Zenith Pharmaceuticals Nigeria
Amber, trending red
The situation
Month 12 of a 24-month contract. Adoption stalled at 56% against an 85% benchmark, with two of four sites effectively unlaunched. A statutory PAYE miscalculation had been open for three months, exposing the client to tax and regulatory liability. The executive sponsor had gone silent for four months, the Group CEO had been pulled into a product defect directly, and two competitors had reached his office.
What I did
- Classified the account against evidence: what made it amber rather than red, and the 30-day window before that changed.
- Reclassified the payroll bug as a compliance incident: containment inside 72 hours, named engineering owner, dated fix timeline, and independent client-side verification before it could be marked resolved.
- Built a 60-day sponsor recovery plan and read the northern-office blocker as a control and consultation problem, not technophobia, then offered the resisting HR lead a real configuration role instead of routing around him.
- Maintained a formal technical risk register with probability, business impact, owner and target resolution per item.
- Scripted a 90-minute executive business review that opened on accountability and closed on named metrics with dates.
- Set five hard preconditions before the ₦22M expansion conversation could reopen, and refused to relax them.
Where it was vs. the bar it had to clear
The call I made: a 90-day recovery sequence prioritised by RICE rather than by whichever stakeholder was loudest, moving modelled renewal probability from 35–40% to 70–75% by Month 15, with three months of proof points banked before renewal talks open, and a combined account value of ₦77M/year at full expansion.
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