Most engagements fail in the first ninety days because nobody agreed what they would produce. Here is the sequence we run, why it is ordered this way, and what exists at the end of it.
The first question is not what is non-compliant. It is what could kill someone this month. Those are frequently different lists, and the second one waits.
Anything with a date — an ITA submission, a Tier II filing, an abatement commitment, a customer audit — gets handled first regardless of priority, because a missed deadline is a discrete violation.
Training people to a program that is about to change wastes the training and burns credibility with supervisors who notice.
Leadership patience is finite. Something tangible has to change on the floor in the first month or the engagement is viewed as paperwork by the people whose cooperation you need.
A program with no named owner and no date decays immediately. Assignment comes with the deliverable, not after it.
If leadership does not see a rhythm early, EHS never becomes part of how the business is run. The first pack goes out before there is much to report, deliberately.
Days 1 to 15 — triage. Site walk, document review, regulatory deadline inventory, open citation and commitment review, and a list of exposures that could produce a fatality. Anything imminent gets interim protection immediately rather than waiting for the deliverable.
Days 16 to 45 — build. Gap register with severity ranking, compliance calendar with named owners and dates, the highest-priority written programs drafted, and a costed capital list for anything requiring money.
Days 46 to 75 — deploy. Programs rolled out with training, records structure stood up, inspection and corrective action cadence started, and supervisors brought into the process rather than informed of it.
Days 76 to 90 — readout. Executive session in business language, the twelve-month roadmap with quarterly milestones, and the ongoing tier recommendation with a fixed monthly number so you can decide what happens next.
We manage it. That happens, and the triage phase is deliberately structured so that the highest-exposure items are known and being worked before anyone walks in.
No. The roadmap and everything built is yours, and some clients take it and run it themselves. Most continue because maintaining it is ongoing work, but that decision belongs at day ninety, not day one.
A site walk, access to documents, a named internal contact, and roughly an hour a week of leadership time plus the readout. Supervisor time comes during the deployment phase and is scheduled around production.
Yes, with the standard set centrally and deployment staggered. Attempting all sites simultaneously is the most common way multi-site efforts fail.
You get told immediately, not at the readout. That happens occasionally, and it is better to reprice the roadmap honestly than to deliver a plan that underestimates what the fix actually costs.
Twenty minutes to walk the sequence against your operation and tell you what days 1 to 15 would likely find.
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