NE W S F E ATU RE PUTTING RIGHT THE WRONGS In the six months since FIDI Focus last spoke to CEO Yann Blandy, the Santa Fe Relocation business has had to face up to the challenges of COVID-19 and its Malaysia office failing its FAIM audit. Editor Dominic Weaver spoke to him about the failure, how coronavirus has affected the companys transformation plans, and what happens from here F ollowing its sale to Lazarus Equity Partners in September 2019, Santa Fe Relocation had no sooner embarked on a carefully considered plan to consolidate and transform elements of its global business than COVID-19 struck. CEO Yann Blandy and his team had to review what they were doing immediately. With operations in China, Santa Fe had early insight into the severity of the unfolding situation and swiftly initiated a three-point plan to mitigate the impact on the company. First, says Blandy, was securing the health of the business and its employees, with an immediate review of the approach to cash in the business and the safety of its working practices against the new background of the pandemic. The team began by taking measures to examine permanent and temporary savings, deferred payments and borrowing, to ensure there was enough cash in the company bank accounts to weather the storm and ensure our resiliency throughout the period. We identified what we believed we would need, and then went above and beyond, says Blandy. We wanted to make sure that we have enough cash and, simultaneously, changed our operating mode to secure the health of our employees and of our assignees. Second, Blandy put in place tools to ensure in a crisis that not only had wide regional differences, but was also in a constant state of flux the companys WW W. F I D I. O R G FF298 AugSept20 pp23-27 Yan Blandy.indd 23 Santa Fe Vietnam: when the COVID-19 crisis began, Santa Fes priority was securing cash and the health of its employees global businesses could monitor and respond in real time. Here, we were looking, essentially, at how markets were closing and reopening, all the variables around immigration authorities, harbours being opened or closed, and so on. That helped our teams to manage this landscape and how we could restart our operations in each one of those markets, he says. NEXT STEPS After taking these steps to secure the short-term future of the business, Blandy and his team began the difficult process of weighing up the possible impact of COVID-19 in the long term and, in light of this, re-evaluating its existing transformation plan. The company had already begun engaging and involving its customers, and consulted about 50 customers and other industry contacts to build a comprehensive picture of the outlook, reworking its original strategy over an eight-week period against a number of possible scenarios. We said the only thing we know is that we dont know and, based on that, we need to be able to manage the unexpected, says Blandy. So, essentially, we dont have a new strategy we have a set of hypotheses about what could happen and a clearly identified set of measures that we would put in place for each of these. While the exact scenario is uncertain, its clear that most elements of Santa Fes original turnaround strategy will remain, albeit with its YANN BLANDY, CEO OF SANTA FE RELOCATION 23 20/07/2020 16:00