Three Advisors, Three Answers
Three advisors where asked about the magnitude of the cost take-out required to turnaround the airline. Guess what happened? Three answers prevailed, with two conflicting directional guidance.
The room was full of people who knew what they were doing. Three advisory teams, each with restructuring credentials longer than the runway we were trying to save. One airline, one set of filings, one deceptively simple question: how much cost has to come out before this business can stand on its own?
Three answers came back. Not three estimates clustered around a number - three answers, with the highest more than double the lowest, and two of them disagreeing on the direction of the fix. One team wanted to cut into the network. Another insisted the network was the only thing keeping the airline solvent. Both had spreadsheets. Both were, internally, correct.
The arithmetic was never wrong
It would be comforting to blame a formula error. There wasn't one. Each team had built its model carefully, checked it, and could trace every figure back to a line in the accounts. The divergence didn't live in the math. It lived one level below it - in the basis: which leases were treated as debt, where maintenance reserves landed, how fuel hedges were classified, whether ancillary revenue sat above or below the line everyone was staring at.
None of those choices is wrong on its own. Each is a defensible reading of the same disclosure. But stack a dozen of them and you no longer have one airline described three ways - you have three different airlines, each demanding a different rescue.
Why the C-suite couldn't choose
Put yourself in the chief executive's chair. Three credible firms, three reconciled models, three confident recommendations. There is no neutral way to adjudicate between them, because the disagreement isn't on the surface where it can be argued - it's buried in assumptions that were never made explicit. So the decision defaults to whoever presents best, or whoever the board trusts most. That is not analysis. That is theatre with footnotes.
This is the pattern we kept seeing, across restructurings and routine comparisons alike. The failure is almost never computational. It is that everyone normalizes the statements privately, in their own head or their own model, and then argues about conclusions as if the inputs were shared. They weren't.
One basis, written down
The fix is unglamorous: agree the basis first, in the open, before anyone computes anything. Standardize every statement onto one consistent set of definitions, make every mapping visible, and let every figure trace back to the filing it came from. Do that and the three answers collapse into one - not because the analysts suddenly agree, but because they're finally answering the same question.
That airline eventually got its number. It took three weeks of reconciling bases that should have been settled in an afternoon. PitchFit exists so the next team doesn't lose those three weeks - so the C-suite never again has to choose which version of the numbers to believe.
