Interim Regional Finance and Capital Director — Margin and Capital

Margin that would survive a normal year

Logistics margins move for reasons that have little to do with how well the business is run. Freight rates spike and fall, fuel surcharges lag fuel prices, volumes swing with trade cycles. A good year can flatter a weak network; a bad one can hide real operating gains. This director exists to answer one question with discipline: how much of the margin is structural, and how much would disappear when prices and volumes return to normal?

Why the answer moves capital

That distinction is not academic. Capital committed on the strength of a temporary margin buys assets, contracts and capacity that must be paid for long after the favourable conditions have passed. The director's analysis therefore feeds directly into which investments go ahead and which inherited commitments, resting on effects that will not last, should be paused or ended.

Powers of an interim executive

Reporting to the Audit Committee Chair, you will set the regional rules for finance and capital decisions, with clear thresholds for local leaders. You will set the bar a case must clear before capital is placed, capacity bought or controls tested across markets, and rule on whether each inherited commitment continues or stops. You will halt proposals that leave cost or risk with no accountable holder, and decline investment where the case leaves out take-up, linked programmes or downside. You will agree the regional leadership line-up and how issues travel upward, step in when the audit committee and business heads disagree, and decide how often the board sees progress, breaches and pending choices. That authority is what lets the margin analysis change outcomes rather than decorate them.

Three checkpoints across 24 months

The first ninety days produce an agreed margin baseline that separates structural margin from price and volume effects, with an accountable owner for each element. Around month nine, capital decisions should be tested against structural margin, and inherited commitments that depend on temporary effects should by then be suspended or closed. By month 24, structural margin reporting should be built into board and capital decisions, and the boundaries of local judgement should be written down where others can follow them.

A finance leader with a long view

You have worked across seven countries or more, in businesses with revenue of $605 million or above and 2,800 or more people, and you know which local variations are necessary and which have merely been protected. The Audit Committee Chair will weigh your experience of ESG transition, professionalisation and succession; ESG transition in particular tests whether you can separate a lasting cost or revenue shift from a passing one. Capital allocation is expected at level 4, with FP&A forecasting, risk judgement, and controls and reporting each at level 3. Your judgement should have been proven in a fleet or infrastructure business that had to keep moving freight while leadership changed.

Who assesses you, week by week

Your first conversation, in week one, is held by video and in confidence with the Audit Committee Chair. By week three the Risk Committee Chair will have set you a practical margin problem to work through together. In the fifth week you meet, in person, a panel of executives who each lead a different function, and in week seven the directors in full. Within four working days of each stage you receive our view in writing.