Stopping was the hard call. Not over-correcting was the harder one.

The situation

A Brazilian manufacturer had built out a US subsidiary ahead of the regulatory clearance it needed to sell its product in the country. Capital was committed. The team was hired. One of the founders had already packed to move. Every month of operating burn was buying market presence the company was not yet legally permitted to convert into revenue — and the clearance had no confirmed date.

This was not a case of a founder wanting to be talked into something. It was the opposite: a leadership group that was fully committed and had every reason to keep going.

What the numbers showed

The analysis separated two things the discussion had fused together: the value of the US market, which was real and unchanged, and the cost of holding a fully staffed presence in that market while unable to sell into it. Held against a clearance timeline nobody could bound, the second consumed the first. The monthly burn was not buying time — it was buying position that would still need to be rebuilt whenever approval arrived, because the commercial ramp starts at clearance regardless of how long the office has been open.

The decision

We put the cost of each path in front of the partners and the decision was theirs. They suspended the operation, avoiding roughly USD 2M of burn while clearance remained pending.

Then the pendulum swung the other way. Having accepted that the operation should stop, the question became whether to dissolve the entity altogether and be done with it. It was the same analysis in reverse, and it produced the opposite answer: dissolution would have destroyed a regulatory position and a corporate vehicle that cost materially more to rebuild than to hold dormant. Suspension held.

What changed

The company stopped spending against an approval it did not have, and kept the asset that would make that approval usable when it came. The recommendation followed the numbers in both directions — including when that meant disagreeing with the room.

What this engagement was not

Not a regulatory or legal opinion. Not a decision we made — the partners made it. Our role was to put a defensible cost on each path before anything irreversible was signed.

Anonymised at client request. Figures are stated as ranges or ratios where absolute values remain commercially sensitive.