Business turnaround in Finland: when to call for help, and what happens in the first 30 days

This page is for owners, boards and CEOs of medium-sized and large companies in Finland whose cash is getting tight. Our answer: call for help before the company is insolvent, at the first firm warning sign. The first 30 days are about cash, because cash buys the time that every other decision needs.

Is this your company?

Financial difficulty (talousvaikeudet) usually starts quietly: payment dates move, VAT goes out a few days late, and the bank asks for figures it never needed before.

The companies that gain most from a turnaround still have a real core: a product or service their customers keep buying. Many are owner-led; almost three in four Finnish companies are family firms (Aalto University via STT, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). The owner is often the CEO or the chair, and the bank is the most important outside stakeholder.

The pressure is widespread. About one Finnish SME in five reported difficulty paying its bills in autumn 2026 (Suomen Yrittäjät, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Trade and construction led bankruptcy filings in August 2026 (Statistics Finland, September 2026 (opens in a new tab)), and 3,906 bankruptcies were filed in 2025 (Statistics Finland, 2026 (opens in a new tab)).

When should you call?

Earlier than most owners think. Call at the first of these:

• Your 13-week cash forecast shows a week when cash falls below what the business needs to operate.
• The bank asks for more information than usual, or a covenant test is getting close.
• VAT or payroll taxes start to slip. In Finland this becomes public fast: the tax debt register shows any business that owes the Tax Administration €10,000 or more (Vero (opens in a new tab)), and unpaid VAT and payroll taxes of €15,000 or more are published (Vero, 2026 (opens in a new tab)).
• The accounts show negative equity, which the board must report to the Trade Register without delay (Finnish Patent and Registration Office, 2026 (opens in a new tab)).

The latest moment is before the company is insolvent. Once it cannot pay its debts as they fall due, the choice narrows to formal restructuring (yrityssaneeraus) or bankruptcy, and the first call should go to an insolvency lawyer. EDON can then work on the cash alongside the lawyer.

If one of these is true today, book a free 30-minute sparring session with EDON (opens in a new tab) this week.

Is it a budget problem or a turnaround?

Three signals separate a turnaround from a budget problem. Each means that cash and the trust of the people who fund the business are slipping together:

1. Cash, counted weekly, shows a gap: taxes are paid late, or the account runs close to zero before payroll. Insolvency practitioners list a cash shortfall as the first warning sign (R3, 2023 (opens in a new tab)).
2. Outsiders change how they treat the company. The bank starts talking about covenants, suppliers ask for payment up front, or the credit insurer cuts cover (Squire Patton Boggs, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). In Finland, more than 52,000 companies had a payment default entry by June 2025, a record (Suomen Yrittäjät, 2025 (opens in a new tab)).
3. The numbers keep missing in the same direction: margins shrink quarter after quarter, or the largest customer leaves.

Good people leaving the management team is often an earlier, softer sign (PwC, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Our rule of thumb: when two of the three signals hold, a better budget will not fix it.

What happens in the first 30 days?

EDON's turnaround method has four stages. The first, Anchor, covers the first 30 days of a cash crisis, or kassakriisi (Exhibit 1).

• Days 1 to 3: size the gap. Reconcile the bank balances, build a 13-week cash forecast, and find the lowest point and the week it falls (Alvarez & Marsal, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). One person owns cash decisions, and while the gap is open there is a short cash call every day.
• Week 1: stop the bleeding. Like a bandage on a wound, this stops more damage while the real repair is planned, and that is what keeps the company alive. Stop discretionary spending, new hires and uncommitted capital spending, and agree the order of payments: wages, taxes, then the suppliers the business cannot run without.
• Weeks 1 to 3: talk before you are asked. The bank comes first, with the forecast and the plan; then the suppliers and customers that matter most; then the Tax Administration. A tax payment arrangement can run for up to two years and keeps the debt off the public register, although late-payment interest keeps running, at 9.5 per cent in 2026 (Vero, 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Then the staff, plainly.
• Weeks 2 to 4: release the cash already in the business. Collect overdue receivables, sell slow-moving stock, and stop loss-making orders, products or sites.
• Day 30: the viability decision, taken with the board. Carry on with the turnaround, apply for formal restructuring, sell, or close in an orderly way. If the turnaround goes on, Read diagnoses the root causes, Counter builds and runs the recovery plan, and Sustain makes the gains permanent; our article on turning around a struggling company covers those steps.

Exhibit 1. The first 30 days buy time with cash: size the gap, stop the bleeding, talk first, release cash, then decide.

