A company in trouble has one of three diseases: it is running out of cash, it is not making money, or it owes more than it can carry. From the outside they look alike, they are treated differently, and the first thing an Alvarez & Marsal interviewer learns about you is whether you can tell them apart before you reach for a framework. That is the whole thesis of this guide. Most candidates arrive with a profitability tree and treat every A&M prompt as a margin problem; the ones who get offers spend their first two minutes on diagnosis and only then pick a lever.
By the end you will have a triage table, a working-capital calculation you can reproduce in ninety seconds, a scored comparison of a weak and a strong answer to the same prompt, and a clear line between what A&M publishes and what is folklore.
The firm sells operators by the hour, and the interview is priced accordingly
A&M was founded in New York in 1983 by Tony Alvarez II and Bryan Marsal as a restructuring boutique. Its history page describes growth from three employees to "over 10,000 in more than 80 offices across 39 countries"; its more recently updated about page says 13,000-plus people in 40-plus countries. The firm is growing faster than its web copy, and it is privately held, so treat any revenue figure you see quoted as somebody's estimate.
The clearest public window into the business model is a court record. When Lehman Brothers filed in September 2008, its engagement letter with A&M was filed with the SEC. Bryan Marsal became chief restructuring officer and, from January 2009, chief executive of the estate. The letter lists the hourly rates: $850 for Marsal, $550 to $850 for managing directors, $450 to $600 for directors, $300 to $450 for associates, and $175 to $300 for analysts. By January 2013 Reuters put A&M's cumulative Lehman fees at about $627 million.
Read that rate card as a hiring spec. A first-year analyst billed to a creditor-scrutinized estate at $175 an hour has to produce something a lender will pay for in week one: a cash forecast that reconciles, a vendor list ranked by criticality, a variance report that explains itself. Nobody bills $175 an hour for a hypothesis about market attractiveness. The interview exists to find out whether you can be that person, which is why it feels less like a strategy conversation and more like a job trial.
Demand is not the constraint. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts counts 24,737 business bankruptcy filings in 2025, up 7.1 percent on 2024, and 9,201 Chapter 11 filings of all kinds against 4,918 in 2022. The caseload has nearly doubled in three years, and firms hire for the people who can build a cash forecast at eleven at night without supervision.
What A&M publishes, and what is folklore
Firms publish less than prep sites pretend, and A&M publishes less than most. The split as of September 2026:
| Claim | Status | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| The campus process starts with an online application and a location preference; a campus recruiter then makes contact | A&M states it | ACE program page |
| Corporate Performance Improvement campus hubs: New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles | A&M states it | ACE program page |
| The Summer Analyst program runs 8 to 10 weeks and includes a Data Analytics and Business Modeling course | A&M states it | ACE program page |
| Analysts were billed at $175 to $300 an hour on Lehman in 2008 | Court and SEC record | Engagement letter above |
| A&M hired two or more Wharton MBAs from the Class of 2025 and is a top consulting employer at Darden | School data | Wharton 2025 Career Report, Darden top hiring companies |
| Two or three rounds, each mixing behavioral questions with a candidate-led case | Folklore, consistent | Forums and prep sites |
| A timed Excel exercise, usually described as a simplified 13-week cash flow or a three-statement build, for Restructuring and PEPI candidates | Folklore, common | Forums and prep sites |
Two implications. The format varies by practice and office, so the recruiter's email outranks anything in this table. And the folklore is consistent enough that you should prepare for a spreadsheet exercise even if nobody has confirmed one; it costs a weekend and protects you from discovering the test exists as it starts.
The three diseases, and why the order matters
Every prompt A&M is likely to hand you describes a company with symptoms. Your first job is diagnosis.
| Disease | What is actually wrong | Typical clock | First-week work | Who has to act |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liquidity | Cash out exceeds cash in over the next 13 weeks, whatever the P&L says | Weeks | 13-week cash flow, vendor triage, collections, revolver availability | CFO or interim CFO, lender, critical vendors |
| Margin | The business does not earn enough on what it sells; cash is fine for now | Quarters | Contribution by product, plant, and customer; cost baseline; pricing | COO, plant managers, sales leadership |
| Balance sheet | Operations earn cash, but debt service or a maturity exceeds what they earn | Covenant test dates and maturities | Capital structure map, covenant headroom, lender dialogue | Board, sponsor, lenders, counsel |
They compound in a fixed direction. An untreated margin problem becomes a liquidity problem; a balance-sheet problem becomes a liquidity problem the week a maturity arrives. That is why the interviewer wants to hear you check liquidity first even when the prompt is about margins: the cash clock is the shortest, and it decides how much time you have for the other two. I have watched a candidate spend three of twenty-five minutes building a cost tree for a company that, by the prompt's own numbers, had six weeks of cash. I stopped scoring structure at minute two, because nothing built on the wrong diagnosis could earn points.
