Interim Managing Director — Market and Operating Footprint Reset

Decide where the business can compete credibly

Build a fact-based view of performance across markets, offerings and operating units. Identify where headline revenue conceals weak economics or disproportionate management effort. Distinguish temporary underperformance from a business model that no longer supports the resources it consumes.

Make alternatives concrete

Develop options to focus, consolidate, partner, improve or withdraw. For each, explain customer obligations, transition costs, capability implications and cash timing. Challenge assumptions that a smaller footprint automatically creates a healthier business or that growth will absorb every structural weakness.

Bring decisions to the board in a form that makes trade-offs visible. Once approved, lead implementation through accountable managers and maintain control of the customer and operational consequences. Material changes beyond delegation must return for approval rather than emerge informally through local decisions.

The leader's credentials

Candidates should have senior general-management responsibility for a multi-activity or multi-location business, with evidence of reshaping scope and delivering the resulting changes. They need financial literacy, commercial judgement and the ability to lead teams through uncertainty. Experience must include consequences after the strategic decision, not only the production of an options paper.

Applicants should describe how they protected valuable capabilities and relationships while reducing or changing other activities. Sector-specific requirements will be assessed against the actual business, and broad experience should not be presented as universal technical expertise.

Maintain a truthful view during transition

Report the effect of changes on cash, service, revenue and people. Avoid double-counting benefits or treating costs as exceptional indefinitely. Address emerging problems quickly and be prepared to revise the sequence where execution evidence warrants it.

The assignment should leave a coherent operating footprint, clear responsibility for remaining activities and a realistic performance baseline. Handover must identify unresolved commitments and assumptions. Success is a business with a defensible scope and the capacity to deliver within it, rather than a smaller organisation that retains the same complexity or a growth plan that postpones necessary choices.