XYZ GmbH, Ulm, Hamburg, Berlin, Barcelona / IT-service provider and software house

Assignment 31. 2019

Company

XYZ GmbH, Ulm, Hamburg, Berlin, Barcelona / IT-service provider and software house / SAP consulting, NNN1 (own software), NNN2 (own software), NNN3 (own software), hosting, development of b2b individual software

Position

CEO /CRO

Situation

The company had made losses of about 10% of sales p.a.; equity was practically zero at the end of 2018. The owner, YYY GmbH, had given the mandate as CEO at the end of 2018 with the aim of restructuring the company and succeeding the founding partner.

Task

The approaches for the turnaround (stopping wasteful cash outflows, creating an integrated overall plan for the first time and introducing reproducible processes for the development of software (SCRUM) and the processing of customer tickets) were quickly identified, and it was immediately started with the implementation.

In May 2019, despite the new positive continuation forecast (IDWS6 report), the financing partners quarreled with each other. As a result, the local Sparkasse terminated the business relationship and made all credit lines due immediately.

Result

A plan insolvency was prepared within four days, and on May 13, 2019, an application for plan insolvency was filed with the district court. The application was accepted by the district court within one hour without changes.

The time between filing the application and opening of insolvency was used to accelerate the restructuring of the company with the help of the German insolvency law.

As part of the self-administration of the insolvency, the company was sold to a strategic investor on August 1, 2019 (date of insolvency opening), and a significantly higher inflow of funds was achieved than YYY GmbH had paid for the at this time still healthy company. This enabled an unusually high quota to satisfy creditor interests.