditor whether they voted for it or not. Most of ours are adopted at the first meeting, because the arithmetic was agreed around a table in Germiston three weeks before anybody sat down to vote.
What the moratorium actually stops
Recorded for a manufacturers' association breakfast in Isando in May. Marius takes the first twelve minutes; the questions afterwards are the useful part.
Some of the floors these files came off
Tell us what is happening
Stut Business Rescue Suite 4, 12 Riley Road, Bedfordview 2007 011 456 3320 After hours, any hour: 083 271 0044 If the sheriff is at the gate, phone. Do not send the form.