Representative composite case study
FP&A and capital planning for a defence-technology scale-up
Defence technology and drones · Well-funded private growth company
Programme FP&A, capacity case and risk scenarios
Representative composite based on recurring mandate patterns. Client identities, facts, timing and results are altered or combined for confidentiality and should not be read as a claim about one identifiable client.
Context & situation
What the client was trying to solve.
The board needed to decide how much readiness to fund ahead of demand and which evidence was strong enough to justify each step in capacity commitment.
A specialised defence-technology company was preparing to scale production against a mix of contracted milestones and high-probability pipeline. Management needed to distinguish committed capacity from speculative build-ahead.
Long-lead components and specialised labour encouraged early commitments, while programme timing and customer acceptance remained uncertain. The finance plan had to protect readiness without converting pipeline optimism into irreversible cash outflow.
The scale-up challenge was the gap between commercial probability and cash commitment. Long-lead components, specialised labour and production readiness had to be funded before customer cash, while programme timing, acceptance and policy conditions could still change. A single probability-weighted pipeline number was therefore too blunt to govern procurement and hiring.
The finance architecture separated contracted demand, high-confidence opportunities and strategic capacity. Procurement and hiring gates were linked to those evidence tiers, and supplier concentration and country dependencies were incorporated into the scenarios. This allowed the company to protect readiness for important programmes without converting every promising opportunity into irreversible working capital.
Constraints
What made the mandate difficult.
Constraint 01
Procurement lead times preceded customer cash.
Constraint 02
Acceptance milestones affected revenue timing.
Constraint 03
Export and policy changes influenced market scenarios.
Work performed
How the mandate was structured.
- 01
Establish the position
Built programme-level revenue, procurement and cash models.
- 02
Build the analysis
Separated contracted, probability-weighted and strategic capacity cases.
- 03
Design the response
Mapped supplier and country dependencies.
- 04
Govern execution
Prepared capital and board scenarios.
Deliverables
The working outputs produced for the mandate.
- Programme FP&A model
- Capacity case
- Supplier-risk map
- Cash and funding scenarios
- Board decision pack
Illustrative outcome
What the work was intended to change.
Illustrative composite outcome: hiring and procurement gates were aligned to evidence tiers rather than one blended pipeline forecast.
Next step
A comparable situation to discuss?
Share the decision at a high level. Specific client experience can be discussed only within the limits of confidentiality.