Real estate
A developer had spread its capital across five projects at once. Nine months to streamline the portfolio and restore its ability to recycle capital.
3/5Projects kept after the review
OVERVIEW
CONTEXT
Each project had a good reason to continue. Together, they meant none of them would reach the finish line.
The portfolio was built during a favorable market: each land opportunity came at a different time, and each was taken. When the market slowed, all five projects needed capital at different stages, while sales revenue was no longer enough to fund them.
There were no shared criteria for comparing projects. Every meeting became a debate among the people in charge of each project, and decisions tended to favor the loudest voice rather than the project with the best chance of returning capital.
SOLUTION
Legal status, cash flow, market liquidity and remaining capital needs, scored on the same scale.
Combining the cash flows of all five projects in one table to see where the bottlenecks overlap.
Sale, joint investment or a slower schedule — chosen by opportunity cost, not emotion.
Renegotiating maturities and tying disbursements to each project's legal milestones.
Any spending above a threshold goes through a committee with published criteria.
Pricing and launch timing set by cash needs, not by sales targets alone.
Each project was reviewed for its legal status, the costs already incurred and the capital still needed to reach positive cash flow. The scores were presented to the board all at once, so the decision to keep or stop a project was no longer a private matter for each project lead.
Two projects were sold or brought into joint investments, and the capital recovered went straight into the three projects that remained. The disbursement schedule was tied to legal milestones instead of the old plan, and the investment committee began meeting under the new rules.
WHAT'S DIFFERENT
The hardest decision isn't what to do next — it's admitting which project should stop.
The scoring scale was fixed before any project names were added, so no one could score in their own interest.
Projects were judged on the capital still to be invested, not on the money already spent.
Every paused project came with a concrete way out, not abandoned halfway.
Approval thresholds and processes were written down and applied to the founder's projects too.
RESULTS
We kept all five projects because no one dared to be the one to suggest stopping. A shared set of criteria let that meeting happen in two hours instead of two years.
Four groups: legal status, capital still to be invested, product liquidity in the target market and time to positive cash flow. The weights are agreed by the board before scoring.
Not necessarily. In this case, most of the team moved to the three remaining projects, which were short of people in the delivery phase.
Every exit option kept some level of participation, so the business still benefits if a sold project gains value later.
Presenting fewer projects with clear cash flows made maturity negotiations easier than keeping all five.
A NEW JOURNEY STARTS HERE
A thirty-minute conversation is usually enough to name the bottleneck. The rest is designing a roadmap that fits your size and resources.
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