Interim President, International Markets — Delivery (Business Services)

Cash now, capacity later: the trade an international president owns

Every international professional services business lives with the same tension. The fastest way to improve cash is to stop spending on things that pay back only in two or three years: new practice capability, senior hires ahead of demand, deeper investment in a promising market. The fastest way to build strategic capacity is to spend on exactly those things. Neither instinct is wrong, and each becomes dangerous when followed without the other in view. The Interim President, International Markets is appointed to hold that trade deliberately, market by market, for 18 months, and to hold it with executive authority rather than as an adviser.

Answering to the Investment Committee, the president agrees which decisions are taken centrally for the international business and which limits are left to each market. They choose the evidence on which money, people and control are governed across those markets, and they decide which inherited commitments carry on, which pause and which stop. A market proposal that offloads its expense or exposure onto a colleague who never took it on does not go forward. Neither does an investment whose case is silent on take-up, on what it depends on, or on what happens if it disappoints. The president decides how the international leadership team is shaped, and brings disagreements with the operating heads to a conclusion before any money is spent.

The judgement involved is finer than it first appears. One market may ask to protect a practice that has never made much money but anchors client relationships worth far more; another may be defending a habit that simply costs. Telling the two apart, and recording why, is most of the job.

The arc of eighteen months

The first ninety days should yield a market-by-market view that separates commitments protecting near-term cash from those building capacity for later, so the Investment Committee is choosing between visible alternatives instead of averaging them into something nobody quite believes. Around month nine, investment in each market should be passing through one consistent gate: proposals nobody will own stopped, and cases tested on take-up, dependencies and downside before money moves. By month 18 the international business should have a leadership structure and an agreed way of raising problems that keeps the cash-and-capacity balance in place without the interim president holding it by hand.

A record of hard trade-offs, tested in three weeks

You have made general management choices in business or professional services where waiting carried a measurable cost, in a business turning over $580 million or more and employing at least 2,400 people across four or more countries. The committee will want to understand your cost transformation work, particularly where you reduced cost without hollowing out the capability the business would need next. It will ask about integration, where two operating models had to become one under time pressure, and about turnaround. Your strategy formation should be at level 4; for risk judgement, ownership of a P&L and operating cadence, level 3 is the committee's mark. Once a call is made you remain answerable for it, down to closing the last cash or capacity exception it created.

Things then move fast. Week one is a confidential video meeting with the Investment Committee. The Audit Committee Chair then sets you a live case in week two, expecting you to read cash and capacity side by side. By week three you are sitting in person with the executive committee, discussing how your approach would land with the people who run the markets day to day. Expect our view within two working days of each meeting.