What is business insolvency and recovery?
Insolvency and recovery deals with helping struggling businesses bounce back from financial difficulty or guiding a business through the challenging process of insolvency, which will most likely involve selling the business’s assets and paying creditors. Think it could be suited to you? Take our quiz to find out.
Working in this area means you will be providing valuable advice to a business at a critical time. While it can be difficult to guide a business through the insolvency process, it can equally be rewarding to help put a business back on the path to success.
Business insolvency and recovery jobs are most often within accountancy firms, or other professional services firms. You can work within a team at a large company like Ernst & Young or a smaller specialist firm.
What does the day to day look like?
You will spend most of your time advising the business you’re working with – helping with the effective management of cash flow and working capital and advising on how to make business improvements such as financial restructuring.
Guiding a business through insolvency involves support and advice through the challenging process and will require you to liaise with lawyers to ensure the business understands the various legislations that are required of them and timings for various procedures.
What skills and characteristics do you need for a career in business recovery and insolvency?
- Qualifications: Most accounting professionals have some kind of related qualification such as an accountancy and finance related degree
- Solid communication skills: These are needed to build a rapport with the business that you are supporting, and be able to communicate legal jargon to them
- Emotional intelligence: You will be advising businesses on things that may be distressing to them, such as restructuring or indeed guiding them through the insolvency process. It’s important to be able to be able to inspire trust but be able to handle the situation sensitively
- Negotiation skills: Strong negotiation skills are a must for the job. You may spend quite a bit of time renegotiating a business’s existing finances
- Commercial awareness: It’s important to have strong commercial skills, as you’ll need to be able to understand what makes a business or organisation successful, so you can help put struggling ones back on the right track
Feel like business recovery and insolvency is not the field for you? Take our quiz to find the specialism better suited to you? Take our quiz!