Restarting a factory after two years of war: the order of operations

I co-founded Gedion & Hizbawi Detergent Manufacturing in 2017, at 23. By 2021 we had grown revenue at roughly 45% a year, nearly doubled daily output from 9.5 to 17 tons, and were leading 25 staff and more than 40 laborers. Then, in June 2021, the conflict in Tigray shut the business down. It stayed shut for two years.

When I returned as general manager in June 2023, the company was not a smaller version of what we had left. It was a different problem.

The situation, honestly

Four things were wrong at once. Cash was constrained. Supplier relationships had lapsed. Competitors had taken the market we had built. And the workforce was dispersed, with many people carrying the effects of the conflict themselves. There was no outside funding coming, and no guarantee the business would recover at all.

When everything is urgent, the temptation is to work on everything. The more useful question was: what has to be true first, so that the next thing becomes possible?

First: cash

Every other move needed runway, so cash came first. We prioritized collections, negotiated extended payment terms with suppliers, and shortened the cash-conversion cycle. That let us fund the restart without new borrowing.

In parallel I built a financial recovery model to isolate the handful of cost drivers that actually moved the P&L. That model is where the eventual 37% reduction in total operating costs came from — not from cutting everything, but from knowing which costs mattered and which were leftovers from a business that no longer existed.

Second: the cost of supply

In the second to fourth weeks, we renegotiated contracts with our two major chemical importers. We were not negotiating from financial strength; we had none to show. What we had was relationship equity and cost-structure benchmarking — a clear view of what our inputs should cost and why.

Benchmarking turned the conversation from a request into an analysis. The result was a 26% reduction in input costs, and just as important, the supply reliability that the rest of the restart depended on.

Third: rhythm and customers

In months two and three, the work shifted to the floor and the market. We restored production rhythm, ran a reintegration program for conflict-affected employees, and tracked performance against explicit recovery targets. Productivity rose 18% in the first quarter of resumed operations. At the same time we rebuilt trust with distributors and re-priced against market rates that had changed while we were gone.

Within three months, 85% of our pre-war customers were back.

Why the order mattered

Each step bought the credibility for the next one.

Cutting costs before we could see cash clearly would have risked cutting the wrong things. Renegotiating supply terms before we could reliably pay on them would have been an empty promise. And going back to customers before production was dependable would have spent their trust twice — once when we disappeared, and again when we failed to deliver.

None of the individual moves was unusual. Collections, supplier terms, benchmarking, performance tracking: these are standard tools. The difference was treating the restart as a sequence of dependencies rather than a list of priorities.

What carries over

I now read every transformation plan the same way. Before asking whether each initiative is right, I ask what it depends on, and whether that thing is already true. A recovery model that isolates the few drivers that matter, a negotiation grounded in benchmarks rather than leverage, and a sequence built around dependencies — that is the playbook I bring to strategy and operations work.