Cerius Business Today: Recent Episodes
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Business is changing. Business Today talks to C-Level executives and business leaders about what they are doing to keep up with the ever changing business world.
On this episode of Cerius Business Today, Kristen has a discussion with a supply chain and operations expert, Michael Smith. They talk about ERP Implementation, the importance of working capital, inventory turnover rates and more.
On today's episode of Cerius Business Today, Kristen speaks with Interim Executive Bromley Beadle about the differences between a troubled company and the company in turnaround and how you can avoid being either.
On today's episode of cerius business today, Pamela and Kristin talk about how an interim executive can give a CEO more time for strategic initiatives.
On today's episode of cerius business today, Pamela and Kristin talk about how an interim executive can give a CEO more time for strategic initiatives. Full Transcript Below
SPEAKER: Pamela
I've actually had three conversations just in the past few weeks with CEOs about this exact same situation and some things are doing they've come to us saying I want to bring in an interim GM. Why? Because I don't want to be the one that everyone goes to with all the questions I've got to get out of that someone else it was. He'd want to bring in an operations expert and an interim CEO or part time CEO his case because of cash flow and just simply to get him out of the day to day. You've seen not before with clients what types of result, wait when we bring them in and what's the conversation with the CEO after the fact, they're relieved, they're happy. It's kind of like they've got four or five hats on the top of their head. And they're no longer having to walk around juggling the hats, a picture someone walking sideways and then sidestepping trying to juggle the hats on top. They're able to hand them off to someone else. You know I hesitated when I answered that question because it's different. You know some people are relieved. Some people are, they don't know what to do because people are coming to them anymore. They're going to somebody else or they're worried. Oh my gosh you know am I going to become irrelevant. So there is an adjustment period for that. But again if you look at that person is in there to help you. And that's really the underlying reason why you brought that person in. They are there to help you, not to make you irrelevant not to you know take all the questions it's to give you more to be more time to be strategic to really take your company evaluate where you are today and know what next steps need to be taken because nobody has time to do that anymore because they're so involved in the day to day. And I know I get that way too, I'm so involved in day to day I I barely have time to think about oh my gosh our strategic plan you know we implementing it or are we executing and or you know shall we start planning for next year or I just saw something in my industry I need to be taking a look at more closely I don't have time for all that this gives you all of that time and so much to do with we actually had cut down a 30 million dollar manufacturing firm. The CPI was the original founder that built it up and kind of got into a rut and had gotten through that the team had needed to make some changes in the leadership team. And was it was a tough grueling thing to make those changes because those employees have been with them since the very beginning and he was struggling with that but yet they were continually issues going on. He wasn't sure that he wanted to be the CEO anymore and was thinking of selling out of the company or all of the company. Wasn't sure what to do so decide to bring in an interim president in the time tested out and see how that went. And it was interesting, having that individual make some of those tougher decisions be more of the day to day interface with the employees and help mentor some and figure out some of the leadership gaps and make the changes. He was having fun again. He actually enjoyed the business again not running the day to day. But as you said this weight had been lifted all shoulders, he was able to be more strategic and actually started talking some competitors and found a competitor in it and ended up doing some acquisitions. It was enthused and energized instead of sailing. He ended up growing the company.
It's amazing when you have more time how much you can do for your company. I mean you wanted to grow, you wanted to be successful but if you're so caught up in the day to day you're never going to get there. So yeah you've got to give herself a little bit of time. And these people that have put in these CEOs that have put in an interim president or an interim managing director or interim general manager, they've found this time, they've actually grown their company or we even have some CEOs that literally they've owned a company for so long whether it's privately owned or family owned there's nobody to step up and they're just burn out. So you know they can now step aside and take a breath of fresh air let somebody else run it and then when they feel like it OK they want to get involved again and the cool thing about it is usually the interim CEO or the interim presidents in there, they're going to wrap your company up. So while you're taking a breather and really readjusting and then you know getting a new perspective on where your company is in the industry and what you want to do with it, somebody is growing it for you. So by the time you get back it's up 10 percent. Profitability is good. So it's actually really good good place to be to have your time as well as somebody in there running it for you.
SPEAKER: Kristin
I'm going to throw a curveball at Pamela.
SPEAKER: Pamela
We may need have the edit team at it out a whole big thing of silence here, starting little steps because it's tough to think about bringing someone else in to run the company, no matter how burned out or tired you are. So start with one thing. And there was one hat or one thing that you do that you could bring someone in either on a project apart from time basis to take that off your plate what would it be?
SPEAKER: Kristin
Operations because operations takes most of your day. So I mean with all the things going on in the day to day stuff that happens and especially if you're the one that they always go to ask questions. So absolutely that would be it.
SPEAKER: Pamela
You came up with that a little too quick. what I'm currently giving up finance, you can be the company's finance person for a very long time and as a privately held business I've always enjoyed that part of it and I enjoy numbers. But what I have realized is as much as I can do that and enjoy that I, I enjoy being client facing more. I've forgotten how much I enjoy that part of the business and when I started with this business doing that and by getting handing it off to someone who definitely can do it better. I'm amazed at how much more fun I'm able to have and do the things that I enjoy not that I hate doing the finance part of it. But it's a bit of something off. It's a weight off my shoulders. So even just starting with little I'm not quite right up someone come out I'm still having I am having fun, I'm not ready to have someone else come in and take over the business for us. But just starting in the little fights of what am I doing that probably is not the thing that I should be doing. I can't do it but there's something else that I want to spend more time doing, whether it's spend time with my family or spending time with our clients.
SPEAKER: Kristin
You were growing your company. I mean really sitting back and thinking, it takes thought takes time to really figure out the best path for your company and if you're never having that time your company then is growing.
SPEAKER: Pamela
And we'll leave it with that as to how an interim bringing an intern whether it's a CFO, CEO, operations, sales manager think about how much time if you're not being the one who's solely responsible for the sales team anymore and I think Phil thank you as well you may get a bigger Christmas gift around the holidays from your sales team if you're not the one running it. Bring me an interim or fractional executive who can help take that off the plate and help you have fun in your business and get it to that growth that you know it is capable of. We're certainly here to help. We can be reached at info@ceriusinterim.com.
On this episode of business today, Pam and Kristen talk about why interim management is every CEOs secret weapon.
Full Transcript below:
SEAKER: Kristen
And as you scale a company you really can’t do it without people and talent which is why everyone is such in a rush to get the right talent in the right places with large scale companies to grow them. We’ve got everyone in place including our leadership team and then John walks in the door on Friday morning, my number two, my right hand and says.
SPEAKER: Pamela
I’m leaving. Everyone has experience that at one time or another.
SPEAKER: Kristen
My heart sinks if it’s not going into heart attack mode.
SPEAKER: Pamela
It happens.
SPEAKER: Kristen
And this happens everything from John decides he’s leaving as of Monday, he may offer me two weeks’ notice. I have two weeks to get someone else in place. I cannot go without my right. Without a right hand what do I do?
SPEAKER: Pamela
You know it’s interesting. We all need to not be blindsided by this because think about the talent market right now. It is so tight. Talent is in such demand that no matter how well you know your employees. Somebody can come in and steal one right out from under you. So yes you want to take very good care of your employees that they don’t do that but sometimes money talks and they’re going to leave no matter what you’re doing for them. So you have to be ready, you have to have a solution that you can quickly implement to be able to fill that position, should something like that happen.
SPEAKER: Kristen
Personally I think that every CEO and their succession plan, it should be kind of like a trust or a will if anything happens call my attorney. They’ve got everything, you ever see on needs to have in case of anything. You’re Cerius. Call their number. I’ve talked to Cerius. I know exactly what they know my company. They know my leadership team, they know everything I need. Call them in case of emergency and fortunately that doesn’t happen. We get the phone call at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon that says my CFO or my CEO just gave notice, they gave me two weeks’ notice. How quick can you get someone in your training, we’ve had them in there by Tuesday Wednesday. We can absolutely interim management can be used for those cases but there’s a number of other scenarios.
SPEAKER: Pamela
Absolutely. Absolutely. So another one is you want to promote someone, they’ve been really good in their job but there’s no one to succeed them. They have no one they can step up to take the roles of a sudden, you leave them in that position. That’s true. That can happen and what can happen from that scenario is that person will leave because they’re not getting promoted so you don’t want that to happen. So you have to make sure you have some kind of succession plan in place to be able to move people around or you have a scenario where that person really needs to go back, like they really meant to go they were meant to go a year ago but you didn’t do a thing about it. Well you need to do something about those people because all they’re doing is hurting the growth of your company.
SPEAKER: Kristen
And that’s a tough one because we all have their sacred cows or otherwise. We all have someone, we look at our leadership team, you know either the company and most the time we here. My company has outgrown them. And that’s a really tough move because there’s two decision points there. One, how do I replace them with someone who is the right person and what I do with this individual? Sometimes you can upscale them. We’ve done shadow programs where we’ve brought in let’s say an interim CEO to work with the operations manager or director of operations coach then gave them the till the toolkits worked with them for six to 12 months and they were actually able to step into that role and be saved. Actually I love that story as I manufacturer about 15 million and that individual is still on board and that CEO comes in every year as their strategic planning works with the team. In other cases they’re not the right person, they’re in over their head and they can help you work through how to face them out, place them somewhere else but really it’s how to replace them? how to get that right person and profiling that right person? they carry it on and interims can be used from shadowing helping through transition situations like this. They can come in and assume the role on an interim or fractional basis and they really don’t need much onboarding, the typical onboarding. It’s not weeks, it’s not days.
SPEAKER: Pamela
literally. Yeah it’s not quite ours but literally we have gotten an engagement on Monday. They’ve called in the clients wanting. In fact this particular case it was the CFO was for public company by the way. And in five days we had all the contracts signed. The interim had been selected and on Monday they started. I mean it’s easy, it’s quick and the thing is it’s a very experienced person that can hit the ground running. You don’t have to wait to train them and they typically are like chameleons that where they go into a situation and they automatically fit into your culture, your leadership team. So they work well with it so you barely know that there’s somebody new that’s working with your team. I mean it’s really does work well.
SPEAKER: Kristen
We’ve had situations where we’ve had an interim step in and a CEO brought us in an interim stepped in and it was an interim CEO that had hired us, brought the interim CFO in and after a couple of weeks the interim CFO was talking with some of the team and the team didn’t realize that it was an interim CEO or interim CFO. They had no idea since everything was so smoothly and they were integrated quite a bit with the team. So we’ve talked about interim management can be used from sudden departures to like someone to depart the company and that’s it’s a tough thing to do. Sometimes you really do need someone there to help you kind of help you through it and make sure because there’s a lot of fear in that. Absolutely fear is probably one of a number of things that keeps us from making tough decisions that we need to make as business owners. You mentioned you want to promote someone and maybe they don’t have all the skills or there’s no one to replace them interim is great with that. Pamela I know you’ve talked a lot about project work.
SPEAKER: Pamela
Yeah, there’s a lot of times when you’re missing a particular expertise and I’ll never forget this one of the corporate companies I used to work with that I was in sales and marketing and my boss came to me one day and say’s I think we want to I think we want to go into the international market. What did you get us there? And I’m like What? I had never done any international business before. So again instead of taking me, this is the advice I would have given my boss I didn’t give it to him back then because I was excited I got to do something new but I will tell you I probably hurt the growth of the company because I didn’t do it as quickly as somebody who’s had that experience. So I see companies today where they’re missing, they’re doing acquisitions for the first time and they don’t really have that person that knows how to do it, knows what to look for, knows the due diligence, knows even how to integrate the two companies once the acquisition is finished and you get somebody with that experience because so smoothly as opposed to using your existing team to try to do something that they’re just not used to. Could they step up? Sure. Well they make mistakes? yes lots of them. Will they be the best you know doing the job? No. So why risk that and risk the time get an interim where they can very quickly get up to speed and get it done for you.
SPEAKER: Kristen
I know that story a couple of times now and I’ve never asked why did your boss choose you? You had the most international, not experience but the most time your passport Hey you travel internationally you should know the international market? Why do he pick you?
SPEAKER: Pamela
I have no idea. I had a good relationship with my boss. I was producing, I did well in the company and I think he just, like we all do. Somebody doing something really well in the company there, they’ve been promoted a couple times, they look good and they’re like if anyone can do it, it’s Pamela or whoever your person is in your company and we just assume they’re going to be able to take it run with it. Again, sure. That’s exactly what I did but we lost time, we probably would have grown faster I mean there’s all sorts of things that they could have done besides put me in that position.
SPEAKER: Kristen
And looking at interim management or fractional and with what we do it’s how quickly we can assess the situation, work with the CEO to figure out what they really need? how quickly they need it and the results? Where do you want to be three and six months from now? Set this job description aside, we appreciate that a whole lot of time and age are spent on that and they pulled it out and they freshened it up but it’s not about failing a sea, it’s about that catalyst to help that company scale. So as we’re looking at different leadership gaps that we may have as we’re looking to Skyler company whether it is a sudden departure, someone who you’d like to depart the company, what you’re promoting too quickly, you want to promote someone, you don’t have anyone to backfill, you need that help with succession planning, there’s any number of areas that really makes interim management that CEO secret weapon to come in. What do you want to call paratroopers, parachute hers in any number of ways an interim can step into an organization assimilate quickly and be that secret weapon to help you scale.
SPEAKER: Pamela
And the main reason really is to get you results quicker without the risk of making mistakes because you really want person to step in, takeover, get whatever it’s done, whatever it is, whether it’s a project, whether it’s filling a role on a more permanent basis, whatever the reason is that you’re bringing in in the interim you know the cool thing about it is you’re going to get results. You’re going to get goals met the end of the day because again they come in very quickly and they hit the ground.
SPEAKER: Kristen
I love that, no wrong hires. An interim [not understandable] you’re not hiring them, we’re knocking the wrong person and hey if it works out and they’re great. There’s always the opportunity to comfort them and get them on board in the company but it really helps mitigate the risk of all of those wrong hires. Most of it because we didn’t know exactly what we needed to begin with and so we got the wrong person, we’ll say that for a future episode one of our favorite topics. Thank you for joining us today. Cerious business today. Do you have any questions or comments? you can send email and info@ceriousinterim.com. or visit our Web site. Have a great day.
To learn about how Cerius Interim Management can help you and for more information on interim executives, please visit our home page by clicking here.
On this episode of Cerius Business Today, Pam and Kristen talk about the importance of learning from your peers and other items they Wished they knew when. And Later Kristen speaks seasoned Interim CMO Whitney Vosbrough explains the importance of finding the 'why' of your business. He shares his tips for creating and delivering a powerful marketing message that resonates with people.
