Plant turnarounds
Three sites taken from losses back to budget. Knows which early indicators a board should watch: breakdown hours, contractor turnover, and the gap between rated and achieved capacity.
Rajiv Mehrotra has spent his working life where industrial companies make or lose money: on the shop floor, in the kiln line, and in the monthly review where a plant head explains why the numbers moved.
He joined a large engineering manufacturer as a graduate engineer in 1994 and ran his first plant at thirty-four. Over the next two decades he moved through cement and building materials, taking on sites that were losing money and returning each of them to a stable operating margin.
From 2016 to 2024 he was Managing Director & CEO of a building-materials company with plants in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. In that role he led a greenfield capacity expansion from site selection through commissioning, reported to a board with a strong independent bench, and sat through every audit committee meeting as an invitee.
He now serves as an Independent Director on the board of an unlisted public company in engineering products, and is seeking one or two further board seats with industrial, capital-goods or materials companies, listed or unlisted.
His value to a board is practical. He can read a capex proposal and tell whether the commissioning schedule is honest, walk a plant and see the safety culture for what it is, and ask management the question behind the variance.