Site turnaround: the first 5 decisions that matter.

A site turnaround is won in the first three weeks — not in the three-year plan. Here are the five decisions I make (or have made) systematically when I arrive on a struggling site, and why their order isn’t negotiable. By Mounir Telkass, founder of MT-Transition.

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1. Measure honestly, right away

On a drifting site, the numbers lie — rarely out of dishonesty, more often through an accumulation of small indulgences: OEE calculated on “open” time rather than required time, customer delays marked “in progress.” First decision: restore a raw, shared, visible measurement. It’s brutal and it’s liberating: you can only turn around what you can see.

In practice, this takes a precise form: I ask for OEE calculated using all three possible methods (open time, required time, net time) and display them side by side, without averaging them. The gap between them already tells a story — often one of a management team that has learned to present the numbers in their best light rather than resolve them. I do the same with customer delays: no “in progress” status, but a real, committed, verifiable delivery date. The first meeting where these raw numbers appear on the board is often uncomfortable — and that discomfort is exactly the signal that the exercise was necessary.

2. Secure the three customers keeping the site alive

Before any internal plan, I call the critical customers. Not to make promises — to listen and give a reliable date. A customer threatening to delist you costs more than a full year’s productivity gains. Customer trust is rebuilt with weekly facts, not with a PowerPoint plan.

In practice, I spend the first two or three days on the phone or on the road rather than in the site offices. The goal isn’t to sell a plan — I don’t have one yet — but to understand precisely what the customer expects, over what timeframe, and what they’re willing to tolerate in the meantime. This listening often changes everything: a customer who seemed ready to delist frequently accepts extra time if they sense a serious operator has taken charge and is communicating reliably. I then set a fixed weekly check-in with them, held even when there’s nothing new to report — silence worries people more than an acknowledged setback.

3. Choose three battles, not fifteen

A struggling site always has fifteen action plans — that’s often exactly why it’s struggling. Third decision: cut it down to three battles maximum, the ones affecting cash and customers, each with a named owner and a dated expected result. Everything else waits, explicitly.

The hard part isn’t identifying the three priority battles — it’s saying no to the other twelve without alienating the teams who were driving them. I always do this in a collective meeting, never one-on-one: every paused plan is named, with the explicit reason and the promise it will resume once the three priorities are stabilized. This transparency avoids the feeling of wasted effort and immediately focuses collective energy where it counts. In practice, on a site of 200 to 300 employees, these three battles almost always cover one quality issue, one throughput issue, and one organizational or social issue.

4. Put frontline supervisors back at the center

Team leaders are the first to be damaged by the drift: caught between contradictory orders, often bypassed. Fourth decision: give them back a simple ritual (short-interval control), a working escalation path, and hands-on training. A site holds together through its frontline supervisors — never through its director alone.

The ritual I reinstate takes fifteen minutes, standing, in front of the day’s indicator — not one more status meeting added to an already saturated agenda. What matters isn’t the tool but the discipline: the team leader must be able to say, every morning, what went wrong the day before and what they’re doing about it, without fear of being punished for flagging a problem. It’s often the first time in months that someone has asked for their opinion rather than imposing a plan built in an office. The escalation path works both ways: they can raise a blocker without filtering it, and I commit to responding within 48 hours, not three weeks.

5. Tell the truth about what’s next

Teams know things are bad; silence worries them more than the facts do. Fifth decision: say what we know, what we don’t know yet, and by when we’ll know it. Transparency isn’t a social risk — it’s the condition for turnaround. People fight for a plan they understand.

I systematically hold an opening meeting with the entire site — not just management — where I explicitly say why I’m there, what I know about the situation, and what I don’t know yet. This transparency often comes as a surprise, because it breaks with months of reassuring institutional communication that no longer matched what teams were experiencing day to day on the lines. I also commit to a schedule of regular progress updates, held even when the news is bad. A site that understands why an effort is being asked of it will deliver; a site kept in the dark about the severity of the situation wears itself out in rumors and distrust, which ultimately costs more than the truth, however uncomfortable.

What never changes, whatever the sector

These five decisions aren’t enough on their own to succeed at a turnaround — but getting them wrong dooms everything else. The first three weeks decide the next eighteen months.

I’ve led these first five weeks in very different contexts — a food-processing site with a hygiene breach, a metalworking shop in chronic underload, a plastics line losing a major customer over quality failures, an aerospace supplier under customer surveillance plan. The vocabulary changes, the indicators change, the regulatory constraints change. The sequence never does. You measure before you promise. You fund the next decisions with results already visible, not with trust requested in advance. You rely on frontline supervisors because they’re what holds a site together — never the director alone. And you close issues one at a time, in order, rather than opening ten fronts in parallel that never get finished.

The reason is simple: an industrial crisis is first a crisis of trust and priorities, before it’s a technical crisis. Teams almost always know what’s wrong — they’ve stopped saying so because nothing changed the last time they flagged it. The role of a transition manager isn’t to bring sector expertise the team doesn’t already have; it’s to restore, within a few weeks, the mechanics that let that already-present expertise take effect again: a shared diagnosis, a clear hierarchy of priorities, a decision rhythm people can rely on. It’s this framework, more than any sector-specific technical skill, that distinguishes turnarounds carried through to completion from those that, for lack of method, never are.

Someone at your company needs to make these decisions? Let’s talk.

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