A&M's own writing points the same way. Its piece on the 13-week cash flow calls the tool "often associated only with distressed situations" but "equally valuable in non-distressed environments", and its liquidity Q&A for private equity sponsors is about reconciling EBITDA to cash to find "leakage". A Restructuring managing director's biography on the firm's site, Bob Caruso's for instance, reads: chief restructuring officer of Revlon, chief executive of Exide, sizing and raising DIP financing, operating companies through Chapter 11. That is the vocabulary of the people who will judge your answer. None of it is about frameworks.
Three questions sort almost any prompt, in this order:
- "How many weeks of liquidity does the company have today, counting undrawn facilities?" Under 13, and you are in a liquidity case whatever else is true.
- "Is operating cash flow positive before debt service?" If yes and the first answer was still tight, the disease is on the balance sheet.
- "What is the next hard date: a covenant test, a maturity, payroll, a large vendor's terms?" That is the clock every recommendation has to beat.
Worked example: a profitable company that is running out of money
The company and its numbers are invented; the arithmetic is the point.
Prompt. Northline Foodservice distributes to restaurants across four states. Revenue was $480 million last year at a 2.9 percent EBITDA margin, roughly $14 million. It has just won a regional chain contract that will lift revenue 20 percent this year. It has a $40 million revolver with $35 million drawn and a $60 million term loan maturing in 14 months. The CEO wants help "improving margins to get the bank comfortable."
A candidate treating this as a margin case finds that one point of margin is worth about $5.8 million on the new revenue base and recommends supplier renegotiation and route density. Reasonable. Also the wrong disease.
Triage. Distribution is a working-capital business, so start there. Say days sales outstanding are 45, days of inventory 30, and days payable 25. The cash conversion cycle is 45 + 30 − 25 = 50 days, and the cash tied up in working capital is roughly revenue times 50/365: on $480 million, about $66 million. (Inventory and payables really run off cost of goods, which at a distributor is close to revenue, so the shortcut holds.)
Grow revenue 20 percent, to $576 million. The extra $96 million of sales needs about $96 million × 50/365, or $13 million, of additional working capital before a dollar of profit arrives. Against that, EBITDA at 2.9 percent of $576 million is about $16.7 million; subtract interest of about $9 million on $95 million of debt at 9 percent, capex of $4 million, and cash taxes of $1 million, and free cash flow before working capital is about $2.7 million. The year's shortfall is $13 million minus $2.7 million, call it $10 million, against $5 million of undrawn revolver. Spread evenly, the revolver is full in roughly six months, eight months before the term loan matures.
Diagnosis. Northline is a profitable, growing company with a liquidity disease caused by its own growth and a balance-sheet disease waiting behind it. Margin is the third problem, not the first.
Treatment, in clock order. The cheapest cash is in the cycle: a day of working capital on $576 million of revenue is worth $576 million / 365, about $1.6 million. Signing the new chain at 30-day terms instead of 45, trimming slow inventory, and moving supplier terms from 25 to 30 days could take 8 to 10 days out of the cycle, or $13 to $16 million, which covers the build. In parallel, the CFO takes a 13-week cash flow to the lender and asks to upsize the revolver against the larger receivables base, and the board opens the refinancing conversation now rather than at month twelve. The margin program still happens, second, funded by the cash you found first.
What the interviewer scored. Not the formula. The sentence "before we talk about margins, how many weeks of liquidity does Northline have?"
Ned's rule. Name the disease before you name the lever. If your first recommendation would take longer to land than the company's cash runway, you have treated the wrong problem, and the interviewer heard it in your opening sentence.
Scoring the same prompt two ways
Interviewers at operator-heavy firms tend to score fewer dimensions than MBB and weight them differently. This is my reconstruction from the interviewer's chair, not A&M's sheet, which is not public.
| Dimension | Weak answer (margin case) | Strong answer (triage first) |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnosis | Accepts the CEO's framing, goes straight to a cost tree | Asks for liquidity, operating cash flow, and the next hard date first |
| Quantification | Sizes one point of margin | Sizes the working-capital build and the runway in weeks |
| Sequencing | A six-month program | Actions ordered by the clock: cycle, lender, refinancing, then margin |
| Stakeholders | "Management should optimize" | CFO, lender, new customer, board, and what each is asked to do |
| Communication | Framework first, answer last | Answer first, one sentence, with the number behind it |
On a 1-to-5 scale per row, the weak answer typically lands around 2, 3, 2, 2, 3; the strong answer at 4 or 5 across the board, with exactly the same arithmetic ability. The gap is manufactured in the first two minutes.
