Enterprise Margin-Mix Recovery Leader

The mandate

Revenue has expanded through long-term maintenance, project mobilisation and emergency call-out work, but group margin fell as scarce technicians moved between obligations without true cost or priority visibility. Contracts recover travel, standby, parts and overtime differently; account teams protect headline revenue while field leaders use premium contractors to avoid service failures. A profit warning led to the performance director’s exit. The group needs executive control of contract and capacity choices before peak maintenance season locks another weak mix.

The first thirty days require a contract-to-capacity view linking scope, service level, response, price, indexation, parts, travel, roster, subcontractor, utilisation, rework, penalties, cash and renewal. By day sixty, the leader must identify structurally negative work, avoidable delivery leakage, underpriced optionality and customers whose emergency pattern consumes capacity reserved elsewhere. The ninety-day window must reset bid, renewal, dispatch and exception decisions without abandoning safety-critical commitments.

Decision rights include stopping noncompliant bids, approving recovery plans within policy, releasing scarce capacity, setting contract-review thresholds and directing account-level evidence. The interim may require executive approval before accepting unrecovered emergency scope and may reprioritise discretionary work inside signed obligations. Contract termination, safety decisions, customer pricing beyond authority, redundancy, legal claims and capital investment remain with named executives and the board.

The assignment must leave permanent margin-mix governance across sales and field operations. The leader will appoint or prepare a service portfolio head, embed bid-to-delivery feedback and observe the successor lead two monthly contract portfolios plus one renewal and peak-capacity cycle. Handover will identify negative work, customer concessions, unpriced scope, scarce-skill bottlenecks, subcontractor dependencies, disputed recovery and decisions requiring commercial or legal authority.

The remit excludes directing technical safety, breaching service obligations, unilateral contract amendment, revenue recognition, individual performance decisions and treating technician utilisation as the sole margin lever. The leader cannot defer required maintenance, hide penalties, move cost between contracts or reject emergency work without understanding customer and safety consequence. Account owners, engineers, legal, finance and directors retain their formal decisions.

Why this seat is open

The departure left sales defending revenue, field operations defending response and finance reporting margin after capacity had already moved. Peak season makes delay expensive and simplistic cost cutting unsafe. A temporary executive can make bounded contract and deployment decisions now and transfer a fact-based mix discipline to permanent leadership.

What you will own

• Reconstruct contract economics across scope, price, indexation, response, parts, travel, roster, subcontractors, penalties and cash.
• Map scarce technician and engineering capacity to contractual priority, safety, customer consequence, timing and recovery.
• Separate structurally negative work from execution leakage, temporary mobilisation, investment and strategically priced entry.
• Chair bid, renewal, emergency-scope, dispatch and exception decisions inside delegated commercial authority.
• Establish recovery for scope creep, indexation, parts, travel, standby, rework, penalties and customer-caused delay.
• Report margin mix, capacity conflict, contract risk, customer concentration and decision latency to the board.
• Transfer portfolio governance, account plans, bid rules, capacity indicators and observed cycles to the successor.

Candidate qualifications

• Has led margin-mix or contract-performance recovery in industrial, engineering, energy or technical field services through profit warnings.
• Understands service levels, emergency response, standby, parts, travel, rosters, subcontractors, penalties and renewals.
• Can distinguish bad price, scope creep, execution leakage, mobilisation investment and strategic entry economics.
• Has challenged commercial leaders while preserving safety, signed obligations and critical customer continuity.
• Brings credible coordination with field operations, engineering, workforce, procurement, finance and account teams.
• Has handed portfolio recovery through live renewals and peak-capacity decisions to permanent leadership.

Non-negotiables

• Can maintain the Cape Town hybrid cadence with weekly contract and monthly field and customer reviews.
• Brings direct technical-service portfolio authority; generic cost reduction or sales operations alone is insufficient.
• Will not compromise safety, hide penalties, shift costs or use utilisation as the only margin answer.
• Has no undisclosed relationship with customers, subcontractors, parts suppliers, competitors or pricing advisers.

1. 49 words maximum. Which contract cost most often hides behind strong field-service revenue growth?
2. 49 words maximum. How would you distinguish strategic entry pricing from structurally negative work?
3. 49 words maximum. What must the successor demonstrate during a peak-capacity allocation?