On Today's episode, Pam and Kristen talk about how to build an advisory board. And later in the episode, Kristen speaks with Jed Daly about peer groups without agendas.
On this episode of Cerius Business today, Pam and Kristen talk about how the gig economy can fill talent gaps. Later Kristen speaks with the Alex Jewett, CEO of Right Left Agency on leveraging the gig economy in her business.
On this episode Business Today, Pam and Kristen are talking with Managing Partner of KSJG, Larry Gregson about, a CPA’s ABC’s. Included in this podcast:
- The best time to do tax planning.
- Pass through income and tax deductions
- Things every business should do to be financially strong.
On this episode of business today Pam and Kristen talk about how companies can leverage the gig economy to fill talent gaps and how every organization can grow by changing the way they think about hiring.
On this episode of Cerius Business Today, Pam and Kristen talk about how you can use total talent management to get stuff done in your business. And later Kristen speaks with productivity expert John Denn on how you can make your days more productive.
On this episode, Pam and Kristen talk about the difference between sales hunters(people who bring in the business) and sales farmers(people who grow the business) and why your business needs both.
On this episode of Cerius Business Today, Pam and Kristen talk about Sales Hunters, masters of not taking "no" for an answer and how a business owner can motivate them.
On this episode of business today Pam and Kristen talk about business partnerships and what you need to be looking for in a business partner. Also in this episode, Pam leads a discussion on compensation ideas for board of directors and advisory boards.
In this episode, Pam and Kristen talk about marketing lessons learned! And later in the podcast, Kristen talks with Brad Grob about marketing in 2018, including content marketing.
Today Pam and Kristen talk about outsourcing for your business and later they discuss how you can create a contract that is effective, as well as present value if you’re an interim executive.
Today Pam and Kristen talk about how Cerius Executives has been using digital marketing and their marketing innovations lab to create more leads and increase sales. Later in the podcast, Kristen speaks with two marketing executives about how CEO's can find the best marketers and how they can be kept accountable.
On this episode of Cerius Business Today, Pam and Kristen talk about the benefits of delegating to your team. Later in the episode, Kristen has a discussion with Brad Gord about why/when a CEO should think about delegating to sales manager.
On this episode of Cerius Business Today, Pam and Kristen discuss how they deal with the day to day stresses of being an entrepreneur. Also in this episode, Kristen talks with fellow entrepreneur Cassandra Miller from See Jane Go from the nation’s first women-driving-women ride-hail platform.
Today Pam and Kristen take you on a ride into the world of Advisory Boards. They help you answer essential questions like:
1) Why your business needs an Advisory Board?
2) How will you benefit from one?
3) How to make an advisory board for your business
Working with Private Equity A large number of executives in our network have had longtime, successful relationships with private equity firms. They have worked with them in a number of ways, including: * Project-based: Due diligence, SME, first-100-day plan * Interim-based: A wide variety of work based on unique or pressing needs * Full-time: Stepping in as part of the new leadership team or supplementing the current one
Where most executives see private equity firms as a potential client or employer, we’d like to recommend a new perspective: taking another look at these firms as partners. To learn more about how you can partner with private equity and nurture your own private equity relationships, listen to our latest podcast, in which we talk with Mark Gartner of Clearlight Partners, and Steve Gast, a seasoned Interim CEO. Some of the topics we cover in the podcast are:
- The current landscape of private equity
- What do private equity firms look for in executive talent?
- The pros and cons of working with a private equity firm as an interim executive
- The rising need for experienced executive talent in private equity
- How to identify the right private equity firms for you or your clients
Mark is always looking for great executives to partner with. For a further discussion, you can contact Mark directly: Mark Gartner.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I am joined today with Interim Operations Executive Felda Looper. Felda, welcome! Thank you for sharing your expertise with us.
Felda: Thank you for inviting me.
Kristen: So Felda, I would like to begin. One of the top questions we get asked is who are these Interim executives? They seem like paratroopers that are sitting around waiting for that call to come in and help the CEO or business owner with their company for whatever amount of time and any given number of days a week. So one of the top questions we get asked is, “How did you end up as interim executive?”
Felda: Well a little bit of background about that is I have a very varied background and have done a very many things to include starting a retail business and making a profit the first year when I was in my twenties, and I have stood up with a team in the embassy in Iraq, organizing a company that’s growing at an exponential rate. So processes are very much a part of what I do. I’ve been doing this for thirty years and I really like organizing and processes, so it became very clear to me that being an interim would be an ideal situation for me at this point in my career.
Kristen: So a lot of CEOs here said, “Well do you have processes and procedures?” And it almost feels like a necessary evil of the books sitting on a shelf that every company needs. Describe some of the work that you do and the impact that it can have on an organization?
Felda: Well first of all, if you don't have organization processes in place your organization can’t be efficient. And I mean it’s just like anything else, you don't start to bake a cake without a recipe. And when you don’t [2:02] have at the top, if the leadership at the top realizes that there are problems or they don’t have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the organization, then there start to be fires that need to be put out. And you start to get chaos then you’re in trouble. And so I find that whenever basically the times that I'm called in, they’re generally over the hump of not having caught the problem in the first place and it’s now tumbling downhill and they need help.
Kristen: So if I’m a CEO and I find my company putting out fires right and left, sounds like Rome is burning. Clearly that’s the time I recognize I need help because the pain is extreme enough, but it makes a lot more sense to get the help before it gets to that point. The challenge is you don’t always recognize the symptoms until they get really bad. What are some early warning signs that you would advise to look for that might be an indication of you’re really missing some clarity in your company and you could use some outside perspective?
Felda: I would say that in my experience that… And usually when you’re in there that’s passed that time. But I found that, leadership, if they are listening to their managers and directors and there are signs that things are not being as efficient or things aren’t getting paid or whatever their processes are that are inefficient, if they’re not being paid attention to from the get-go, then that’s when they start to grow like wildfire out of control, and it's basically a matter of paying attention. Really paying attention.
Kristen: So just to that. Anyone who works in a company can say and be frustrated with, “there’s no accountability.” No one’s clear on what they have to do, we keep having issues and I wish that my team were more accountable. What are a couple of things that as a leader I could do to put up in place to maybe improve that accountability?
Felda: Well first of all whenever people make assumptions and you don’t have standard operating procedures, knowing exactly who is going to do what, then you’re going to be in a trouble. Because standard operating procedures in my professional opinion are paramount in having an organization that runs efficiently and effectively. That is sort of the big [4:42], when you just assume everybody knows what they’re doing because you know what happens when you make assumptions. And with that standard operating procedures which I’m… that’s my big thing. If you don’t have standard operating procedures, you will not be efficient. Bottom line.
Kristen: So I know you recently went in on an assignment and in a very short period of time helped the company document. They’d gone through quite a bit of turnover in the past couple of years. Now it’s one of those things where anyone walking into the company there’s no manual. They were operating, it was like operating equipment with no user manual. So in a very short period of time, I think you have them with at least 40 processes. What was the technique that you used that was so effective in doing that in such a short period of time?
Felda: Well basically, it took me the first couple of weeks to figure out where their problems were, where the issues lie and to go in and to be an interim operating officer when there are no operating procedures in place was the first smack in the face. Because if you don’t have your system, your processes mapped out, you don’t know what to do. And when you assume that somebody knows what they’re supposed to do, here’s your job description, here’s what you’re supposed to do in a job description, that’s fine, you know what’s expected of you. But when you don’t have a standard operating procedure for what you do then and map out your processes, then you kind of take it on the fly then building your plane as you’re flying it. What I did when I went into that last organization is I literally map each of the processes with the process owners. Put the paper on the wall and easily walk right through all the processes, this is what happens. It’s amazing how many people have their hands into that process, like when I got them into the room to map the processes were not on the same page with each other on how things are done. And after the hour or two that it took us to go through those processes, with everybody saying well this happens, well no that happens first and then this happens. It’s amazing to see the dynamic once we’re finished with it, now we have a standard operating procedure in place that everybody can agree on. Everybody understands how it works and then you know exactly how things are working. I love to see the dynamic when I do that. It’s surprising what little time anyone has to put towards something like this, but as they see the time it can save, they love it. They just want to jump in and do it.
Kristen: Oh, they do.
Felda: Yeah, well one of the processes we mapped was a process for procurement and payment. And the amount of time, we were able to save at least, 35-40% of the time during that process by making some changes within their IT and making some changes within the actual process itself, and the director was extremely pleased. And that was just one of the processes with the time and money we were able to save was just mapping of one single process. So those then become cumulative across an organization when you make each of those processes efficient. That starts to add up. It’s truly amazing especially when they’re daily processes.
Kristen: Yes.
Felda: Things that are done on a daily basis. Not getting paid and simple things like that that can be avoided by just having good processes in place. And the great thing is they’re scalable as the company grows. That’s -
Krsiten: Absolutely. So If I'm looking to, I’m a business owner, I’m not quite sure to bring someone in to help yet, but I want to start a ground zero and maybe try a couple of things myself. What are some low hanging fruit I as a business owner that I could work through with my team in order to help improve operations?
Felda: Well I think probably one of the things I would do is I would look where my pain points are and see what’s causing those. First of all don’t dwell on what’s causing on them, look at how to improve them. If you’re sitting in the forrest and can’t see the trees because you have zero objectivity about what you do, then that’s when you need somebody from the outside to come in and help you have some objectivity about what your problems are and how to deal with them. There’s one company you and I both know that we’ve talked to about sometimes I think I could do this myself because I know best about my company, and you do know your company the best. You know that your core competencies, but when you’re having issues about how well you’re functioning and how efficient you are, I’m sorry you can’t, by definition you can’t be objective about your own work. So that’s when looking at what your problems are, you get stumped, then at some point that’s when you’re going to say I need some help, need that objectivity.
Kristen: I can’t agree more. We see that constantly. As business owners it’s easy to be myopic and if I know my company best, I am the best person to solve the problem which is you know is very counter-intuitive thanking to what reality ends up being. Any other top pieces of advice from all of your years and decades of operations experience that you would give to a business owner?
Felda: Of course. Where do I start? It depends upon certainly what your issues are. But I think having, as I said a little bit earlier, having your finger on the pulse of your organization and being really sensitive and tuned into what’s working and what isn’t working. And to be able to have the faith in your directors and managers to be able to tell you the truth about where the problems are. Not being a “yes” person, but a good director, a good manager will be able to tell you where your problems are. And if you’re not getting that from your people it’s an issue because when you’re having problems, then if you can’t rely on the people within to be able to give you that and you have got issues then you have a problem. So I think that listening to your people, wondering if they like coming to work. Are they enjoying what they do? What’s going on in your organization? And sometimes people are reluctant to let the leadership know but good leaders will know that and they will be able to then direct “OK where are our problems, we have an issue we need to deal with.” No, that’s hard. That’s because you need to be open to asking the questions and open to receiving the feedback. Which is [11:37] - If you’re going to ask the questions, you’ve got to be able to get the answers and also you have to make an environment where you are accessible, where you are approachable and that you are open to “we have a problem.” Because you can’t fix it if you don’t know what’s broke.
Kristen: Fantastic advice. And as common sense as some of this is we can in our businesses, but sometimes we just need a reminder. Thank you so much Felda. I appreciate your time and sharing your expertise and experiences with us today. For those of you listening, feel free to join us on our next episode of Cerius Business Today and enjoy.
Kristen: Alright, Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with interim executive Don Labowsky. Don, thank you for joining us today. How are you?
Don: I’m doing very well. And yourself?
Kristen: Fantastic. What are some things you’ve found and were able to leverage the internal resources in order to make that a smooth transition? I understand that you met all of the timeline goals, all the budget goals and still got this entire transaction done. How is the impact with the internal team and being able to leverage that with your skill set? Because it’s never just one person.
Don: No, no it’s never just one person, and certainly I was just part of a team and I only had the supply chain piece; there were many other pieces to this successful transition. But I think that the big thing is communication; being open and honest with people and setting expectations and setting timelines, and saying this is what needs to be done in this amount of time and let people go do it. And I was very lucky that the team rose to the occasion and did all those things when they needed to be done in the correct order and were able to achieve all the goals that were given to us.
Kristen: Fantastic. What are the attributes of the company? You were really with a great team. What were some of the attributes that you think helped make it so successful?
Don: Well they had a very, very dynamic Chief Operating Officer/ CFO, the person that was in that role was incredibly engaged, incredibly detail-oriented; very, very positive. And they also had a CEO that they had brought in about a year ago who came up with this whole fibbit, had the experience, had been working with several different companies in both markets. And had the courage and strength to really suggest this and get board approval and to move forward with it. So they had a very, very strong visionary and the number two person was a very, very strong operator, and that’s what I think was key to that transition being so successful.
Kristen: Fantastic. I know it went about as well as any transition possibly could go. Looking at some of the others you mentioned you stepped into, what were some of the more challenging ones then, and what you did to turn them around?
Don: One was I was asked to take over as President of a company. It was about a 12 million dollar company, had been bought by a larger company and after the sale they realized that the books were cooked basically, and the owners of the company that was purchased were all fired. And there was roughly 300 customers that had to be informed that they had been overbilled for years, that had been informed that we would make it right and that we would want them to continue their business. So you had a very big challenge going after the customers and saying yes I realized I’m the new guy, I realize the company did not bill you properly, we’re going to make it right, but we’re also going to ask you to keep with us and continue to buy from us, services in this case. And you also had to deal with staff that felt like criminals because all were unwittingly part of this. They did not know what was going on. It was all kind of done by a very small group of people who modified information after it had been sent in by the individuals. So they all kinda felt like they were not worthy and they were part of the conspiracy as one might say. But ultimately what happened is we lost no customers through this process, and the staff was brought around and they eventually figured out that hey we’re not the source of the problem and they stayed on board. We were able to turn it around. That company was then again sold to another company in less than a year.
Kristen: Don I have to say when things are going wrong I want you on my side.
Don: [laughs] Well, I guess I like the adrenaline rush of walking into a firefight, you never know what you’re going to find.
Krsiten: We hear that a lot. We’re looking at CEO’s who are possibly looking to transform their company and make some type of a pipette or they’re in a very challenging situation that needs to be turned around. What are your top 3 pieces of advice for that CEO?