Practice areas change the disease you will be handed
A&M's history page lists seven primary service lines. Three of them run case-style interviews for generalist hires, and each hands you a different default disease.
| Practice | What the work is | Default disease | Bring |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restructuring & Turnaround | Interim CRO, CFO, and CEO roles; liquidity management; DIP financing; Chapter 11 operations | Liquidity, then balance sheet | 13-week cash flow logic, covenant vocabulary, calm |
| Corporate Performance Improvement (CPI) | Operational improvement in going concerns, staffed alongside people its campus page describes as former CFOs, CIOs, and chief supply chain officers | Margin, with a cash-conversion twist | Contribution analysis, cost baselines, plans with names on them |
| Private Equity Performance Improvement (PEPI) | Performance improvement for sponsors and their portfolio companies on a hold-period clock | Margin or liquidity, measured in exit multiples | EBITDA-to-cash reconciliation, 100-day plans |
The tell in a CPI or PEPI interview is that the interviewer keeps asking "who does this, by when, and how would we know it worked?" The hands-on language on A&M's own pages is not branding. It is the rubric.
Fit questions are an ownership audit
The behavioral half is not the PEI. Nobody wants a story about influencing a study group. The people across the table have often been CFOs and CROs, and they are auditing whether you have ever owned a number, delivered bad news, and stayed. Prepare three stories:
- A number you owned. A budget, a forecast, a collections target, a production schedule. What it was, what it did while you owned it, what you changed.
- Bad news you delivered upward. A&M's history page says its people "tell clients what they need to know, not always what they want to hear." Show the smaller version.
- A week you ran on incomplete information. Not a heroic all-nighter; a decision made at 70 percent confidence and how you protected against being wrong.
Keep each under two minutes and lead with the outcome and the number. Interviewers at operator firms interrupt, and the candidate who front-loads the result survives the interruption.
Practice this today
Take one profitability case, any case, and refuse to structure it until you have written a triage line: which disease, what clock, and the one number that would confirm it. Then run the case. Five repetitions and the triage question becomes a reflex.
CoachNed has 64 original cases at /cases; the operations and profitability ones take the triage treatment well. Run the arithmetic in /drills/math until a day of working capital on any revenue figure is a five-second calculation, and use /drills/synthesis to practice answer-first closes that name who acts and by when. With five minutes, /start gives you three typed turns of a case with instant scores and no account; the live voice case with Ned at /interview runs about 18 minutes and ends in a seven-score debrief. Everything is open for seven days, no card; then $120 for a recruiting season or $49 a month.
CoachNed is independent and not affiliated with Alvarez & Marsal or any other firm named here, and nothing above claims knowledge of A&M's current confidential process.
Frequently asked questions
Does Alvarez & Marsal use case interviews?
Yes for most consulting practices, although A&M does not publish a format. Candidate reports consistently describe two or three rounds that each pair behavioral questions with a candidate-led business case, plus a spreadsheet exercise for Restructuring and PEPI roles. Confirm your own loop with the recruiter.
Is there an Excel or modeling test in the A&M interview?
Often, according to candidate folklore, especially in Restructuring & Turnaround and Private Equity Performance Improvement. It is usually described as a simplified 13-week cash flow or a three-statement build under time pressure. A&M neither confirms nor denies this publicly, so prepare as if it exists.
How is an A&M case different from a McKinsey or BCG case?
The prompt is usually a company in some form of trouble, the interviewer is often a former operator, and the scoring rewards diagnosis, cash arithmetic, and a recommendation ordered by the company's clock rather than a comprehensive framework. You are expected to drive.
What is a 13-week cash flow and do I need to build one?
It is a weekly forecast of receipts and disbursements over the next quarter, used to show lenders and boards how many weeks of liquidity a company has. You will not build a full one in a conversation case, but you should be able to explain its logic and, if a modeling test is part of your loop, build a simplified version in Excel.
Sources
- Our History | Alvarez & Marsal — founding, growth figures, service lines, Lehman timeline, "what they need to know" quote. Checked 2026-09-24.
- About A&M | Alvarez & Marsal — current headcount and country figures. Checked 2026-09-24.
- ACE Program | Alvarez & Marsal — CPI campus hubs, Summer Analyst program, application-then-recruiter process. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Campus Recruiting, Corporate Performance Improvement | Alvarez & Marsal — operator backgrounds of CPI staff. Checked 2026-09-24.
- The 13-Week Cash Flow | Alvarez & Marsal — the firm's view of the tool in distressed and non-distressed settings. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Pathway to Profitability Q&A Series: Liquidity Management | Alvarez & Marsal — direct cash flow forecasts and reconciling EBITDA to cash. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Robert Caruso | Alvarez & Marsal — Restructuring managing director biography. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Lehman Brothers engagement letter with Alvarez & Marsal, SEC 8-K exhibit, September 2008 — hourly billing rates by level. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Marsal to lead team of over 600 at Lehman | Reuters — Marsal's move from CRO to CEO. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Lehman bankruptcy fees surpass $2 billion | Reuters — A&M's cumulative Lehman fees of about $627 million. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Bankruptcy Filings Rise 11 Percent | United States Courts — business and Chapter 11 filing counts, 2021 to 2025. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Wharton MBA 2025 Career Report — A&M among employers hiring two or more Class of 2025 graduates. Checked 2026-09-24.
- Top Hiring Companies | UVA Darden — A&M among Darden's top consulting employers. Checked 2026-09-24.