Talent’s Portrait – Sébastien Gauchet
A long term relationship with a precious support.
“Since 2013 I have been in regular contact with Celine in Lincoln. While never being outplaced by Lincoln since then, I did appreciated support and advice from Celine who followed my career in China.”
“After leaving my previous company, Celine approached me April 2018 with a temporary assignment in Shanghai.”
“The company I now work for had to quickly change their local GM after they found out about some serious governance issues in the form of unauthorized payment remittances to third party with fake contract to cover it.”
The company was in the middle of relocating their Chinese manufacturing facility from Shanghai to ChangZhou.
Therefore my interim management assignment objective was:
- Stabilize the management team and avoid they would follow the previous GM
- Carry on the plant relocation without customer supply disruption
The main results achieved during the assignment were:
- Stabilize engagement of the sales team that represent 80% of china business
- Change of 7 out of 11 managers including HR and finance
- Reinforce governance process
- Revised the relocation budget especially the severance pay for workers compliant with China labor law
- Initiate legal entity transfer process for the plant from Shanghai to ChangZhou
- Hire and trained more than 100 line workers and supervisors in ChangZhou
- Plant utilities construction, transfer and restart of equipment and buffer stock to cover ramp up in less than 2 months”
Celine & Sebastien, audacious together.
“During the assignment Lincoln team acted my beacon to keep focus and the ear to test some of my ideas.”
“The board had been very satisfied of the result of the temporary assignment and proposed me to stay and take full ownership to finalized the turnaround initiated.”
“During turnaround we had to change completely sales team for 20% of our business, change nearly 70% of our suppliers, sue companies affiliated to former GM and in 2019 faced a sanitary crisis on our main market which reduced demand volume by 50%.
Now 2 year and a half after the the start of the temporary assignment the company business top line grow by 40%, bottom line is back in profitable territory. Profit generated in 2020 will pay off of relocation and restructuring expenses engaged during turnaround. Most importantly now the Chinese management team is loyal to the company and I can see everybody smiling and creative.”
Céline Laffin, General Manager Lincoln Hong Kong, and Sebastien Gauchet, senior Leader passionate about optimizing manufacturing set-up in China and enabling product & service value to Asian customers.