Don: Well first of all I think engage everybody in the solution. No one person even at the top knows what’s going on in all aspects of the business. So you’ve got to engage everybody and you’ve got to focus on solving the problems, not reacting to symptoms. Too many people just focus on the symptoms and really don’t want to find out what the underlined reasons are why certain things are happening. And I think the next point would be to really quantify everything, you’ve got to get away from feelings and gut urges and whatnot and break down the numbers and figure out what can you measure. And if you can’t measure something, figure out then how to measure it especially if it’s important to the business. And if you can’t measure it, then leave it out for a little while, at least for the first round trying to figure out what to do. And the most important thing though is to really take that zero-based budgeting approach. Forget about what you have been doing. What you have been doing got you into trouble somehow. We don’t know how, but somehow something you’re doing got you into trouble. So what would we do if we did business from scratch? How do we start over? And what would we be considered to be important, and what would we not consider to be important, and really look at those critically and leave behind any of those things that you know “we’ve always done it this way” or sometimes people call them sacred cows or protected areas or something. You really can’t have any. When you walk into an urgent situation, you cannot have anybody who’s off-limits or beyond the scope of what the turnaround project is.
Kristen: Don, thank you. It’s difficult when you’re CEO or business owner, you’ve been in your company for so long, you really become myopic. So that outside perspective you offer is tremendous. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise, and your experiences, and feel free to join us in the next couple of episodes of Cerius Today, and again Don thank you for all that you’ve shared.
Don: You’re welcome. Thank you for the time.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today by Interim Operations Expert, James Stewart. How are you doing today, Jim?
James: I am doing very well. Thank you, Kristen.
Kristen: Fantastic. Taking all of these challenges into account, you’ve got a CEO who knows that things can be working better. They may not be falling apart, but knows that they could be working better. What are the top 3 pieces of advice you would give a CEO when it comes to distribution operations, supply chain management. What are the top 3 things they should look at?
James: Oh my goodness. I think one of the first pieces of advice and it seems kind of obvious, but it was really an aggravating factor in this particular situation, was the amount of initiatives that the company was trying to accomplish all at once. They had a primary manufacturing facility that was undergoing some very serious production issues at the same time they were rolling out and changing their executive staff. At the same time they were trying to integrate. They purchased another company on the east coast at the same time they tried to purchase other companies around the world at the same time they were trying to implement the ERP role over, and bring all of the entities up on that. And that’s just a math full of things for an organization to execute, so I think it was very difficult to adequate progress on all those. And that’s everybody that’s involved with that. So that’s my first advice and self-retrospection would be is it realistic to be doing all these things? Or should these be sequenced in an order? You know, get this part done and start that and save the math and take a little bit longer. Sometimes the slow way is the fast way and in this particular case, I think we tried to go very fast on quite a few topics and it was difficult to get them all done and we’ve had scheduled slips on some of those initiatives. They just unfolded as we had hoped and that’s just the reality of having too many things on your plate. You might not be able to get it all done.
Kristen: I hear that a lot. Prioritize the initiative. Any time you try and get too much done, you end up getting nothing done.
James: Yeah, so if later the organization assumes precision and execution, I mean these people aren’t out to be CEOs because they’re not smart. They’re smart, high-performance people. They’ve been recognized for their contribution and they may not just be a winning manager for this. Surrounded by people it’s hard and its hard working and it’s insightful and intuitive and clever and efficient as they are. So they might say “well if everyone, is like me I’d get all this done.” Everybody is not like you. And it’s a lot more complicated when you get down 2 layers in the organization and it takes time to sort through this stuff. And add a little bit of bandwidth and time flexibility, so that you can make sustainable effective changes as opposed to “hey, we implemented the system but now it doesn’t work because we forgot to do some stuff.
Kristen: Jim that’s tremendous advice. We see that quite a bit from that perspective. Any other last-minute tips that you’d like to offer our audience?
James: Last minute tips. Well I guess the one that I would throw out there and I’ve been self-serving for Cerius and people like me, is that you’re going an interim executive route is a very easy way to get some high-level of expertise in an area of problem and do it a really low risk patch. So my particular assignment lasted a year, or almost a year, and it could’ve lasted 3 months and been shut off just as easily, and so anybody who’s been thinking about getting some expert help here, it’s easier to go and put it in place and see what the path forward leads to that it is to, you know, have to make a huge commitment like you would with a permanent hire. So don’t hesitate, go out and get some help on board, see where it goes and then you know just set expectations or this is a trial assignment, that sort of thing. It’s a great way to get additional perspectives into your management. It’s a great way to get local flair. It’s a great way to get access to some experiences that you don’t have to do it by investing in a full-time person for a long period of time.
Kristen: Jim I couldn’t agree more. I appreciate your time and sharing your expertise and experiences with us today. Our audience, feel free to join us on the next episode of Cerius Business Today and again Jim thank you for joining us. We’d love to have you back.
James: Thanks Kristen. It was fun.
Kristen: Alright, Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with interim executive Don Labowsky. Don, thank you for joining us today. How are you?
Don: I’m doing very well. And yourself?
Kristen: Fantastic. We’re going to start off with some easy questions here. Probably one of the questions we get the most from CEO’s, they have a tough time imagining that these couple of executives are available whenever they are needed. Who are they? How did they become an interim executive? Can you give us a little background on you and how you ended up doing interim executive work?
Don: Ah sure, and it’s kind of a funny story. I was actually helping, trying to help somebody else get a job with a particular company. I took the CFO of a local manufacturing company out to a job to see if he had a spot open for my friend who was a marketing person and he said he did not. But what they had was an opening for an interim product manager, they had their product manager leave on a very important project six months before it was due to be introduced and it needed to have the engineering finished, prototyping done, FDA approval done, and get it set up at the trade show all within six months. All when their project manager left to go to a competitive and they were really stuck. And so I said that well I can do that, and I went in took charge, and got hired by them obviously took charge, and got the engineering done, got the prototyping done, got the FDA approval introduced to that trade show in New Orleans and that product went on to be a core product for them for 14 years.
Kristen: Well that’s jumping into the deep end.
Don: Yup [laughs].
Kristen: Do you typically get brought in for similar types of challenges? Let’s see the range that you’ve seen in interim executives?
Don: The challenges are all over, and I think it’s again these are situations where the company is in some type of a transition. In that they have a high urgency need, they have limited time, sometimes limited cash, sometimes there’s legal issues involved, sometimes somebody left who was very important to the process and I think that they have a very high urgency need but it’s only a temporary need. And they expect to be able to, once they get through this transition period they expect to be OK. That’s where I think interim executive shine.
Kristen: One of the questions we get is how’s an interim executive going to be accepted by the interim team. How does that transition both coming in and out? Especially when there’s a very strong family-oriented culture in the [2:28] company. How do you trust them when you start there as well as when you’re leaving?
Don: Well I think the staff always has a feeling that something is going on despite the fact that management may try to downplay or even sometimes hide the need for these transitions. Whether they’re in trouble or whether somebody left, or other situations. I think the staff often knows. I’ve found the staff to be very receptive to having somebody from the outside come in, and actually they’re very, very willing to talk about what they think needs to be done, which is always one of my rules is to engage people from the top to the bottom in whatever the solution is needed because everybody’s got their own idea. They’re been watching it for years, they knew that something was going to go wrong, or they knew that something needed to be done and I found them to be very receptive.
Kristen: Fantastic. We tend to get the same feedback is they’re waiting and willing to bring someone in with open arms. That’s not on. When you go in, I know you’ve got a very strong engineering background, very strong project management as general manager, when companies bring you in and projects have a short timeline, there’s a high potential for error. And they’re typically off-course and off-track when you walk in. What are some of the common things that you see them not doing right and you’re able to do a course correction?
Don: Oh boy. I think that there’s several things. I think that sometimes companies get stuck in a rut doing certain things certain ways, and you can ask them, “Well if you were doing things over, how would you do them differently?” They’d say, “Oh, if we were doing things differently we’d do it this way.” Well why not do it that way now and make it a course correction. So you have to come in and expect to use what I call a zero space budging approach. In this regard we’ve always done it this way. If the only reason someone can give you why someone is doing a particular action is that “we’ve always done it that way,” then you immediately know that something needs to be investigated. I think the other thing is to always look at what the impacts are. There’s a pain point somewhere and you have to be able to find the impacts where they’re feeling it. Are they feeling it in the cash flow? Are they feeling it in the sales? Are they feeling it in the overtime? Are they feeling it in high customer returns? And then to be able to separate the difference between problems and symptoms. A lot of people will come in and say, “Oh if we fix the symptom we’ll be fine,” but you may not fix the underlying problem. So I think you’ll have to be able to go in there and always be able to differentiate between the problems and the symptoms.
Kristen: Great advice. We say that quite a bit. I know you recently had an assignment where the company was going through a major business pivot, completely transitioning the company. At Cerius we’re seeing that a lot. We’re seeing it in the marketplace, we’re seeing it in the number of clients. One of the challenges that we have from CEO’s is “I know a certain number of my employees are going to be on board and they’re going to get it, and another percentage are going to fight it every step of the way. Especially taking into account your recent assignment, how do you convey the messaging to the employees and to the team to have them part of that pivot?
Don: We have to make sure to communicate what’s going on and why it’s going on, and how it impacts them individually. In the most recent case where a company did make a major pivot, sold off their entire revenue stream in order to allow them to go to a different market. The people who were left running that particular area were obviously going to be losing their jobs, and so you had to work with them, communicate with them, be very open and transparent, and also work with management to give them the incentives to stay. So there’s the financial incentive to stay and I think we were in our most recent engagement, we were to keep everybody on board. Nobody left early, and they stay motivated and engaged through the entire process.
Kristen: That’s impressive. I’m guessing few companies can say that when they’re in that type of a transformation. What are some of the challenges you see when companies are making that kind of a pivot? Not just with the employees, but with the organization as a whole.
Don: Well it’s really remaking the company. It’s trying to build the airplane or change the wings while you were in the air. You’ve got to continually generate revenue. So I was in charge of supply chain, so we continually had to produce the product and build the generators and ship the concentrate and buy all the wrong materials; all while this change is going on. So we also had to be concurrently setting up what was happening in the future. In this case they wanted a west coast contact manufacturer set up which we found and got one set up in Salt Lake City, as well as turn the rest of the equipment and the assets over to the buyer who happened to be in Atlanta. But this all had to be going on while still paying the bills. And that’s where I think where the challenge comes in.
Kristen: Thank you so much for sharing your expertise, and your experiences. Feel free to join us in the next couple of episodes of Cerius Today, and again Don thank you for all that you’ve shared.
Don: You’re welcome. Thank you for the time.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with Interim HR Executive Scott Coolidge. Scott, thank you for joining us today.
Scott: You bet, happy to be here.
Kristen: Fantastic. Scott looking at from your perspective of what companies are most challenged with and the improvements that they can make, even if it’s just the little things, what are 3 pieces of advice you would give a CEO?
Scott: Well you know I have to say this Kristen, I mean having them associated with, and this won’t be a surprise to any CEO, having been associated with the world of HR, big companies, small companies – it’s all around leadership. You know, who you select to put into leadership roles really at all levels of the organization. I don’t care if they’re supervisors, mid-level managers, directors, or executives. So often the default position is to take the person who’s your best technician, best technically who has grown up through the organization and, you know, selected them into these leadership roles. And often they’re simply not well-suited for management or leadership roles. That’s not to say they can’t be developed into that, but often times it’s a situation where they’re just not effective leaders and building out the selection process in order to identify and put people into leadership roles at all levels, I would say is the most critical thing that any CEO and management team could do. So that’s number 1, and I’ve seen that over and over and over again. Number 2 I would say that it’s around the, I’m going to call it the performance management framework right, and what I mean by that is really from two perspectives. What are you focused on in terms of overall business performance, what are the metrics? And how does that translate into the performance management process that you used for employees in order to get people to focus on the right things and have them working that optimal levels in order to achieve their personal objectives and those of the organization and building alignment between business objectives and people objectives. And to me that goes right back to the leadership issue because the most significant issue, I don’t care what kind of a performance management framework you have, if you don’t have managers who are capable of providing feedback on a regular basis. Look we all know business particularly in this environment changes almost every day and therefore the performance that you’re expecting from people at all levels is going to change constantly. You have to have people in place who are effective at providing feedback, both positive and negative, and getting people to change direction and encouraging them and having the right mechanisms in place to reward them. And that’s the third part of it. The third thing is taking a look at your reward and recognition programs. So many businesses, big and small, particularly small ones that are trying to grow to that next level. Taking a look at how you pay people: base compensation, bonus compensation, and equally important I would argue are recognition problems that you have in place because everyone knows that people want to be recognized and paid for doing a really solid job. And so having the programs and practices in place that allow your effective leaders to pay and recognize employees is absolutely critical. So those are probably the top 3. Although as you touched on just a minute ago, the other thing is communication and I can’t tell you how often I’ll walk into situations where I would just say employee communications are just not that effective. They aren’t clear, they aren’t consistent and they aren’t regular enough. So oftentimes I’ll find myself working with a CEO or a leadership team or a HR person to kind of clarify and effectively execute a solid communications stretch. Does that make sense?
Kristen: Absolutely. I’m sure that anyone listening is nodding their head and saying yes I completely understand I’ve been through this. Well thank you so much Scott. I appreciate your time and sharing your time and expertise and experiences with us today, and joining us. For those listening, feel free to join us for our next episode at Cerius Business Today and have a great day.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with Interim HR Executive Scott Coolidge. Scott, thank you for joining us today.
Scott: You bet, happy to be here.
Kristen: Fantastic, that’s a good one. You mention the word change a couple of times, especially that retention of employees. Now you recently did an assignment where the CEO was looking to shift the organization in order to remain competitive realizing they needed to get more products and services, but in order to deliver that to clients they needed to adjust the organizational structure of the team, and kind of needed some help with change management, and working through that and communicating it to the organization in order to enable that. Can you give us some highlights of what the situation was and how you were able to help impact some successful results?
Scott: Sure, I’d be happy to Kristen. And this was my latest interim assignment, and this was one that I had some of the most fun with. Basically, this situation was a new CEO stepped in, had a situation where they had had a significant crisis in their business within an 18-month period for coming on board. And they had righted the ship for most part, but found themselves in a situation, she found herself in a situation where she knew that the competitive environment had changed dramatically and knew that she had to reposition the organization in such a way to allow them to be more competitive on a going-forward basis, and she needed to structure in such a way that allowed her more freedom to get out in the market, work with her customer base, build potential technology alliances, and so she needed to have a structure that was more efficient in order to allow her to do that. I helped her conduct an organizational… she brought in a consulting firm to do the organizational study, but my primary role was working with her from a change perspective to determine what needed to be done from a structural standpoint and then most importantly to help her figure out what needed to be done in terms of communications to the organization and communications to the executives that were involved in this change in order to retain them and produce this effective structure on a going-forward basis. So specifically I helped her finalize the organizational structure, it had a concerning impact on a number of the existing executives, so I worked through with her how the very specific conversations she needed to have with the impact of executives and helped her get through that in an effective way, so at the end of the day she didn’t lose a single executive, repositioned the business for success in the future, and helped her as well with a communications to all the employees in the organization so that they understood why she was doing what she was doing, what the impact was going to be on them as employees, and what the future would hold for the organization. And I’m very happy to say that through all of this, I’m going to keep my fingers crossed as is she, that so far, knock on wood, she hasn’t lost a single person in the organization and it looks like we positioned them well for the future.
