Interim Chief Financial Officer — Value Agenda

Not a caretaker finance chief

Some interim finance leaders are asked to keep the close on time and little else. This appointment is different. The Interim Chief Financial Officer holds executive authority to decide which commitments the business can still afford if conditions turn out worse than planned, and to stop the ones it cannot.

Nor is the job a modelling exercise. A downside case earns its keep only when it changes a decision. If every commitment survives the test, the test was too gentle; if none does, it was built to make a point rather than to inform a choice.

Building a downside case worth deciding on

In logistics and infrastructure services, commitments tend to be long and lumpy: fleet and equipment leases, terminal and warehouse capacity, service and concession contracts, multi-year technology programmes. Revenue, by contrast, moves with volumes and rates. A credible downside therefore tests commitments against lower volume, slower recovery of cost increases and tighter financing together rather than one at a time. The CFO's first task is to agree that case with the chief executive; the second is to put every inherited commitment through it.

Under the Group Chief Executive Officer, you will set the financial decision rules, including the value up to which country finance heads may commit without you, and decide the facts on which capital spending, operating capacity and financial control are judged. Under the downside case, each inherited commitment continues, pauses or stops on your word. You will block proposals that leave exposure parked with no accountable holder, and decline investment cases that ignore take-up, the other projects they lean on or the scale of possible loss. You will approve how finance leadership is organised and how issues rise, and settle disputes between operating leaders and the centre before cash is committed.

A record that has met a hard downside

The finance functions you have led served businesses with at least $460 million in revenue, 2,600 people and a reach of eight countries. Your experience of regulatory remediation, joint ventures and turnaround will be weighed, and in at least one of them your decisions should have had consequences felt by directors and by depot and terminal managers alike. Capital allocation is expected at level 4, with risk judgement, FP&A forecasting, and controls and reporting each at level 3. Your baselines have held when a chief executive pressed on them, and when the managers who run fleets, terminals and infrastructure assets did the same. You have withheld money from cases that could not say who would use the change or what it might cost, then rebuilt the finance capacity the work required.

Twenty-four months, and four meetings to begin them

Within 90 days there should be a downside case agreed with the chief executive, each inherited commitment tested for affordability and a person accountable for each. Around month nine, commitments that fail the test should already be paused or wound up, and finance exceptions should be travelling by one route rather than many. By month 24, capital allocation should be governed against the downside case as a matter of routine, and the finance leadership structure should hold without you.

There are four stages. The Group Chief Executive Officer opens with a private video call in week one; the Regional President takes week three, working a commitment through the downside case with you; the fifth week puts you in person before executives who each run a function; and the full board has the last word in the seventh week. After each, we respond in writing within five working days.