Interim Country Managing Director — Cash and Capacity

Neither a cash squeeze nor a growth mandate

Read quickly, this appointment looks like either a cash squeeze or a growth brief. A pure cash mandate would defer every renewal and expansion until the balance looked healthier, and leave the next leader with a business that cannot grow. A pure capacity mandate would invest ahead of demand and hope cash follows. The Interim Country Managing Director is asked to do something harder: decide, commitment by commitment, whether each one earns its cash by building capacity the business will need, and stop the ones that do not.

The trade-off, worked through

In logistics, the tension is concrete. A depot expansion, a fleet upgrade or a new route consumes cash now and returns it only if volumes arrive and the business can serve them. Paybacks also arrive on very different timetables, so a decision that looks right on this quarter's numbers can be wrong by next year's. The judgement lies in telling a commitment that is slow to pay from one that will never pay, and in saying which is which before the cash has gone.

Reporting to the Board of Directors, the managing director decides rather than advises. You will set the country's decision rules, including the authority site and depot managers keep, and decide what cash, capital spending and control requests must prove. Inherited commitments continue or stop on your word, and any proposal that loads cost or risk onto a team that never accepted it ends with you. You will decline investment where the case leaves out take-up, what it depends on or downside. You will approve who leads what in the country, decide how issues rise, and settle disagreements between directors and depot or commercial heads before cash goes out of the door.

A managing director who has owned both sides

You have run a business no smaller than $345 million in revenue and 1,700 people, across three countries or more. The board will give real weight to your scale-up, integration and professionalisation work, and expects strategy formation at level 4 alongside level 3 in operating cadence, in risk judgement and in P&L ownership. Your grasp of logistics and infrastructure comes from calls that carried your name, including a commitment without backing that you halted before it did damage. Your judgement has held in a fleet or infrastructure portfolio that kept running through a change of leadership. You have withheld money from cases that could not say who would use the change or what it might cost, then rebuilt the management capacity the work needed.

Twelve months, and seven weeks before them

Within 90 days a baseline for cash and capacity should be agreed, with every inherited commitment weighed for its near-term cash cost and its strategic value. Around month nine, commitments that consume cash without building capacity should be stopped or frozen, with an accountable owner for each one that remains. By month 12, cash and capacity decisions should run through a single country cadence that the next leader can take over without a pause.

Selection takes seven weeks. It begins in week one with the Board of Directors, meeting you confidentially by video. In the third week the Regional President works through a cash-and-capacity choice with you. In week five, executives who each lead a function meet you in person, and in week seven the full board makes its judgement. You will receive our response in writing within five working days of each stage.