Kristen: That is tremendous. Especially in the current environment that we’ve had with recruiting and retention as you mention that’s a challenge for so many companies, and I think you hit on the sticking point is communication, and when any type of transition, any type of change going on in the company, communication is priority number one to make such a big impact. Well thank you so much Scott. I appreciate your time and sharing your time and expertise and experiences with us today, and joining us. For those listening, feel free to join us for our next episode at Cerius Business Today and have a great day.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with Interim HR Executive Scott Coolidge. Scott, thank you for joining us today.
Scott: You bet, happy to be here.
Kristen: Fantastic. One of the questions we get most often from CEO’s and business owners is how is it that someone of this caliber is sitting around waiting to help me with my company. They don’t quite understand the makeup of interim executives and how they’re available and when they jump in and out of companies. If you don’t mind giving us a little bit of your background and how is it that you ended up becoming an interim executive and why?
Scott: Oh great question Kristen. It’s pretty simple from my vantage point. I’ve had a 35-plus year career, almost exclusively in Human Resources. About half of that I was with large consulting firms, Towers Perrin and Hey Management Consultants, and the other half was in corporate roles in HR and various capacities. The latest of which was the head of Human Resources at Freddie Mac. And I got to a point in my career where I wanted to shift and change priorities in terms of life and career and so I left Freddie Mac and launched a career that basically allows me a lot more flexibility to manage my priorities, and what I look for and what I’ve found so exciting about interim opportunities is I look for interesting business situations, I look for client situations where they have significant human resources issues and where I can add some value, and so far I’ve found that these interim roles really fit that bill very nicely.
Kristen: It’s a good thing that you shifted to that. I know you’ve helped a lot of companies. Looking at the type of companies that you step in and lend you years of experience to, human capital is often the most important part and most overwhelming part of the organization. What are some of the common situations that you get brought into, especially looking at a small to mid-size business?
Scott: That’s another great question Kristen, and what I’ve seen so far is that typically even though my background has been with Fortune 500 types of companies, as I’ve stepped into these interim roles, it tends to be small to medium-sized businesses. Usually they’ll have a human resources person there, but that person tends to be more administrative than executional with respect to the programs that they already have in place. And typically what I have found is that the organization is in a situation where they’re trying to grow or have grown, and the number and complexity of human resources issues has grown dramatically. And what they’re looking for is somebody who’s been there and done that before, and then exposed to situations that their current staff just simply hasn’t been associated with. So they’re looking for an advisor to help them think about the situations they find themselves in, retention of staff, engagement of staff. They might have some pro-dramatic issues around leadership development or performance management or change management. And so they’re looking for somebody to tap who’s been there, done that and can give them some advice around what to do, when to do it, where to invest their time, and what the implications are of doing that to their business operations, and frankly to their bottom line. And that’s what’s been so interesting for me.
Kristen: As a business owner, CEO it’s hard to know when you need to bring in that external help. Often you don’t do it until, not that it’s too late, but it’s past the point when you should have or when it would’ve been most helpful and productive. What are some of the symptoms I should be looking for as a business owner in my organization to raise my head and say “wait we really need some outside assistance here.”
Scott: Well that is typically what I’ve found to be the situation. Quite honestly you’re exactly right. Hindsight being 20/20, I think a number of CEO’s that I’ve worked with or leadership team members wished they would have done it a bit earlier. And you asked about symptoms, typically it’s a spike in turnover; that it is certainly one element. The second element is that they’re just not getting the performance that they’re looking for. They’re not growing as fast, they recognize that part of the problem is leadership issue and they know that they need to upgrade their talent but they’re just not quite sure how to go about it and what to do in that regard. The other symptom that often presents itself is that they’re having trouble recruiting and retaining the talent that they need in order to get to the next level. Again, they’ll bring some people in, they think they’re moving in the right direction but then the new people that join turn over fairly quickly, and they’re trying to figure out why that’s the case and what they need to do to resolve that. The other thing that happens quite often is that they’re running into some financial difficulties. As a matter of fact, one recent situation that we were involved with simply was their revenue had become, had plateaued and their expenses were rising and they needed to figure out what to do. So in that particular situation we had to come in and take a look at their total award, expense, compensation, recognition programs, that kind of thing. Figure out what needed to be changed in order to help them control expense while at the same time of being able to retain and engage the people that they have on board.
Kristen: Thank you so much Scott. I appreciate your time and sharing your expertise and experiences with us today and joining us. For those listening, feel free to join us in our next episode Cerius Business Today and have a great day.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with Interim Operations Expert, James Stewart. How are you doing today, Jim?
James: I am doing very well. Thank you, Kristen.
Kristen: Fantastic. It’s not an easy situation to walk into. Not only has the company been acquired but now they’ve got someone who’s stepping in on an interim bases. What were a couple of things you were able to do kind of quickly to make an impact there and let them know that you are there to help?
James: So I have talked about our successes on the inventory front which is something we can look back at and say we have significantly moved and needled there. What should I say? This team had three warehouses of product all in the local vicinity and the decision had been made prior to my arrival to buy all inventory required for 2016 and 2015 to make sure there wasn’t any shortfall in inventory which wasn’t issued a year before. As a result the inventory processes were very aggregated. They weren’t used to running so many remote locations. They weren’t used to having that amount of inventory and it became really evident in just inventory integrity ability to know where a product was and able to do things fundamental, things like cycle counting. So when it became obvious that there was a big problem and in which as we started [1:29] it was, we basically had to throw that recipe out and come up with some significant and customized tools to address the inventory. So what I contributed to that was literally to sit down, look at my skill set on Excel and problem solving ability and just say ”okay, lets step through a problem solving process,” which wasn’t a normal thing for the people that were working there. Let’s define what we are trying to accomplish, let’s define parameters, let’s do some testing, lets develop some hypotheses, lets test those. And basically came up with a whole set of inventory management tools that allowed us to ultimately improve the quality of the inventory understanding and reporting to, the last I think we got it a 100 percent compliant over the course of the year. So that was a significant improvement from where they were.
Kristen: I’ve been hearing that a lot from company CEOs lately on they’re are growing quickly, lots of people are in that decision making process and their inventory is misaligned and the problem just keeps growing and growing each quarter. What are some of the things that contribute to inventory issues that are kind of the first things that a CEO can take a look at if they see that problem growing?
James: Sure that’s a great question. In this particular case there were some real roles and responsibilities issues that were unclear. Meaning that in the beginning when this West Coast company was a wholly-owned entity, all the decisions regarding purchasing and supply management, were all made by a small team of people that sat in the same building. When the company was purchased, they started for efficiency’s sake moving some of their core functions back to the headquarters with the idea that there would be [3:27] there and they would be able to get better performance over time. But those roles and responsibilities were never really rewired to where everybody knew what was going on. So there was confusion on, you know, things like who ordered how many, what and when and when are they supposed to arrive, there is a confusion on how to manage the receipts and what warehouses they should go into and this confusion on who was doing the physical receipts, who had the receipts and the quick books as a ERP kind of system and they had a receipt in the overall ERP system as well. So you know there were these processes that has come apart and weren’t defined and torn apart. They were spread across job descriptions and so it got to be a comedy of errors on who owns what. I don’t think that’s identical. Meaning if you are getting similar observations from other organizations it’s that there is not one person in charge of this thing called inventory performance across a multimillion dollar company and it’s got to be well defined, well-orchestrated, and well-tended to make it work effectively.
Kristen: When you sit down with the CEO who is having these issues and have complaints, what are some of the questions that you ask in order to really help understand what status of the situation is?
James: So we went through a whole organizational design of how should the west coast company, as a sub entity of the east coast parent company, how should these fit together. And it required significant work and definition organizationally, roles and responsibilities wise and even get into bit of what are the mission and vision and, you know, the operating strategies of the sub entity, and how should those fit together? Those are not straight forward conversations for a lot of people. They haven’t been, even C-level executives haven’t been in a positon of going through complicated change, they’re not familiar with the requirements for clear job definitions and clear process definition and clear understanding of roles and responsibilities and expectations, and how to get people to live into that. So that’s the first piece, like what are you trying to get done? Where do you want this organization to go? How can I help move that forward? So that was the first half of my assignment was to undergoing that assessment and getting confirmation from the management team that the direction we want to go and we all have a great aim and we think we are going to make this set of changes. Potentially it could have happened a lot quicker than that but you end up in a situation where there is a lot of turnover going on in the headquarters, there’s a lot of issues that they are solving back there so it became somewhat difficult as a remote organization to solve those things especially in such an interdependent discussion. I couldn’t make independent decisions on how the organization bought to work and so to engage the primary staff was a challenge for me.
Kristen: I appreciate your time and sharing your expertise and experiences with us today. Our audience, feel free to join us on the next episode of Cerius Business Today and again Jim thank you for joining us. We’d love to have you back.
James: Thanks Kristen. It was fun.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today by Interim Operations Expert, James Stewart. How are you doing today, Jim?
James: I am doing very well. Thank you, Kristen.
Kristen: Fantastic. So I know that you’ve recently come out of an assignment where you were the interim Director of Operations. One question that we get is how does someone end up being an interim executive? How is that you were available to step into this company on an interim basis for probably like a month, and be their interim Director of Operations. Give us some background on how you ended up there.
James: Sure. So I spent the majority of my career in a Fortune 100 company. You know over two decades worth of time and in that time I was able to, you know, go from being an engineer to all the way up to a Business Unit Manager with one of their divisions on the west coast. I separated from that company during one of their early retirement packages and at that time realized that I still wanted to be working and so ended up doing and getting connected with Cerius Interim Executives. Threw my hat in the ring with them, so to speak, and this assignment in particular resulted in that connection quite a while later. At the same time I was doing, also had my own consulting business where I was doing the same sort of work for a variety of different clients and in this case it was very convenient to have Cerius come over and say hey we got a client you might be interested in, would you mind helping out in your local area.
Kristen: When you look at operations consulting, what types of situations have you worked with and when are you typically brought in?
James: I think there’s a couple different factors that would lead up to an assignment like this. One is where there is operational underperformance and they have some specific issues they are trying to address and so they are trying to bring in some talent that they might not want to employ on a regular basis or just a permanent basis, but they need some expertise to come in and help out. Another way would be where they feel there is a hole in an organization and they need somebody to feel it in and in this particular assignment that I have just parted from, it was actually a combination of the two. The organization was underperformance from a revenue and profit perspective over the year prior to my coming on board and at the same time there were clear operational issues that they were needing to address, there knew there was a lot of improvement to be had, and so they wanted somebody to come on board, be a local leader for the organization and make significant improvements on their operational performance vectors.
Kristen: When you step into the company who are having some of those issues, what are they saying? What are the pinpoints? What are kind of the symptoms they are experiencing in an organization? Because I’m sure many of them don’t say “Gosh, we have operational efficiencies, we need them fixed.” What are some of the pain points you see going on?
James: A motto I use a lot is, it’s got a technical name called socio-technical systems. But regardless of that title, it means that you really have to look at things in a business, from three perspectives. One is a business perspective, what is going in the business, and why is there a problem. Another one is a technical perspective and that is what are the workings inside the organization that are out coming together? And then, there’s also social aspects as well. So you have people involved in the middle of all that. I think that if I look at a particular situation I [3:47] company is that there were issues across all three of those vectors. Some of them were inter connected and some of them were a little bit independent. So on the business side, the industry that this company was in was having a bit of a tankage going on from a revenue perspective. Unit sales were up, revenues were down, so the average selling price of the products was dropping much faster than they had expected when they bought the company. So that’s the bottom line performance that was, you know, needed to be addressed. On the technical side of things what you got was… so this was in a west coast smaller business acquired by an East Coast bigger business. The level of process and business maturity on the West Coast is significantly less than the East Coast and particularly East Coast was operating off a year olds ERP system that give them business information that they weren’t able to get from the West Coast. The West Coast was a quick book based system and so that the interfacing between the two companies on just things like manager reporting and financial reporting and the amount of work it takes to get the type of business intelligence were just two different systems hand in hand. Finally on the social side, the West Coast people were a younger group of people, less average time in position, interesting mix of millennial and then there was also some old timers – old timers meaning old timers in the West Coast company. They were actually middle aged people that were actually kind of setting their ways relative to the type of company they joined when they joined the company. And then here comes along an acquisition by a company ten times as big and the culture started changing and there were difficulties on that front.
Kristen: I appreciate your time and sharing your expertise and experiences with us today. Our audience, feel free to join us on the next episode of Cerius Business Today and again Jim thank you for joining us. We’d love to have you back.
James: Thanks Kristen. It was fun.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with interim CFO Bill Hegeman. How are you?
Bill: I’m really good Kristen. How are you?
Kristen: Great. Thank you taking time out of your busy schedule. I know it took quite a bit to get you here, but glad to have you. I understand that you jump in to a number of pretty complex and dire situations, some they range in severity. You’re in an interesting assignment right now. Obviously without bulging any confidential information, what are some of the things that you are working through with the situation and bringing about the impact that you bringing about in the company?
Bill: Well the one thing I talk about is cash. When I came here cash was extremely tight and even when I was, they were talking to me about this position they didn’t bring it up that much but shortly after I got here I realized there were severe cash situation and dealing with it, and then a little more digging I found out they weren’t collecting receivables in a timely manner that they had that you know more than about two-thirds of receivables were past due and at the same time they were not paying their suppliers on a timely basis. So they were stealing money thatshould have been for the suppliers by not collecting from their customers. I immediately put somebody on charge with that to make phone calls and make direct contact with our customers, and ask for the money. And once we did that within 5 weeks, we cleaned up over 80-percent of those past due receivables and they’ve been able to pay their vendors again. And it’s just a matter of discipline that you know you sell a good product at a fair price and you need to collect that. And if you don’t collect that, it’s going to cause you problems. So I just put in a very specific thing that you didn’t stop until you talk to the customer and get a commitment. And once you’ve done we collected them. Because they did like working with us. That’s one of the main things. The other thing was just the lack of credibility. That was the primary reason I was brought in is they could not provide, they had an international parent and they could not provide good, consistent financial information. And the company was extremely frustrated that they would ask for information, then they’d ask in a different way and they’d get two completely different answers. And this went on and on again where they just couldn’t get consistent financial information out of the organization I’m with. And so that’s one of the things I’ve done is really tighten the policies and procedures to make sure that we’re doing things the same way each time and that we review the information before we send it over but we make sure it’s right and it’s on time.
