The First Ninety Days

Abstract

Five practices set in order, from fixing the history before anything changes to measuring what was recovered. It is a quarter to eight on a Monday, and the finance director of a firm of some three hundred people has the first clear morning she has had since the year-end. The firm makes and services equipment for commercial kitchens. It sells through account managers to restaurant groups and hotels, and directly to a long tail of small independent restaurants; it runs a service division that bills engineers' time; and it holds a few dozen supply and maintenance agreements with larger customers, some of them many years old. She has read the first five chapters of a book like this one, or lived them, and she suspects that every one of the five leaks is somewhere in her ledgers. She has a notebook, a coffee, and a list of the firm's twenty largest customers. She does not yet have a plan, and she can feel the pull, in her shoulders, to write one by lunchtime and announce it on Friday.