The First 90 Days: How Food Manufacturers Lose the Executives They Just Hired

A leadership hire that does not work out is usually described as a twelve-month problem. The reviews grow quieter, a search starts the following year again, and the story settles into a version in which the hire was not quite right.

That is not when it failed. In most of the cases I have closely watched, the outcome was set within the first 90 days, and the decisive moves were made by the employer, not the hire.

Plenty of industries can absorb a slow start. A new leader arrives, spends six weeks meeting people, builds a plan, and presents it at the end of the first quarter. That works when the business is a spreadsheet.

It does not work across a plant network. The lines run whether or not the new VP of Operations has found their feet. Peak season does not move. An audit does not reschedule itself. A capital project that was already behind is still behind on day one. So a new operations leader in food manufacturing is making consequential decisions in week two, often before anyone has told them what they are actually allowed to decide.

That gap between the decisions the role demands immediately and the authority that has genuinely been handed over is where most of these hires fall apart.

The mandate shrinks between offer and arrival.
This is the most common one in sponsor-backed businesses. A candidate accepts a role built around rationalizing a network or standing up a second site. Somewhere between signing and starting, the value-creation plan shifts, the capital is deferred, and the job quietly becomes holding the line. Nobody renegotiates it out loud. The new hire works out over several weeks that the mandate they accepted no longer exists, and they are now doing a job they would not have taken.

The incumbent team found out late.
I see this most often in family- and founder-owned businesses, where the hire has been discussed privately for months and is announced a week before arrival internally. The plant managers who have run those sites for fifteen years meet their new boss as a fait accompli. Nothing about that is recoverable through good intentions in week one. Authority that is not deliberately transferred is withheld indefinitely.

The decision rights never actually move.
A founder hires a COO because the business has outgrown what one person can handle, and then keeps signing off on line changes, shift patterns, and supplier terms. The title transferred, and the authority did not. The new COO spends ninety days discovering which decisions are genuinely theirs, and the organization spends the same ninety days learning to route around them.

They are measured by the last leader's numbers.
A new operations leader is brought in to change how the network runs, then assessed at ninety days against KPIs built for the model they were hired to replace. Early in a real operational change, some of those numbers get worse before they improve. If nobody has agreed in advance which measures are allowed to move in the wrong direction and for how long, the first quarterly review becomes an argument rather than a checkpoint.

These are not onboarding niceties. They are the conditions that decide whether the hire survives contact with the business, and I would rather agree to them at the briefing than discover them at the ninety-day mark.

Name the decisions that transfer on day one.
Not the responsibilities, the decisions. Which spend, which people, which sites, which supplier relationships. Write them down. If the honest answer is that some of them will move later, say so, because a candidate can accept a phased handover. What they cannot absorb, they must discover through trial and error.

Tell the leadership team early enough to matter.
The people who will report to this hire should understand the rationale well before the announcement, ideally with an opportunity to meet the finalist. That costs confidentiality and buys legitimacy. In a founder-owned business, I think it is close to essential.

Agree that what is allowed to get worse.
Before day one, name the two or three measures that may dip during the change, and the window in which that is acceptable. This single conversation prevents more failed hires than any onboarding program I have seen.

Put them on the floor first.
Not a week of headquarters decks. If the mandate is operational, the first fortnight belongs on the sites, on shift, with the people who will have to execute whatever comes next. Every strong operator I place expects this. Not every business offers it.

If a leadership hire fails within a year, the search is usually blamed, and sometimes that is fair. Fit discipline is my job, and when I put forward someone who cannot do the work, that is on me.

But a good number of these are not selection failures. They are a business hiring for a mandate that was not yet ready to be handed over. The hire is the visible event; the unreadiness was there before the search started. That is a better problem to find at the briefing stage than at the exit interview, which is why I would rather ask uncomfortable questions about decision rights up front than place someone into a role that does not yet exist in practice.

If you would like a 30-minute conversation about your leadership pipeline or a specific gap, use the button below.