What is different about a turnaround in Finland?

Owner families decide fast but cut late. In family companies decisions are short and direct, yet a strong sense of personal responsibility often delays layoffs (Family Business Magazine, 2026 (opens in a new tab)), and owners of smaller firms say they feel alone when the crisis bites (COWI for the Danish Business Authority, 2022 (opens in a new tab)).

Trust in outside help is low. Many companies have relied for years on the same individual advisers, often not hands-on consultants, who no longer add much value, and owners rarely look elsewhere because these are the people they are used to. In a crisis that habit costs time: a fresh outside view is most useful exactly when it feels least natural to ask for one.

The board's duties are concrete. Negative equity must be registered without delay, yet only one company in five with negative equity in 2021 to 2023 filed the notice (Finnish Tax Administration, 2025 (opens in a new tab)).

Formal restructuring now has an earlier door. Since July 2022 a company threatened with insolvency can apply for early restructuring itself, with a stay of three months that can be extended to twelve (Act 386/2022 (opens in a new tab)). Courts confirmed 134 restructuring programmes in 2025 (Statistics Finland, 2026 (opens in a new tab)), but most companies that enter restructuring still end in bankruptcy (Suomen Yrittäjät, 2018 (opens in a new tab)), so the informal work should start well before.

Staff rules are lighter than they were. Since 1 July 2025 the Co-operation Act applies in full only from 50 employees, and the minimum negotiation periods are 7 days or 3 weeks (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, 2025 (opens in a new tab)).

What does a turnaround look like in practice?

From Kave Asad's experience: a sanitaryware manufacturer with a long-standing, market-leading brand was losing money on every product it sold. The cost of goods was already higher than the selling price.

• The worst losses stopped at once. Some products lost heavily because of a problem in the clay formula. The company wanted to keep a complete range, but those products were stopped immediately.
• The stock went out slowly. Instead of producing more, the products already in the warehouses were released to the market gradually, at a lower rate.
• The discounts were rebuilt. Years of historical discounts had pushed selling prices below production cost, and a ladder discount system replaced them.
• The cause was fixed in the factory. For the long term, the clay formula and the production process were redesigned.

All of this ran while the company was being prepared for a sale.

When is a turnaround the wrong answer?

• The company is already insolvent and no realistic plan covers the debts. Start with an insolvency lawyer: Finnish law does not allow restructuring when the programme is unlikely to remove the insolvency (Restructuring of Enterprises Act, section 7, as amended in 2022 (opens in a new tab)).
• The market for the core business has gone. Sell, or close in an orderly way and protect what the owners still have (Rödl & Partner, 2026 (opens in a new tab)).
• The owners will not change how the company is run, or will not fund the plan.
• The bookkeeping is materially deficient, or someone acting for the company has been convicted of an offence in the business. The law bars restructuring in both cases, with narrow exceptions (Restructuring of Enterprises Act, section 7, as amended in 2022 (opens in a new tab)), and no plan can rebuild that trust.

How does EDON work with you?

EDON is a strategy and transformation firm based in Finland, and turnarounds are part of its transformation and performance work. Early in the work, EDON puts a high-value, usable deliverable in your hands, something you can act on and keep, before you commit further. We call it the Head Start.

Each engagement is scoped around the decisions in front of the owners and the board: what has to be decided, by when, and what you will hold at the end. Scope and deliverables are agreed in writing before the work starts, and we work alongside your lawyer, auditor and bank.

If you would rather start on your own, the free Turnaround Toolkit sets out the four stages and the tools for each.

Questions owners ask

What is the difference between a turnaround and formal restructuring? A turnaround is the company's own programme to restore cash and profit, led by the owners and management. Formal restructuring (yrityssaneeraus) is a court procedure, with a stay on creditors and a programme the court confirms (Ministry of Justice, unofficial translation (opens in a new tab)). Many turnarounds never need a court.

How early is too early to call? It is almost never too early. The best moment is when the 13-week forecast first shows a shortfall, while there are still weeks to act.

What should we tell the bank, and when? Tell it early, before it asks, and bring the 13-week forecast and the plan. Banks consider a repayment holiday when the company brings current figures (Nordea (opens in a new tab)), and Finnvera can grant one on its own loans (Finnvera (opens in a new tab)).

Is there free help? Yes. Yrittäjän talousapu, run by the KEHA Centre, gives free and confidential advice to entrepreneurs in financial difficulty (KEHA Centre (opens in a new tab)).