The EU banking union wasn’t created until after the debt crisis of 2010 to 2012. The need for deeper financial integration had been discussed for years before that — what was missing was the pressure to force politicians into unpopular decisions. The same pattern repeats in European energy policy, in border protection, and elsewhere: real reform arrives only when there’s nowhere left to retreat.
In the companies we work with, I see exactly the same mechanism. It’s just not the banking union at stake, but a change of leadership, a cost restructuring, or a shift in business model. And just as with large political entities, the longer the problem gets postponed, the more expensive and painful the eventual fix becomes.
Crisis as the Only Trigger for Change
Ninety percent of the companies that come to us looking for an interim manager don’t come proactively. They come when the house is already on fire: a key customer has left, a bank has frozen a credit line, or it’s just come to light that the CFO had been concealing the real state of the balance sheet for months. At that point, decisions get made in hours, not weeks, and the choice is limited to whoever happens to be free and available immediately.
And yet the warning signs are usually visible months, sometimes years, in advance. Falling margins, key people leaving, delayed reports, leadership that can no longer give simple answers about the numbers or about where the company is actually heading. But the company only deals with it once it has no other option — the same way the European Union waited for the Greek debt collapse before starting to build a banking union, and for the migration wave before deepening protection of its shared border.
This isn’t because managers or owners don’t see the problem. Most of the time, they see it very clearly. But as long as the company is still turning a profit, even a smaller one than last year, it’s always easier to argue that we’ll manage somehow than to reach for the unpopular step — layoffs, a change of leadership, walking away from an established but no-longer-working model.
The Price of a Late Decision
The difference between a company that acts proactively and one that waits for collapse isn’t the owner’s courage. It’s a question of how many options the company still has by the time it finally decides to act.
A company that admits the problem in time gets to choose: it can look for an interim CFO to fix its cash flow before the money runs out, or bring in an interim CEO to carry out the restructuring on its own terms, on a reasonable timeline, with the support of the rest of the leadership. A company that waits for collapse doesn’t get to choose — it takes whoever happens to be available, at whatever price, at whatever speed, and often without any real chance for a proper handover.
Interim management works best exactly in that preventive role — deployed for a limited time, with a clearly defined goal and a clear end point, not as the firefighter who shows up once the roof is already burning. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, companies call for exactly that: a firefighter — and then they’re surprised that the fix takes longer and costs more than they expected.
What to Take Away From This
Reforms, they say, only come in a crisis. That may be true for states, where the political cycle, public debate, and the need to find agreement among many actors all carry their own inertia that’s hard for any one person to override. For companies, it doesn’t have to be true — there, a single person or a small leadership team decides, with far more freedom to act before circumstances force their hand.
The question every owner or CEO can ask themselves is simple: if I had to admit today to a problem that will be unbearable in a year or two, would I do it? Or will I wait for the market to admit it for me — at a point when I’ll have far fewer options for how to respond?
