One of the most common misunderstandings about administration is the assumption that the administrator runs the business. They do not, and they are not resourced to. An insolvency practitioner appointed as administrator takes control of the company, its assets and its strategy. What they inherit alongside that is a live trading operation with staff on shift, stock in transit, customers with bookings and suppliers waiting to know whether they will be paid. Those two things require completely different skills, and they are almost never held by the same person.
The administrator's role is statutory. They act as an officer of the court, owe duties to creditors as a whole, and pursue the statutory objectives in order: rescuing the company as a going concern, achieving a better result for creditors than a winding-up, or realising property to distribute to secured and preferential creditors. Everything they do sits inside that framework — investigating the company's affairs, deciding whether to trade, marketing the business, negotiating with secured creditors, reporting to the court and to creditors, and ultimately exiting the process. They hold the authority. They sign the contracts. They carry the personal risk.
The interim manager's role is operational. They are the person physically present in the business, holding the day-to-day management position that the departing directors or senior managers vacated. They run the rota, deal with the head chef who has not been paid, negotiate post-appointment terms with the laundry supplier, keep the premises licence valid, count the takings and produce a weekly trading report the office holder can rely on. They have no statutory role and no authority over the estate — their authority is delegated, defined in the engagement, and exercised on the office holder's behalf.
The distinction matters most in the first week. An administrator appointed on a Friday afternoon over a fifteen-site hospitality group cannot personally be at each site on Saturday morning. But Saturday morning is exactly when the duty managers need to know whether to open, whether to accept bookings, whether wages will run, and who to phone when the card machine stops working. Without an operational lead in place, those questions get answered badly or not at all, and value evaporates in days — not through any failure of the insolvency strategy, but through the absence of anyone running the operation while the strategy is being formed.
In practice the division of labour looks like this. The administrator decides whether trading continues; the interim manager establishes whether it is operationally possible and then makes it happen. The administrator controls the bank accounts and approves spend; the interim manager builds the weekly trading forecast and works within it. The administrator handles creditor communications and any employee consultation obligations; the interim manager handles the staff on site, answers their questions honestly and keeps the team functioning. The administrator markets the business to buyers; the interim manager ensures that what a buyer visits is a credible, clean, trading operation rather than a demoralised one.
Reporting is where the two roles meet. An office holder needs evidence, not reassurance — post-appointment income against post-appointment cost, weekly, by site, with variances explained. A good interim manager produces that as a matter of routine, because they have run businesses where that discipline was the difference between control and guesswork. That reporting is what allows the administrator to make defensible decisions and demonstrate them to creditors and the court.
There is also a risk dimension. Trading in administration exposes the office holder to personal liability for post-appointment liabilities, and to criticism if the operation is run poorly. Having an experienced operator on site who understands licensing, food safety, fire risk, statutory inspections, insurance conditions and health and safety obligations is not a nicety — it is a direct mitigation. The interim manager's job includes evidencing that compliance remained intact throughout, which is precisely the record the office holder will need later.
It is worth naming what an interim manager is not. They are not a consultant producing recommendations. They are not a recruiter placing a permanent candidate. They are not a turnaround adviser writing a plan for someone else to deliver. They take the management role, carry the responsibility that comes with it, and leave on a defined date with a documented handover. That handover may be to a buyer's team, to a successor management structure, or into an orderly closure — but it is planned from the start rather than improvised at the end.
Finally, the two roles have different clocks. The administration runs to statutory timetables measured in months. The operation runs to shifts, deliveries, bookings and payroll runs measured in hours. An office holder trying to serve both clocks personally will always be pulled away from the strategic work that only they can do. Separating the roles is not a cost — it is what makes the trading option viable at all.
AJS Interim Management identifies and deploys experienced operational managers into businesses in administration, usually within days of appointment. If you are weighing whether an operation can keep trading, we can assess it and put the manager in to run it.