Cley Distillery: €3M raised by reframing the business

Cley Distillery had everything that makes a business strong on paper. A good product. Growing traction. A team that knew what it was doing. And a fundamental problem no Dutch bank could solve.

The value of a distillery lives in casks that mature for years. A single malt distilled today is sellable in eight years. Until then it sits on your balance sheet as inventory, and costs money to keep, insurance, storage, excise duty. Your liquidity develops in exactly the opposite direction from your value.

Banks look at liquidity. They want collateral, predictable cashflows, and a maturity structure that fits their product menu. A cask of whisky that's worth money in six years is not financeable for a bank, not because it lacks value, but because their system has no slot for it.

Cley came in at the moment cashflow pressure became real, while the balance sheet at asset level was actually getting stronger. A structural mismatch. Pushing for more revenue wouldn't solve it, it would make it worse. More production, more inventory, more capital tied up.

The standard solution that came up was a regular SMB credit line with personal guarantees. Short maturity, fixed amortisation, collateral outside the assets.

A "solution" on paper. In practice: a structure that would have made the problem worse. The fixed amortisation would have squeezed cashflow further. The personal guarantee placed the risk exactly on the people least able to carry it, the founders. And it didn't solve the mismatch itself; it just smeared it across time.

That's misfit. Not "the bank doesn't deliver", the bank was willing to deliver. The wrong product.

What we did: redesigned the business for the people who could price the value.

Instead of presenting Cley as an SMB with cashflow pressure, we positioned it as an asset-backed proposition. The casks and maturing inventory as the core value. The maturity of that inventory as the timeline financing was built around, not against. Investors who knew how to assess inventory with future sale value, not banks who couldn't.

That sounds simple. In execution the work was in:

• Translating the valuation into a story investors could understand and defend to their own committee.
• Setting up the legal structure so the asset-backed portion was ringfenced, investors knew exactly what their money pointed to.
• Aligning stakeholders, founders, accountant, tax advisor, investors, independent valuator. One story, no contradictions in side meetings.
• Cleaning up the company storyline, Cley wasn't "a spirits company with growing pains" anymore; it was an investable inventory proposition with an operating business around it.

This isn't a trick. It's putting the business honestly into the terms that match how it actually works.

€3 million raised within roughly three years.

The capital needed to stabilise the business and grow, without breaking the structure it actually runs on. No personal guarantees that would put the founders at risk. No amortisation schedule squeezing the company every month. A structure that matched what the business actually is.

But it's not just the amount. What came out was clarity about the valuation, economic and societal. For the founders, for the investors, for future financiers. The business now knew what it was worth and why. That one fact changes how every next conversation with a financier goes.

• Fit beats product. The bank was willing to deliver. What the bank wanted to deliver wasn't what Cley needed. That's the gap.
• Asset-backed structures work for businesses without standard cashflow. Distillery, food processing, maturing inventory, IP, receivables, if your value is real but lives in time, you can design a structure around it.
• Three years isn't a short engagement. I stay when it takes long. No report and gone, next to you in the conversations, round after round.