They carry briefcases, not resuscitation equipment. But if a consulting team from AlixPartners suddenly shows up at your office, it's rarely a good sign. For more than two decades Alix has led turnarounds of troubled companies, many of them teetering near bankruptcy. But in the past few months, chief executive Fred Crawford has suddenly started hearing from a different group of potential clients: healthy firms worrying about the credit crunch and the deepening recession. "They're not used to dramatic slowdowns in demand, to customers going bankrupt or not paying them," Crawford says. "Some well-run companies are being snuck up on." So today some Alix teams are pursuing a new kind of business: creating doomsday plans for still-profitable compa-nies, to help them cope if the economic free fall continues. "We're just brutally objective," Crawford says, pushing managers-optimists by nature-to stop looking for silver linings and focus on worst-case scenarios.
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