Family Firm Finance — Funding Growth at Lácteos del Altiplano

A four-round, advanced corporate-finance simulation set inside Lácteos del Altiplano S.A.S., a second-generation family dairy company in Tunja, Boyacá, Colombia (COP$96.000 millones revenue, 13% EBITDA margin, 410 employees, founded 1991). A national supermarket chain offers a transformational 3-year private-label contract worth COP$40.000 millones a year — a 42% revenue jump — but it demands a COP$22.000 millones plant and cold-chain expansion within 12 months and payment terms stretched from 30 to 75 days, trapping roughly COP$6.200 millones in receivables. Total cash requirement: about COP$28.200 millones against COP$5.500 millones of cash and COP$6.800 millones of annual free cash flow, almost all of it currently paid out as an ~88% family dividend. Playing the CFO, you (1) diagnose why a profitable, lightly-leveraged firm is cash-constrained — reading the balance sheet and cash flow past the income statement to see the working-capital trap and the three binding constraints of cash, covenant and governance; (2) design a financing mix across bank debt, equipment leasing, retained earnings via a dividend cut, and an outside minority equity investor, keeping leverage under the bank's 3.0x EBITDA covenant ceiling; (3) convert the dinner-table dividend habit into a formal policy that funds growth while building a bridge for the abroad-based sibling who depends on the payout and threatens to block any cut; and (4) reform governance — independent directors, separation of ownership and management, an audit-and-finance board remit, and a genuine founder transition from operator-with-veto to chair-with-defined-authority — then pitch the integrated package to the bank's credit committee and the retailer. The math rewards genuine, sequenced family-firm finance and punishes the five classic errors: income-statement myopia, control-at-all-costs all-debt funding that breaches the covenant, imposing a dividend cut with no shareholder bridge, cosmetic governance, and reflexive dilution before exhausting cheaper levers. Final KPIs track Liquidity Coverage, Financial Health, Family Trust, and Bankability against the COP$28.200 millones funding requirement and the 45-day deadline.