You are Julián Caicedo-Rosales, 42, VP New Markets at Ingelectra Iberia, an IBEX-Small-Caps engineering & power-systems group. You need board approval for Project Saturno — a €34M three-year bet that you believe will define the company's next decade. The CFO is openly against you.
The situation
Ingelectra Iberia is €820M revenue, 4,100 employees, with three divisions — Power (turbines & gen-sets, 56% of revenue), Industrial Automation (28%), and Engineering Services (16%). The board is reading the post-Inflation Reduction Act, post-CSRD landscape and knows the firm needs a new direction. Project Saturno is your proposed move: a dedicated business unit to capture distributed-storage and grid-edge integration projects across Iberia and Andean markets, betting on the post-2025 regulatory window. €34M of capex over three years, 38 new hires, a new partnership with a German systems integrator. You presented it twice. The November board meeting is your third — and almost certainly your last — attempt.
You have eleven days. The Executive Committee that pre-approves capex items above €15M meets in nine days. The board meets in eleven. Your project will not survive the ExCo without four of the seven members aligned. The CFO, Ricardo Olabuenaga, has been publicly skeptical for six months — "the cash flow profile in years 1–2 is unacceptable, the regulatory window is uncertain, the German partnership has a 40% counterparty risk." He is technically correct on the numbers and politically correct that you have not yet built the coalition. The CEO, Mercedes Larrazábal, is supportive but will not spend her credibility carrying Saturno against the CFO unless the ExCo arithmetic is already there.