Good morning. I know what many of you are thinking, because I would be thinking it too: another new leader, another set of promises. So let me start not with a promise but with a fact. Last year this company lost three of its largest clients, and revenue fell by eighteen per cent. I will not soften that, and I will not blame the people in this room for it.

The board has given me a clear mandate to turn this firm around. But a mandate is not the same as trust. It is precisely because the last few years asked so much of you and returned so little that I do not expect my legitimacy to arrive with the title on my door. It has to be earned, week by week, and I intend to earn it.

So here is how I will be judged. I am naming three priorities, and I am putting a date on each. First: we restore on-time delivery to industry standard by the end of the second quarter. Second: we win back at least one of the clients we lost, by the third quarter. Third — and hear this clearly — there will be no layoffs in my first year. Not only will we hold this team together, but we will rebuild it.

Let me be specific about that first priority, because vague targets are how trust quietly dies. On-time delivery has fallen to seventy-one per cent; the industry standard is ninety-five. By the end of the second quarter we will reach ninety-five — and it is that number, published every single month, that you should hold me to, whether it flatters us or not. I would rather be judged on a figure than on a phrase.

Before I change anything else, I am going to listen. For my first thirty days I will spend more time in the depots than at this desk. It is the people who load the trucks at four in the morning, not the consultants, that will tell me what is actually broken. A leader earns stature by understanding the work, not by announcing it.

You may assume that reversing a loss means cutting. Far from being the plan, cuts are the opposite of it. The savings we make by fixing delivery will go back into the fleet and into training — into you — not out of the door. That is a choice, and I am making it with decisiveness, not leaving it to drift.

And I will make myself reachable. Every month I will hold an open forum where any question, however uncomfortable, may be put to me directly. Never before has this firm been asked to trust a leader it did not choose, and I understand what that costs you. So ask me hard things; hold me to dates. I say this with conviction: accountability is not a threat to authority — it is the source of it.

You have heard ambitious numbers before, and you have watched them quietly disappear. Far from being a reason for more noise, that history is a reason for less. So I will promise you less than my predecessor did, and I intend to deliver more. What this signals is a simple discipline: say less, do more, and let the results speak.

Some of you will test me, and you should. When the first hard question comes — and it will — I would rather answer it with composure than with charm. I am not here to win you over with charisma. I am here to earn your credibility the slow way: by doing what I said, on the date I said it.

Never before has this firm faced a year quite like the last one. But a company is not its worst year. A company is what it chooses to be next. So let us be clear, let us be credible, and let us be consistent. That is the standard I will hold myself to, and it is the standard I will ask of you. Thank you.