Kristen: I know in this specific situation there’s also a talent assessment, do you have all the right people in the accounting or finance department. And we see that often in our clients and especially in fast growing companies. What advice would you give to their CEO or someone who’s currently leading the finance department of how to recognize the talent that you need in there? What the gaps are? How do you train them? Or maybe they’re just not the right fit that’s so those soft skills that are really difficult. Is there may be some top pieces of advice you can give from talent management and finance…
Bill: Yeah. So one of the things I do when I come in to an organization is I do meet with each of the people and they, most of the people in the organization know who the good performers are and who the bad ones are. And so the first thing is just to talk to everyone and get their opinions. Who do they like working with? Who gives them the best information? And you get a pretty good sense of who’s on board and who isn’t. And then secondly, you go through what should you be expecting from that position? Because from my experience I know what the output should be for specific position and then I will go in and talk to that person to find out what they’re getting. You know is it a systems issue or is it a competence, the competency issue? And you can pretty quickly assess. And what I say is usually in two weeks I can tell you who the people that must go, and who the people that probably should go, and then if there’re upgrades needed in some of the positions where you might have a good performer but they just aren’t capable of doing everything that they’re required to do.
Kirsten: That is tremendous advice. Especially as much as we’re seeing it in companies right now. Is there anything other else that maybe we haven’t hit on or that you’d say CEO’s really should be looking and expecting from their finance department? If you would say 3 things they should be looking at and kinging in on in order to be effective for strategic plans and where they want to go next year, what would those 3 things be?
Bill: I’d say first of all I would have the things, the finance team provide you with a 3 year financial view of the future where they take and they look at your plans and they build a set of financials around that. And what you want to make sure that you have the cash capacity to fulfill those needs and if you don’t what are you going to do about it. So the first thing is that they can develop, put those together and you can give them tough questions and they can answer them. I think the second thing is to make sure that your finance organization is engaged with the entire organization. One of the things that I found is that in some organizations the finance department hasn’t been given its due and people don’t respect them and therefore they don’t get the answers they need to provide financials. But conversely the finance department can’t help them be successful. Finance department could be very, good finance department could be very valuable to the entire organizations for answering questions, helping them with pricing, helping them understand what needs to be done in a credit situation, you know, as far as credit approval goes for our new customers. So there’s a lot of things the finance department can do, but if they’re not included in the business they’re, you’re going to be sure changed. Then the last thing that I feel that is valuable for an organization is to really understand what their needs of the finance department are. They need to really sit down just like a HR department or a business development. What do you need from them and be clear about it and make sure that you’re getting that from them.
Kristen: Bill that is tremendous advice, especially if you’re a CEO or a business owner and you don’t have the decades of finance background that you have. That’s very compelling. I appreciate your time and sharing your expertise and experiences with us today. Feel free to join us on our next episode of Cerius Business Today, and again Bill thank you for joining us.
Bill: Thank you.
Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with interim CFO Bill Hegeman. How are you?
Bill: I’m really good Kristen. How are you?
Kristen: Great. Thank you taking time out of your busy schedule. I know it took quite a bit to get you here, but glad to have you. Well Bill I know that you go into a number of situations where there’s, involving finance challenges with companies and none of them are ever easy. But just to understand a little bit about your background and how you ended up being an interim CFO helping companies in troubled situations. I know you’ve gone from Controller to CFO to President to an interim. Can you give us a brief overview of how you got there?
Bill: I started at a Fortune 500 company, did all their back office accounting, taxes, cash management. And then became a controller of a billion-dollar division which really gave me access to a lot of different things. What I found is the controller position is I really like the operating side of the business, really understanding how customers buy, and how suppliers provide their products. And with that I decided to move to a smaller company as a CFO. From there I ended up as a general manager and eventually spinning it off and became President of a small contract manufacturing. That eventually ended and I moved into a CFO role in a little bit larger organization, but the organization was broken.
I took the actions to fix the organization and eventually ended up as president of that organization. After retiring to move to warmer climate, I was looking around for new opportunities and I found there is a need for people that understood businesses the way I did because of my diverse background, and therefore I became an interim executive for a number of different firms.
Kristen: Sounds like your variety of background in finance operations to president, you’ve got a lot of experience to draw from in order to help organizations. What are some of the ways that you help them that the most common challenges that organizations run into, especially in the finance realm?
Bill: Well some of the things that I run into are fairly common, and the first one I run into is just the credibility issues that people don’t trust the finance organization. Things have gone on, usually for a period of time, where they miss deadline, they don’t communicate. When they do communicate, the information is either incomplete or its confusing, and then people start asking more and more questions, and they get more information that doesn’t quite make sense, and eventually they point just don’t trust the finance sector at all. And if you’re a bank, or you’re an auditor, that causes you a great deal of concern and it becomes very dysfunctional for the organization. Another problem I see a lot, and this is usually the tipping point where I get called in is they don’t have enough cash to run the business. And it’s usually a product of, it could be a number of different things because it’s usually that they don’t collect what is owed them. And for some reason they don’t feel that they can go out and ask for it on a consistent basis. That’s another thing. And then the last thing is really the lack of discipline within the finance organization can cause a lot of problems is that they don’t run a lot of businesses as a serious entity. A lot of times the company doesn’t value the finance function and so they don’t put enough resources in or enough skills in those resources to run a good finance department. And then the issues that come with that prop up in a number of different ways, but it’s just the lack of investing in the finance organization.
Kristen: So it sounds like there’s a number of things that end up compounding on top of each other, and you certainly end up going in one. It’s in pretty dire strength. So if I’m a CEO, a company owner, I’d like to get someone of your expertise in there sooner than later, especially before having cash flow problems. What are some early signs that I should be looking for in maybe my finance and accounting department, the company’s outgrown the current expertise or beyond our capabilities. What’s some things I should look for?
Bill: I think if you’re not able to adequately your bank’s questions, or your finance company or your finance department is not, usually the bank is pretty adapted that something is wrong because they deal with so many companies. That’s one thing when you get into abnormal amount of questions from the bank. The same with if you have audited financials, you’re going to see a lot of unusual things pop up during their audit that should be pretty standard. And so that’s a red flag. The other thing is if they can’t produce consistent financial results for you the executive, they should be able to produce those in a timely manner. If they’re struggling to do that, here’s usually a reason that says somethings broken and isn’t getting fixed. And so that’s another red flag that goes up that can be a pretty telling issue, but I would definitely, if you don’t have the gas to pay your bills, that’s probably the biggest red flag.
Kristen: One of the questions we often get from companies is that I’ve got a controller in place. When do I graduate, or when do I add CFO, and kind of what’s the difference? How would you respond to that?
Bill: Well the way that I would look at is the controller is looking out the rearview mirror, they’re recording what has already happened, they’re focused on making sure that the accounting is right and they’re just looking to make sure that everything that they saw that happened gets recorded properly. The CFO is really becomes critical because he’s gonna be much more forward looking. He’s gonna make sure that you have the resources and the assets available to grow your organization. If there’s hurdles, he’s going to make you see them in advance and help you through them. And so when you’re trying to decide when it’s time to graduate from a controller to a CFO, it’s when you’re looking for the business to go through a substantial change you know more than 10 to 15% on an annual basis where you really need to be looking to the future more than just recording what’s happening in the past. That’s pretty common to get a CFO in, and it doesn’t have to be a full-time CFO, there’s fractional CFO’s out there where you don’t need to make the full investment right away, but you’re going to find out pretty quick that the CFO’s more than worth their money to contribute to their operation.
Kriten: Thank you. That’s a great distinction. I appreciate your time and sharing your expertise and experiences with us today. Feel free to join us on our next episode of Cerius Business Today, and again Bill thank you for joining us.
Bill: Thank you.
Executive Leaders have an enormous impact on the way businesses function. The way the executive leader behaves with and treats their employees can have a tremendous ripple effect right down to the customers. Becoming an executive leader is a decision, not a rank or a position. If you have chosen to become an executive leader to your employees, you have promised that you look out for the people beside you.In an excellent talk by Simon Sinek on 99u, the Executive Leadership expert explained how the best kind of Executive Leaders are the ones who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In the military, for example, the example of a brave pilot covering for his mates on the ground despite difficult flying conditions. The soldiers down below feel confident knowing that somebody else has got their back and fight on without looking behind them. Why did the pilot risk his life? Because he knew, his colleagues would’ve done the same for him in a heartbeat.
In a business context, wouldn’t people working in an organization feel more confident and safe knowing that others they may or may not know within the organization will sacrifice themselves the same way so that they may gain? It seems hard to imagine such a scenario these days when people do not give up credit, let alone a life.
So where do such people come from? They are not born, but rather made.
The human animal is like a machine. It is a system that works to make you do things to survive. Just as people work towards a goal for which a business offers an incentive, your body works the same way with chemical induced feelings working in our best interest.
All our happy feelings are brought about by four dominant chemicals: endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. The first two chemicals do not need a person’s help to trigger them while the latter two depend on other people and bring balance.
Endorphins mask physical pain. They bring on feelings of extreme happiness in times of pain like laughter or the high you get from an intense workout. Your brain releases dopamine after you accomplish something. It makes us get stuff done focusing on our goal. It is easier to pursue goals that are visual that is why it is better you write down your goals, and keep it detailed and tangible.
The danger of dopamine is that it is highly addictive. When unbalanced, it is dangerous and destructive. Addiction to alcohol, gambling, mobiles, nicotine and other addictive are all a result of dopamine. It makes you distracted and gives you a short attention span (which is probably why 66% of youth today addicted to their phones are misdiagnosed with ADHD). In businesses, employees get a dopamine addiction out of hitting target numbers.
When there is danger outside, we protect ourselves by grouping up with other people to be safe and extinguish external dangers. Outside dangers are constant and unknown. They can be ups n downs in the economy, competition, terrorism, the list goes on. Dangers of an organization, however, are not constant. They are variable and depend upon how safe the decisions of the Executive Leadership make employees feel when they go to work.
Remember the Aesop fable of 4 oxen teaming up against a lion? When they stood together, the lion was not able to harm them, but when they disbanded the lion easily defeated them. Take the lion as the extreme danger faced by a company. When you do not feel safe inside your company, then you spend more time and energy saving yourself inside, and ultimately expose yourself to outside dangers. This destructive behaviour uses energy which could’ve been used for productivity instead, yet it is not.
The responsibility of an executive leader is two things:
- Who gets into the safety circle? What values and beliefs define the circle?
- How to create a safety circle that is truly meaningful? Should it just be C-level executives or should we extend it to the outer edges, including the bottom most junior levels?
The last two chemicals (serotonin and oxytocin) focus on these thoughts and balances endorphins and dopamine to make Executive Leaders achieve their goals.
Serotonin is an Executive Leadership chemical. It makes us feel pride and values status. Humans are social animals and need the recognition of others for their accomplishments. That is why we have award shows and commencement ceremonies. Serotonin gives you confidence and reinforces relationships: between a parent and their child, or a boss and an employee. We want to make other people proud, and look out for others so they may accomplish the same.
In our materialistic society, we find that wealth raises our status, and many people flaunt it. The problem is that no relationship is established because of it and at the end of the day we don’t feel satisfied. It’s like tricking serotonin.
Working or living together in a group has value, but it only works if we trust each other within the group. Only when we trust each other can we turn our back and innovate and take risks to increase performance for the company.
Relative to your industry, there is always a dominant personality or talent. Like in the military it may be courage, or in art school it might be creativity. So how do you know who’s the alpha? Well if your nervous meeting someone else, you just might not the alpha.
When we recognize an alpha, we automatically step back and let them take over and serve them. Everybody wants to raise their status to alpha and get favours and special treatment from everybody else. For some reason, nobody has a problem that his or her boss makes more money than them or has a bigger office. Somehow, we just accept the fact that the alpha gets treated better.
However, being an alpha comes at a cost. When danger threatens the group, the group expects the best – the alpha – to go out and protect them. The boss should be ready to give up their perks when it matters. Executive Leadership has more work and requires you to put yourself at risk to help others. Executive Leaders fail when they do not protect the group and work only in self-interest. It angers the group and causes them to instantly mistrust the executive leader.
The last chemical of happiness is oxytocin. It is a feeling of love, trust and friendship. It is the reason you like to spend time with your friends or sit by someone you know. Oxytocin is the intense feeling of safety that somebody’s got your back. You get it through intimate contact like a hug or a handshake. Not all business relationships are rational. It is more about feeling safe. Physical touch makes a difference because if you don’t shake hands before signing a contract, you’ll either end the deal or go into it feeling nervous.
You get oxytocin through acts of human generosity. We value people who give their time rather than money, because you can get back money but not time. An executive leader who takes the time to help others is a good executive leader. Don’t depend upon email, and make the effort to speak in person or on the phone. People get happier and feel appreciated when you put in time and energy to communicate with or help them.
When you are an executive leader, it can be difficult to give your time and energy to every employee because you simply don’t have enough to give to everyone. You need to make sure you can trust others around you in your circle and that they too can trust others, continuing the trust chain.
The CEO should make sure that the people under them feel safe in their circle. Moreover, the people in the inner circle should make sure that their circles further on are circles of safety. It continues till it reaches the customer. The employees will feel safe within their organization and talk to them like they are human. If they are scared, they will be more worried about their job security than making the customer comfortable. An extremely efficient organization has employees who do everything in their power to make customers feel safe and belonged just like they do.
Witnessing acts of human generosity also gives oxytocin. In fact, the more oxytocin u have in your body, the more generous you become. Moreover, the more generous acts you do, the more you want to. A bonus of lots of oxytocin is that it inhibits addiction and boosts your immune system. This results in a healthier and longer life. Oxytocin increases the ability to solve problems and increases activity. All in all, it is really good for us.
Cortisol, on the other hand, is a feeling of stress and anxiety. It keeps you alive and triggers the fight or flight mechanism. It makes us paranoid about danger, and like a virus quickly passes on to others around us. Cortisol shuts down non-essential systems in your body like growth and the immune system. Because of its damaging side effects, it is not supposed to be in your body all the time. It is extremely unhealthy, inhibits oxytocin and makes you biologically less empathetic and less generous.
In short, jobs which stress us are killing us.
Moreover, the people responsible are the Executive Leaders.
