Interim President, International Markets — Scale-Up

Decision rights built to outlast the people who hold them

When an international business scales, decision rights tend to live in people rather than in rules. A strong market head negotiates latitude; a new one inherits it without knowing where its limits were; a new market arrives and nobody is sure whether it follows the old arrangements or makes its own. The Interim President, International Markets, is appointed to write those rights down in a form that survives when markets are added and when leaders change. The test of success is not whether the arrangement works while the president is present, but whether it holds when someone else is in each chair.

The mandate

The president holds executive authority and reports to the Board Chair. They define decision rights across the international markets and the thresholds local leaders keep, and settle what proof a market must bring for decisions on spending, capacity and control. Every inherited commitment gets their ruling: continued, paused or closed. Proposals that offload cost or risk onto a market without its consent will be rejected, as will investment cases that assume customers will come, leave dependencies unstated or skip the downside entirely. The president approves the leadership structure and how exceptions travel, arbitrates when the Board Chair and market leaders disagree, and decides how regularly the board reviews progress, exceptions and open decisions.

Eighteen months, tested by change

Before the first ninety days are out, the Board Chair and the president should have agreed the decision rights for each international market and the thresholds its leaders keep. Around month nine those rights should have been put through a real test, a change of leader or the entry or reshaping of a market, and the route for exceptions and the people responsible for them should have been confirmed in the light of it. By month 18 scale-up decisions should be running on the agreed rights, with a board cadence that no longer relies on the interim president being in the room.

Who this suits

Revenue of $755 million or more, 2,300 people and three countries is the minimum span we look for in your leadership. Your experience of buy-side M&A, cost transformation and turnaround will be examined; acquisitions in particular, because absorbing an acquired business is the sternest test of whether decision rights were ever written down. Strategy formation must reach level 4; running a P&L, setting an operating cadence and judging risk are each needed at level 3. You have brought a contested downside to a board chair without blunting it. You have refused funding when nobody could say who would adopt a change or what would happen if it went wrong, and then rebuilt the capacity to do the work properly. You are prepared to end a commitment over the objection of some market heads, and to be held to account for the full 18 months.

A short route: chair, case, board

Selection is short. In week one the Board Chair meets you on a confidential video link to talk through how you would design decision rights that survive change. Week two brings a working case with the Regional President. Week three is in person, with directors of the board. A response from us arrives in writing within four working days of each stage.