Children who see their parents come home stressed out makes them associate work with something unhappy. Executive Leadership is not a rank or a position. It is a decision. If you have chosen to look after people beside you, then you are an executive leader. It is your willingness to sacrifice for someone else so that they may feel safe is what makes you an executive leader.
Big changes that require higher resources and change the company’s portfolio and business activities is transformational growth. Product expansion, getting into new markets, introducing new product categories, and following new segments are some prime examples of transformational growth in a business. Globalization and technological advancement have pushed many companies in the economy to grow increasingly rapidly in the past few years. If you do not keep up with the competition, you will get left behind. Unlike entrepreneurs of the past, where you could stick with that one good idea for the rest of your life without further developing it, current business owners need to innovate continually and bring about positive changes in the organization to survive.
There are different ways a business can grow. On one end of the spectrum, there is optimization, where small tactical changes collectively add up to a significant change. This is something any efficient business constantly does to keep the firm afloat. Incremental changes are always going on in a company to keep up with the dynamic market. The company achieves growth through continuous improvements and little changes.
On the other end is transformational growth.
Transformational growth Big changes that require higher resources and change the company’s portfolio and business activities is transformational growth. Product expansion, getting into new markets, introducing new product categories, and following new segments are some prime examples of transformational changes in a business. According to research by Fortune, “the best companies tilt their innovation portfolios away from incremental initiatives and toward breakthrough and transformational projects.”
Don LeBlanc is the Chief Marketing Officer of Vistaprint, a multinational e-commerce printing company with over $1 billion in revenue. They have over 15 million micro business customers around the world of which a large portion is from the United States.
In a recent interview, LeBlanc was asked how he would define transformational growth in his company. He said, “We only started with one product that was a business card, which is still our number one seller. But how we got to be over a billion dollars is by taking that and launching new products around it. If you need a business card, you might need something that is a comparable product, matching website, matching postcards, and so forth. So there’s product expansion. We went from the market we are in, to over 20 countries. We went through the channels that we were initially just promoting online to now we promote offline. So we’ve added in new channels, both distribution and for marketing. So every time we’ve turned on new countries, new channels, new product lines, to me they would be examples of transformational growth.”
Role of brand in driving growth In a direct-order company like Vistaprint, it is a common misconception that brand doesn’t matter in driving revenue. In every company a perception of a brand does exist but investing and managing that brand is considered ‘not worth it.’ They would much rather spend the resources of investing in a brand into something else which generates immediate revenue like giving out a new offer.
Investing in your brand means losing out on immediate money producing activities and no quick visible results. However, in the long term the message and philosophy transmitted by the brand you’ve developed will be the very reason your customers choose to come to you instead of your competitors.
Planting seeds for the future Companies typically are so caught up in the present that when they do future planning, they envision only the next 3-5 years. To be ready for the future, you need to envision where you want your company to be in next 20 years and start working towards it. Plant seeds for the future by starting operations in product categories or locations that have potential in the future. For Vistaprint, it saw India as an emerging tech market, and they have set up shop in the country anticipating large returns in the future.
LeBlanc believes that change should be balanced. To follow a strategy only because of the location or only for a particular product can be dangerous. Transformational changes that stretch your resources and energy can also be harmful. Companies need to maintain a balanced approach between not doing too much nor too little.
“It’s this tension between trying not to do too much, because you could get overextended very easily, to picking your spots in each of those vectors,” said LeBlanc on a balanced growth strategy. “I’m saying, well if we’re going to launch one big product this year, what’s the product? If we’re going to enter one market, what’s the market? Make sure you get those right so that you’re continuing to grow on each of those different pieces but not trying to do so much that you end up failing on any of them.”
We have seen executive careers take many forms over the decade we have been working with these executives. Some of it was caused by economic changes while other times it was most influenced by personal changes. Experienced executives have a number of options when making the next career choice from taking a full-time position, retiring, focusing on board work or going independent as a contingent executive (ie. interim executive, management consultant, advisor or coach). As much as each of these decisions seemed independent of the other, over the past 10 years, we have witnessed executive careers as more fluid, interchanging and often overlapping between these options. At Cerius, we work primarily with the executives who want to work on a contingent basis. We often get a number of questions surrounding what that career choice looks like, what an executive can expect and why executives choose this path. No better person to ask then a large group of executives so we surveyed our network and want to share the information along with what we are seeing in the marketplace.
Who makes up the contingent or interim executive workforce? With over 75% of the executives surveyed being baby boomers, it is clear that being independent isn’t just for a retired executive who isn’t ready to play golf full time. Though we are seeing more executives step into this career long before they are nearing retirement age, it is still most popular among executives who have had a successful executive career and are looking to now work independently with various companies who can use their expertise.
This career field is still somewhat new in the United States compared to our UK counterparts for a number of reasons. Our survey found that just under 30% of the executives have been in their career for five or more years compared to over 72% based on a recent survey of interim executives in the UK. The duration includes both consecutive and non-consecutive years as an interim executive or management consultant.
We are seeing a growing demand for interims at the CEO and President level. There are a number of variables impacting the top position whether it is family owned, privately owned or publicly traded. From retirement to health issues and even being forced out, the increased demand is reflected in our survey with over 45% of the executives providing that top level expertise. It is closely followed by operations at 41.3%. We were surprised to see technology expertise be more predominant than finance with over 21% of those polled. Finance, sales, and marketing were somewhat even with 17.4%, 17.4% and 17.9% respectively.
Why does an executive do interim or management consulting work? It was clear from our survey that interim executives love the freedom of this type of work. It provides a better work/life balance then their previous careers and the ability to choose the types of challenges they want. There was also a strong pull to interim executive work for those in the process of looking for their next role and executives who have sold their company or are semi-retired. As much as most executives enjoy the freedom of interim executive work, over 86% said they would consider a full time position for the right opportunity. This is down from 90% in 2013 and a stark comparison to those polled. Meanwhile, over 90% would recommend interim or consulting work to another executive.
Over the past ten years, we have seen executive careers become more fluid between interim executive and full time employed roles than the prior decades. It no longer is one or the other. As we track executive careers over the past decade we are seeing less of a division and more of a migration from one to the other depending on a number of variables from personal situations, external factors and the need for either consistency vs. variability at any given time. At the same time, the average tenure of a company executive shorted quite a bit causing some to question how long is “long term employment”.
What does their business look like? Most interim executives spend much of their time doing business development and securing opportunities. Though the concept is being adopted by more and more companies in the U.S. there is still a percentage of the SMB market unaware that this option exists. When asked about their top sources for securing assignments, networking was top of the list at 84.7% of the executives listing it and referrals being the best source for 62.8% of the executives. However, the internet is becoming a substantial resource for many interim executives. From online talent marketplaces to social media, over 36% of the executives use the internet as an effective source for opportunities.
Though there is an extensive range of rates for interim executives and management consultants, over 70% of the executives reported client rates between $100-250/hour with the median at $150-200/hour. There does not seem to be a connection between a lower or higher rate and the amount of time spent working on an assignment.
How busy an interim executive is depends primarily on two factors in our experience: how busy they want to be and how long they have been developing their interim executive business. Some key points:
- Just over 50% of the respondents worked at least 2 days a week on an assignment over the last two years.
- On the flip side, just under 30% worked less than 1 day per week.
- This coincides with just over 30% having been an interim executive or consultant for less than one year. It takes time to develop in most cases which is one of the factors we see driving the online talent marketplaces.
- Regardless of how much an executive is working, the work/life balance is clearly seen with over 72% of the executive respondents taking off three or more weeks per year.
- That is no client work, no networking, and no business development.
When asked about their prospects for the coming year, almost 73% of the executives are forecasting 2016 to be better than 2015.
As quickly as the weather can change, so can the life and career of an executive. The good news is an executive’s career now comes in every shape and size from corporate executive, business owner, start-up entrepreneur, interim executive, management consultant, coach, advisor, board member and the list goes on. At Cerius, we have been educating, advising and placing interim executives for over a decade and look forward to continuing that into the next decade better than ever.
For Cerius Executives, this is Raj Prasad.
When should I sell my business? In the back of their heads, entrepreneurs are always thinking about ‘when should I sell my business?’ An owner who ponders over selling their business, most of the time, does not do so out of financial desperation or trouble, but for a wide variety of other reasons.
John Hammett is an investment banker at Corporate Finance Associates, and a former company owner himself. He understands the unique situation a private company owner is in. At one point in his career, Hammett was working for an entrepreneur in his mid-fifties who sold one of two divisions in his company. While working on the transaction with the company owner, Hammett learned some valuable advice that has stuck with him to this day. The owner told him, “Anytime you have an opportunity to get liquidity in your company, you need to seriously consider it because running a business is risky and the longer you hold on to that business and the bigger you get, the more chance you risk of failure. There is value in a business but no liquidity until you go through a transaction of selling a piece or all of your company to a buyer.”
In the early stages of a business, owners are more confident in taking risks because they don’t have much value in their companies yet to lose. Taking chances are essential and beneficial if the founder wants their business to grow beyond the initial stages. As the company grows bigger, so does the value of it and owners become more conservative, fearing greater damage than when it was a smaller business. Owners who are older no longer have the luxury of time to spend years on damage control fixing bad strategies, so they avoid those risky situations that could lose them their company. In Hammett’s opinion, business owners should always be looking to exit their investment in their businesses. Not because the company may be in a bad place, but because as one of your largest single investments, it is something to be concerned about.
Cal Lai, President and CEO of Recom Technologies points out that owners have many reasons why they sell their businesses. Although a chance at liquidity is a good reason for an owner to decide that it’s time to sell the business, that may not be the only reason. After dedicating 15-20 years of time, energy and resources into the building of a company, CEO’s and founders may find themselves ready for retirement. An owner may be ready for some change and something new to try and that could be motivation enough. “A good entrepreneur is always looking at their options going forward.” Lai agrees with Hammett that, “Time is always a risk, and the more time your business is out there, the greater risk you have.”
As an owner you have financial goals you are continuously striving for and this applies to selling your business as well. Things to keep in mind when thinking of selling your business are timing of the sale, getting your company ready to sell (audited financials, the right technology, a good executive team, etc.) and finding the right potential buyers.
But selling a company is not always only about getting the best price. Murray Rudin, Managing Director at for Riordan, Lewis & Haden, a private equity firm says, “If the firm is entering into a deal in which they are only selling a percentage of their business and will continue to be engaged, then other kinds of factors are equally important as price. These factors include the caliber, the reputation, the references, the culture, the chemistry and the trust of the Private Equity firm or other type of firm they are going to partner with.”
The mindset of an owner selling their business should not be obsessing over the last few dollars of valuation, but rather focused more on the quality of people they will be partnering with as a result of the sale. Rudin argues that this is the biggest mistake business owners make in scenarios where they intend to roll over significant equity. Remember, once the deal is done, you have to work with these people. Make sure they are the right match for you and your company no matter what price they are offering you for a piece of your business.
The final piece of advice from the experts, plan your exit and be ready when the timing is right to pursue your company’s maximum value. Sell it on your terms rather than the market’s terms.
Small Business Operations – Don’t let people become bottlenecks Whether you’re a small business owner or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, managing an organization can be intricate. Processes that keep the business running are complex and interdependent on multiple people. One of the most common killers of growth and productivity in a company is communication and information flow. Talk to most business owners and you will hear at least one of the following:
“Nothing is written down. All of the information on my business is in the employees’ heads.”
“I have one key employee who is so critical to me that I can’t promote him/her, and I don’t know what I’ll do if he/she leaves.”
“We are operating in silos, and it costs me money. The right-hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
“We discussed it at the meeting two weeks ago, why isn’t everyone following the new process?”
“We have no formal processes and procedures. We keep reinventing the wheel.”
Creating a culture of communication and information sharing in a growing company can be difficult. You are often moving so fast that you feel there is no time to stop and get things in order. The reality is that it costs you more by not slowing down and doing it right. Here are a few key places to start:
Small Business Operations – Put your processes into writing Processes should be written down so clearly that employees can follow them with little to no support. It saves a lot of time for both managers and their employees. Certain tasks which require frequent training for new recruits can be taught using a step-by-step video using PowerPoint and a vocal recording that is native to the program.
Whatever the format, getting it written down is a good step but making sure it is easily understood is even better. Keeping the language simple and clear is a great way for employees to understand procedures.
A well-respected operations executives I work with, Marc, builds everything around pictures and symbols. When he works with companies to come up with a vision, mission and core values he has the company vote on symbols or pictures to represent them. This is especially critical in bi-lingual companies. When’s the last time you walked into a company and a random employee could communicate the vision, let alone the other guiding principles of the organization? You can in any company Marc has worked with.
Another great example is one of our clients who was tasked with training a production staff, who only spoke Spanish, on one of the most boring – yet most important – subjects in business: Safety. A couple of staff members put their minds together and came up with one of the most memorable PowerPoints I have ever seen. They enlisted the production staff, put together costumes and overly exaggerated the dos and “do nots” of safety. The employees were engaged as part of the training, and an incoming employee got what was probably the best safety training they’d ever had. A picture says a thousand words. When given the option – go with the picture!
Small Business Operations – Don’t let people become bottlenecks When one employee takes on more responsibility than most of the staff, it restricts everybody else’s support, creativity and growth, creating a bottleneck in the company. You can picture these in most organizations. Where does the work in the process slow down? There are likely areas in your business that seem as though four lanes are trying to merge into one during rush hour. This is usually one of the easiest places to start when addressing information flow and operational inefficiencies in your company.
An optimized company does not allow specific processes to be dependent on only one person. It creates an unhealthy employee-management relationship where the organization is too dependent on a select few individuals.
This creates a number of issues. Employees end up trapped in their current role, as they are the only one who can do it. If the employee is then out for a period of time or leaves, managers, have to spend a lot of time learning and training things they previously didn’t know to a replacement.
No employee should be too valuable or hold too much information to move or let go. One quick trick is cross training. Assign various individuals to shadow the employee for a couple of days for different periods of time. The employee should talk out loud, explain and train. The shadow employee’s responsibility is to document. You end up with written information, cross training and more flexibility with regards to that employee.
Small Business Operations – Encourage self-responsibility The best and easiest way to organize your team is into process teams, where each is responsible for their outcomes. It creates a positive company culture where everyone must actively participate to achieve something. The process team keep communication between the first person to the last person in the process. It eliminates the opportunity for some to simply be order takers and encourages people to become a potential leader and do more than what is minimal required.
A pro-active environment creates more permanent fixes for employee and customer satisfaction. It spreads the energy and helps speed growth. You will notice daily improvements in processes you oversee daily. Your job is regulated to that of a mentor who monitors them and gives them guidance and support where required, allowing you to focus on the ‘big picture’. Management software can also be helpful in managing your process teams.
Small Business Operations – Get feedback Let the best ideas come from your employees – Stop and listen! Granted, they don’t have all of the information you do to do an initial validity test of the idea so give them a template of things to check their idea against. You are teaching them not just to speak up, but more about business process relationships and how one decision they impacts things throughout the company.
A continuous employee-driven improvement cycle is set in motion where if they see something, they’ll say something. This gets rid of negativity behind closed doors, as everything is said publicly, and gives you new ideas that save money, boost productivity, and increase efficiency, quality and loyalty. Process optimization relates to everyone, no matter how small and unnoticed they are in the organization.
There’s a number of reasons companies bring in an Interim CEO or Interim President beyond the most popular cause of a vacant position. At Cerius, we have seen the strategic use of an Interim CEO or Interim President include: * Turnarounds * Company CEO does not want to be involved in the day-to-day operations of the company anymore so looks to bring in a Interim President while they stay on as CEO and Chairman of company * Family owned businesses to better prepare a family member to take over as CEO or President * Situations involving merger, acquisition, purchase or sale of a business * Partnership resolution * Founder of company is a scientist, engineer or technologist and does not want to run the company as the CEO or President
Interim CEOs and Interim Presidents (also known as temporary executives, part-time CEOs, or super temps) have already enjoyed stellar C-level careers in which they started, grew, and sold successful businesses. Now in their current careers these senior executives step into organizations like yours for a season to provide highly objective recommendations and lead your management team to deliver significant measurable results. They are ideally suited to not just fill a leadership gap, but to actually energize and grow the business.
We are seeing a current trend in the area of business exits. A number of business owners we know are looking at a near term exit. Either they have held on to the company longer than planned on due to the recession or a number of other factors leading them to consider now is the time. There’s a number of things that can be done to maximize a company’s value and the sell price for the owner. In many cases, the owner has been the CEO and/or President up to this point and though they were the best to grow the business, they may not be the right ones to prepare it for an exit. An Interim President not only brings an outside perspective and the expertise to create additional value, it also shows potential investors that the value of the company is not contingent on the owner running the company.
The right Interim CEO or Interim President can have a great and immediate impact on the situation and help better drive the company to its goals. Here’s a few of the most common ones we see from clients at Cerius, how they were addressed and the types of results the client experienced:
Family owned Manufacturing Company of Electronic Components Interim President: 2-3 days/week, 6 months Situation
- Company losing money, one month away from closing
- Father founded the company, currently run by one of the siblings
- Concerns regarding sales organization and leadership
- Non-performing team
- No plan, goals or metrics, lack of processes
- High inventory, low turnover
Implementation
- Established strategic plan, goals, metrics with dashboards, daily quotas and accountability
- Daily meetings with follow through
- Prioritized quotes and engineering
- Increased margins through charging for engineering, successful price increases, better metrics for purchasing
- Corrected inventory
- Reorganized with 20% force reduction, removed “C” players and elevated other employees
- Created daily booking thermometer to allow for 13 week budgeting
Results
- Breakeven in 2 months, profitable by 3rd month
- 3% loss to 3% profit in 5 months
- Returns reduced by 90%
- Inventory reduced by over 16%
Sustainable Results One Year Later
- 25% increase in product shipped
- 13% decrease in COGS
- Now, 7.5x more profitable
Family Owned Manufacturing Company Interim CEO: 4-5 days/week, 3 months Situation
- Father (owner/operator) passed away suddenly
- Succession planning had not been done so there was no clear leadership
- Company was losing money, knew something was wrong
- Lack of strategic plan and reporting for decision making
- Lack of inter-department sharing
- Inaccurate financials
- Outdated ERP system
Implementation
- Realigned culture to Expect Excellence
- Implemented LEAN manufacturing
- Initiated regular meetings & reporting
- Initial dashboard formulated to drive key core metrics
- Analyzed and addressed scrap, overtime, and returns
- Aligned customer terms with industry standards improving profitability
- Reorganized warehouses
- Analyzed and implemented state of the art scanning system
- Right sized organization to current business needs and conditions
Results
- Provided savings equivalent to 4x increase in sales
- 50% scrap reduction
- 78% reduction in Overtime
- 75% reduction in returns
- Found additional $1M in sold inventory
- 15% reduction in storage costs
- 50% reduction in SKU’s
- 10% reduction in workforce
Though no two companies and situations are the same, we find there are often common themes within organizations and at Cerius, we know how to find the right expertise to address the need and provide results. If you have more questions about interim executives and management consultants click here some of the most commonly asked questions and answers.
Finding a good salesperson is one of the most common challenges we discuss with business owners. A major source of frustration for businesses is finding the right people to sell their product or service to potential customers. Entrepreneurs and business owners continually get frustrated that they can’t go out and connect with the market themselves because of time constraints. They instead have to trust hired salespersons to do the best possible job in selling their product. A good salesperson is one who understands the values your product stand for. They should be familiar with the production of the product or service so that they can accurately relay information and tell customers what differentiates your product from the rest.
Defining the traits that define a good salesperson starts with defining the word ‘sales’. When you look into the dictionary for definitions of ‘sales’, you’ll find definitions sprouting technical terms on the exchange of money. As a salesperson, you should look beyond jargon and know that sales is not so much about getting money, but rather about positively influencing people.
Being influential matters You have to be influential as a salesperson. You need to understand what the customer’s known needs are, as well as, their ‘unknown needs’. The former kind are what the customer already knows and has identified as lacking in their routine; perhaps through some research or by asking around. In cases of customers with known needs, most salespeople will go straight ahead and fixate on that need and sell the solution to the client.
Again, the role of a salesperson is to influence, not to sell.
The thing is, people don’t like to be sold to. They don’t want to feel like they are being forced into purchasing something, even if they need it. If you go into the street and randomly ask a sample of people how they’d like to be sold to, almost all of them will invariably tell you that they wouldn’t want to be sold on anything in the first place.
A good salesperson not only understands and fulfills known needs but will also acknowledge unknown needs. The ability to understand, uncover and address those unknown needs is critical. Looking to understand your customer, what they need and how you can help solve that rather than how you can convince them to buy from you is key.
Forming connections are key A successful salesperson is one who is all about getting to know the individual. To connect with a person, the salesperson needs to relate a positive and honest experience that makes a sustainable idea and attracts customers. A solid foundation for sales is made when there is a positive experience on both sides of a transaction.
The ability to influence other people is part of our psyche. From the moment we are born, we influence people around us. Babies scream and cry to get food, but as they get older they pick up new skills, like verbal communication, to get what they want. With time, we develop new ways to communicate and influence others.
Utilizing interpersonal skills As we grow older and develop, we start to use and understand skills that match our interests with others to form a connection. Using the ability to influence people, we are able to find jobs, make friends and find life partners. Without even realizing it, we are positively influencing people subconsciously from the moment we first meet them. A good salesperson utilizes their interpersonal skills to influence a person in a positive way.
Some salespeople are so focused on the objective, the products, and the sales benchmark that they miss out on all the stuff that creates the platform. Good sales people are those who realize and understand that the skills and capabilities they bring to the job are what they use all the time.
Potential employers are deeply interested in the background of a potential salesperson; fragments from their personal life and achievements from their professional experiences. They try to get a personal perspective to find out how successful they are in developing relationships within their personal and professional life. They want to know, is this person able to make relationships with people?
Having the ability to distinguish selling from a glorified order, and know a way to influence people is key to a good salesperson. Employers will want to know whether or not the person can fit into the team? Will they be able to work with customers, fulfilling the value of the organizations? The platform is not based on professional skills but them as people. What goes on in their mind influences the heart.
Change isn’t always easy but sometimes necessary. We are seeing a trend of change among many clients we work with at Cerius. Most of that change involves diversification. This diversification is in a number of forms from client base to products and services. Leadership is looking to lower risk in the long term by taking some risks now.
With a business that is increasing its revenues year over year and has good cash flow, it can be difficult to look ahead and think your revenue sources may be very different three to five years from now. Just because that is how you have made money in the past doesn’t mean it is sustainable. We are seeing the drive for diversification in a variety of industries and types of companies. Here are some great examples of companies Cerius has worked with and what they are doing to ensure they are creating and leading the market rather than just surviving in it.
Healthcare Innovation There is no question the healthcare industry is changing. One of the best applications we have seen that combines product management with innovation is a large healthcare services company that took on Innovation as an initiative and is turning it into a business practice and line of services. Rather than just adopting some of the innovative trends and technologies available, they are investing in the companies that are developing them and applying it to their industry and services. The company was able to stay focused on their normal business operations by bringing in an innovation executive with a variety of industry vertical experience that could be applied. With the focus being maintained by an external resource, the internal team was not distracted but rather energized with the exciting direction in which the company was going.
Non-Profit for the 21st Century About the last place you would think of an organization taking initiative and expanding their services away from what has been done for the past few decades is a non-profit. It is easy to become myopic when you are operating a company on a day to day basis. With this in mind, a nationwide non-profit brought in an interim executive from outside the company and outside the industry. The executive was able to quickly see how to leverage the non-profit’s core competency of receiving and reselling their donated merchandise within a single category to other categories with relatable characteristics. Within two months, the expansion had already begun along with the organizations first app to make it quicker and easier for donations to be pledged and processed.
Family Owned Business After 30+ years in business, a family owned business decided it wanted to be in business for another 30 years and in order to do so, it would need to change its service and product offering. Over the decades, the company had built strong relationships with their clients as well as throughout the industry both with competitors and complimentary providers. One of the biggest challenges their clients have is managing the range of providers for any given project. With a strong expertise in understanding the client’s end need, the company decided to expand beyond their single product and become the single point of contact for the client across all service and product offerings. This will solve the client’s problem of coordination issues and provide better coordination and clarity for the suppliers, not to mention an expanded revenue stream for the company.
The one thing all companies had in common is not relying solely on their internal team. To think outside of the box they went outside of their company and found expertise to minimize the risks they were taking. Here’s some insights from Cerius Experts who work with companies looking to leverage outside expertise and resource to diversify their revenue stream.
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For situations that may not be consistent with the norm of your industry or business, an innovative interim executive can be instrumental in identifying the target, the path and aligning your organization with the direction.
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Start off with a very specific strategic product marketing executive. Someone who knows how to productize, because optimally you’re not just looking at the revenue streams within the industry, it’s ‘what is the product, how do I describe the product and is it marketable within the marketplace? Supplemental marketing resources can be used to create the messaging both externally and internally. This is one of the biggest failures we see. The messaging can be the difference between having an okay product but everyone understands it and buys it vs. the best product but the market is too confused in order to make a purchase decision.
Whether you are looking to increase your revenues, pull ahead of your competition or stave off obsolescence; there’s a number of options for getting there.
As the company grows, it becomes more important than ever to list the roles and responsibilities of each department, each manager, and each employee. A systematized list of job roles creates a culture of order and prevents work duplication of the same task by different people. One of the most frustrating things for an employee is not knowing what everybody else around them does. Modern organizations are very complex and have a high level of inter-dependency between departments and team members. For a business to run smoothly, employees must be aware of who does what in the organization so that they know who to go to when they need to get something done.
As a manager, you have a pretty good idea of what each employee does. Whether you work in a small 6-man team or a large organization, you know who to go to for help with supplies, ordering, or even just where to find the documents that have the answers. But employees do not know what their colleagues do unless they ask or you tell them. It is an issue that the staff deeply cares about, yet many managers do not concern themselves with defining clear roles and responsibilities and sharing them.
Unclear roles and responsibilities Every time I have ever helped a company do a recap on a big project, we list all the issues and find out what led to them. Ninety percent of the time it came down to unclear roles & responsibilities.
As the company grows, it becomes more important than ever to list the roles and responsibilitiesof each department, each manager, and each employee. A systematized list of job roles creates a culture of order and prevents work duplication of the same task by different people. There is less confusion about what is expected of each employee. Team members will know who to go to to coordinate tasks in the organization as a whole and work interdependently.
Talk to five of your employees. Ask them what their role in the company is and what they are responsible for. Do they start listing what they do on a daily basis or do they correlate it to the organization as a whole? And how do they contribute to it compared to their counterparts? Do your employees know where their work ends and another team member’s begins? If someone leaves, can you divide up their role and responsibilities in less than 5 minutes?
As daunting as it can be to tackle this age old task, start simple and it will snowball from there. The best place to start is just by making a list. Remember – when it comes to organizations, if it isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist.
Listing roles It doesn’t matter what tool you use, just keep it simple and something that can easily be passed on, e.g. Word or Excel. I prefer Excel since it can easily be consolidated, sorted, altered and distributed. It is surprising how many times once consolidated I sort by “Person Responsible” and an overwhelming number of items have one person’s name next to it. It is one of the easiest ways to get a quick snapshot. There are also applications like the backbone model which come pre-populated with common sense roles. It is convenient, online and easy to understand and use. Managers can see each person’s roles and responsibilities, assign it somebody else, remove or add new ones. Computer programs like these allow you to search through the roles to find out who the individual responsible for a certain project or function is, if you need help with a certain project.
If the job responsibilities are listed, nobody has to wonder whose job it is to update the website, order supplies or monitor inventory levels. All the items will be listed, organized, systematized, and viewable to all.
Impact of clearly defined roles You, as a leader, will know who is responsible for what and who to hold accountable for it. It also makes the transition for your successor or new recruits easier. Once employees know what their job is through an automated delegation model, you no longer have to manage and juggle tasks to keep on top of things. It becomes a clearly defined role for a team member to free up valuable time for you to push the business forward.
In an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review, a study by Tamara Erikson was summarized on team dynamics at the BBC and Reuters. In her research, she found that in cases where employees’ roles were clearly defined there was better successful collaboration in teams. In her findings, she observed that collaboration success was higher when individual roles were defined rather than that of a group approach.
“Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task,” said Erikson. Defining the role of an employee helps the organization target and hire the best man for the job from the start and also ensures continued success by informing them how that success will be measured and identified.
Ideas for Board of Director’s Compensation Every once in a while, a newspaper or a business magazine publishes an article exposing overinflated salaries of board members. While it may be true for some big corporations, the same cannot be said for the rest. Companies have different options on how to compensate their board members other than handing over a colossal sum of money or equity in the company.
There are two major ways companies compensate their board members; either through equity or cash compensation. It is important that a company compensate board members in a manner that promotes their long-term interests and goals. We had an in-depth discussion with some well-experienced board members, and examined the pros and cons of both ways of compensating advisory boards or board of directors compensation.
Compensating with Equity While researching her book, Marissa Levin, an expert on boards, came across a long-standing attorney and compensation expert. There are four different ways to use equity as board member’s compensation and according to this compensation expert: “Never give more than one quarter to one half of one percent to each board member you have.”
A hazard of compensating with equity arises when board members leave the company. Marissa advises, “Put in a one year agreement with a restricted stock clause that allows you to buy back that stock, basically at a penny, in the event that you roll off that board.” Because the last thing a company wants is to give a large portion of equity to somebody who only works part-time for them. And if that board member doesn’t work out, then the company has someone walking around outside the company who owns a large portion of stock with no interest in the organization.
Another thing for companies to consider is that you should be very prudent with the stock. This is something start-ups should especially consider because they usually have very little revenues so they cannot pay the board member very much or at all and, as a result, allot 5- 6% equity as the board member’s compensation.
Although initially that might not seem to be a big amount, but as the company grows that small percentage can amount to a large sum. Like Marissa says, “If you build a company to $5, $10, $15, $20, $30, $50 million dollars, that’s a lot of money to be giving to somebody basically ‘cart blanche’.”
Monetary Compensation Jeff Thompson has served in the board of directors for 10 years at Edelbrock Corporation. He was also a member of the executive, compensation and audit committees. Talking about compensating public board of directors, Jeff explained that they do things a bit differently.
“We paid every member a fee for the quarterly meeting. It wasn’t a large amount of money but we also covered all their expenses,” said Jeff. The expenses included travel expenses, as the company had people coming in from all over the country.
An additional perk that public boards had was a small pool of stock for the board members, which amounted to 1-2% of the company. The money was vested over a 5-7 year period to ensure long-term loyalty from its board members. Jeff said, “In order to earn the stock, you had to have long-term plans and goals with the company. So if you left early, you didn’t get much of anything.” In the event a board member rolled off the board due to term limits, since they had earned that investment, they would have the right to either to keep the stock or sell it back to the company.
It’s important that you let go of board members in a way that doesn’t leave hard feelings between either party. Marissa said, “The most important thing you can do is keep the doors open and never burn any bridges because you don’t know if you might want them back at some later date or they could refer you to another advisor.” In her company, she sets up an ‘exit interview’ to make sure that there is closure in a professional manner so that everybody feels good about the experience.
A business is essentially a system of operations. When there is no organization and structure in the management of its processes, the company struggles to focus on new projects and growth, and spends most of its time keeping up with its day-to-day activities. Successful businesses are organized businesses. If your employees are not informed and there is no plan, then an air of confusion surrounding the workforce will lower productivity and hinder creativity.
It is not difficult to be an operations specialist, yet the impact is immense. There are some key fundamentals to building a strong operational foundation that can help make or break a company’s growth. There are a few operational issues that are the most common. Focusing is the top issue to focus on that can make a big difference to both your employees and your profitability.
Clear roles & responsibilities Often in growing companies everyone wears many hats and jumps in to pick up the slack where needed. Too much is going on every day and they consider it too cumbersome to put something like this into writing. Unfortunately, this is one of the cases where if it’s not written down, it does not exist. Any time spent gathering and documenting this information will be quickly gained backed and then some. This can serve as the launching pad for a number of uses:
- Employee Accountability – It is difficult to hold someone accountable when it is not crystal clear what they are accountable for.
- Loss of an Employee – Pull out their list of responsibilities and quickly divide them up between the staff. This can be done in less than 10 minutes and everyone is now clear that they are responsible for those tasks.
- Training – You now have a list to go through and discuss potential training gaps.
- Succession Planning – You now have a list of responsibilities for the next role an employee wants to take on. Go through the list to discuss the skills needed and training gaps to be addressed before they can move into the role.
- Processes and Procedures – Each person is responsible for creating their own process and procedures for the items on their responsibilities list. Provide a simple template to get them started. Start with one per month and move it up to one per week for those who catch on quickly.
- Cross Training – Having a list to start from makes it much easier to identify opportunities for cross training. Also a great time to cross check the process the responsibility owner wrote. Use that document to cross train.
- Getting The Right Employees in the Right Seats – Assess your employees (formally or informally) for what they do best, what they are good at and what they enjoy doing. What hidden talents are there that you never knew about. Compare list to the roles & responsibilities. Who in your organization is mismatched with skills to role? I have seen 180 degree turns in employees and the overall team effectiveness by making shifts as a result of this exercise.
The list goes on when it comes to the benefits this single operational focus can bring. Every post mortem I have ever been involved in was traced back to the project getting off track at the very beginning in one single area – there was no clarity on who was doing what and what was expected of them. As a result, the moment something didn’t go as planned, the employees were left playing hot potato and musical chairs.
A few more things to consider as you work on putting some operational fundamentals in place. Anything you do should be put to the test with the below:
5 Key Fundamentals of Operations 1. Be Clear – Can this be communicated on its own from the highest to the lowest level of your organization? Will it makes sense to everyone? 2. Communication – Remember the telephone game you played as a kid. Bring in a handful of your employees and put them around a table. Whisper to the first one “The brown cat bough a faucet, the black dog slipped on a tennis ball.” See what happens once it makes its way around the table. It can only be passed on once (no repeating). This is what happens when everyone is in the same room. What happens in day to day business operations. 3. Documentation – If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. 4. Flexibility – Leave room in the structure for a degree of flexibility. If it can’t accommodate a variety of situations and still work as it should, go back to the drawing board. 5. Scalable – It should work for both the current size and the next couple of growth levels of your company. It must be able to growth with you.
Companies are looking for executives who add value to the organization. Analyze the hiring company’s situation and find ways to achieve their objectives. Be creative with how you can help them during this executive contract. Growing your independent executive business at any level is a complicated and difficult process. It’s not just applying for roles or projects you’re qualified for, but rather searching for places where your experience and values ‘fit’ with that of the organization.
At Cerius Executives, we have advised hundreds of executives through career, assignment and position transitions. A smooth transition between organizations requires extensive planning and consideration to detail.
We recommend 7 basic steps that can help you find your next executive contract.
Finding Your Next Executive Contract – Step 1: Identify what you want First, purposefully determine what you want to do next in your career. With time priorities change and your interest moves towards other things. So take some time to figure out what exactly do you want to do in the next phase of your work life.
You need to know what path best suits your interests and experiences, towards maintaining a successful career. Are you ready to start up another company, step into a CEO role, gain some work-life balance, become an interim executive or a management consultant, or quite possibly focus on board work?
Finding Your Next Executive Contract – Step 2: Put everything down in writing Start with your past. Get your entire history on paper so you can easily pull what you need as you need it. Jot down all of your work experiences, skills and achievements in a single document. You can then easily pull from that into your CV, resume and online profiles. Keeping your profiles up-to-date is crucial in any job search strategy and should be maintained on all platforms like LinkedIn and your professional website.
Finding Your Next Executive Contract – Step 3: Determine what you can bring to the company Reflect on your past work history and make a list of the results you have and can deliver to your future customers. By determining what value you can you bring to a company, you can better market and sell yourself. Having a record of working in certain kinds of situations helps you narrow down your specialty, and narrows down your search for positions which you are experienced in.
Finding Your Next Executive Contract – Step 4: Broadcast yourself Get it out there – everyone you speak to should be clear on what you do best and what opportunities you are looking for. With the current business and talent environment it is rare for anyone to not come across an open opportunity or position here and there. Companies and recruiters are looking for talent referrals more than ever. Make sure everyone you come across knows what you are looking for and when to keep you in mind. You are more likely to find your next opportunity through someone you know than through a posting.
Finding Your Next Executive Contract – Step 5: Keep your information consistent Don’t tell a networking group you are looking for your next CEO role, when the last 4 positions on your LinkedIn profile are all board roles. It’s understandable to want to look for roles in an entirely different direction, but hiring companies want executives bringing years of relevant experience to the table. So make your information consistent with your history and what you want. It is also confusing and frustration for someone you meet to have nothing from the dialogue you two had reflected on your LinkedIn profile. Keep it consistent across all channels.
Finding Your Next Executive Contract – Step 6: Get creative in creating solutions Companies are looking for executives who add value to the organization. Analyze the hiring company’s situation and find ways to achieve their objectives. Be creative with how you can help them as an executive. Stay focused on where the company wants to arrive and how you can get them there. It may not be obvious right from the start. Help provide the solutions including a creative incentivized comp plan tied to goal achievement rather than the usual job description. It should coincide with the direction the company is headed in and helping to get them there. Whether it is a full time, interim or project role, there are endless possibilities for structuring the contract.
Finding Your Next Executive Contract – Step 7: Don’t be short sighted in the negotiations Keep in mind the end goal for both you and the company. At the executive level there are too many ways to count to accommodate your bottom line and that of the company. Ask questions to make sure you understand what their parameters are and be clear on yours from the start. Once you have an initial agreement, don’t get greedy. Too often in the current economy we have seen executives try to negotiate up after an initial agreement and lose the job or the contract. Going back to an earlier suggestion – remain consistent with your communications and keep the curve balls to a minimum. As much as a company will appreciate your negotiations skills once it is on their behalf, now may not the time to fully demonstrate them.
Transforming information technology from a cost center to a profit center to a competitive advantage should be a key imitative of any company with an IT spend. An accomplished CTO or CIO is the key to success. There’s a number of reasons a company of any size would need a CIO or CTO for additional expertise. Whether you are looking to have your current IT structure assessed, needing a technology road map and plan, considering implementation of an ERP or needing to fill a vacant position, technology executives have a select expertise that often is not available or duplicated elsewhere within the organization. Bringing in an interim executive or management consultant can be a great way to quickly address the need and keep the focus on results without committing to long term overhead costs. At Cerius, we have seen the strategic use of an Interim Technology Executive include:
- Enterprise Architecture
- ERP selection, implementation, or fine-tuning
- Business Process, Information, Technology and Planning
- Information Technology Improvement
- Data Centers, Cloud Computing, Technology and Help Desk
- Program, Project and Portfolio Management
- System Evaluation and Selection Process
- IT / Technology and Business Alignment
- Global Outsourcing
Interim technology executives have an in-depth understanding of business process improvement and technology along with the hands-on experience to drive your IT organization to become a strategic and competitive asset.
Interim CIO’s fill a gap between the departures of a senior IT executive and the start date of the new hire. Part-time CIOs work for a designated period of time to build and lead the IT organization in a SMB, or to lead a key IT initiative within larger organizations.
We are often asked the difference between a CIO and CTO. In its simplest form, a CIO is responsible for the technology the company depends on to operate and the CTO is responsible for the technology the company depends on for its revenues. The CIO focuses on the internal technologies the company needs to operate and deliver its services or products. This role can have an impact on bottom line profits through increased productivity, product delivery and company communications. The CTO is more of a customer facing role involved in product development and the end product the customer is using. The impact of the CTO role is more focused on revenues and delivery a top level product to the end customer. Whichever technology expertise you need, the benefits and results for bringing in outside expertise can be limitless. Here’s a few of the most common ones we see from clients at Cerius, how they were addressed and the types of results the client experienced:
Professional services and banking industry
Interim CIO: 5 days/week, 11 months
Situation
- Independent review and assessment needed
- Obsolete systems in place
- Significant system outage occurred
- Large project 6 months overdue
- Technology and business unit not working together
Implementation
- Restoration, recovery and remedial actions created and executed for system outage
- Hired Director of IT Operations – department not functioning in part due to key role missing
- Completed large project within one month of start
- Established back-up systems
- Hired Director of IT Operations – department not functioning in part due to key role missing
- Created SOP, increased discipline and predictability of IT operations
- Established annual budget
- Set up performance testing program
- Initiated change management program
- Initiated business intelligence and reporting
Results
- Brought strategic product to market within one month delivering 3% increase in revenue
- Bridged cultural divide resulting in ability of business units to continue plan execution together
- Full recovery within 6 months of system outage
Large Healthcare provider CIO: 4-5 days/week, 6 months Situation
- Company lost prior CIO and needed immediate leadership
- Broken relationship between business and IT existed
- Need for strategy and standards
- Disorganized department
Key Challenges/Issues for Interim
- Projects were behind schedule and over budget
Implementation
- Established project management and governance
- Established standards within IT including architecture
- Organization management realigned teams
- Reduced costs to overall budget
- Projects adjusted and moving forward with clearer direction
- Brought strong leadership with both IT and business background
Results
- Reduced IT budget by $7 million
- Put in motion plans for additional $1.5-2 million of reductions
- Projects have turned from red to green – on time and under budget
- IT and business units are working as a team
Though no two companies and situations are the same, we find there are often common themes within organizations and at Cerius, we know how to find the right expertise to address the need and provide results. If you have more questions about interim executives and management consultants click here some of the most commonly asked questions and answers.
Pam: I’m Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative, or to provide specialized skills and knowledge for a temporary period of time. Today we'll be talking to members of the Cerius team who are experts in either hiring or placing executives in full-time, part-time or on a consulting basis. So let's meet the Cerius team. First we have Kristen McAlister, President of Cerius, next is Matt Saur, Chief People Officer, and then we have Maria Hillman and Kim Person, both Vice-Presidents of Client Solutions. Let's get right to the questions, shall we? Let’s do a rapid fire session here and each of you give me one answer to each of the next 3 questions. Things to avoid when hiring an executive. Maria, let’s start with you.
Maria: Anyone that uses the word “I” too much and not “we”, meaning they’re not a team player.
Pam: Excellent. Matt?
Matt: Don’t hire somebody in my image.
Pam: Ah yes. Kristen?
Kristen: I would like to be careful from recycling within your industry. You may have an expert in your industry but they’re just going to recycle ideas and other concepts that are within it and not bring a great outside innovative perspective.
Pam: Great. Great answer. Kim?
Kim: Hiring an executive that cannot talk about his or her accomplishments.
Pam: Alright. Next one. Things to ask an executive that you want to hire? Maria?
Maria: I would ask them, what would you do in the first 30 days on your job.
Pam: Ok. Matt?
Matt: What were you brought in to do on your last assignment, and what did you accomplish?
Pam: Right. Thanks Matt. Kristen?
Kristen: Ask them about the results from their last couple of assignments or positions. Some one can’t come up top of their head. What type of numbers, what type of impact that they’ve had? Especially using numbers other than, I just increased morale. They weren’t measuring it then, and they’re not going to measure it for you.
Pam: So you want specifics. Correct?
Kristen: I want specifics. Better have it all on the top of your head because if you don’t have it from your past, how are you going to measure it and monitor it for me, and get me results.
Pam: Exactly. Kim?
Kim: I’m just going to reiterate. You’ve got to talk to executives what can you do for the company, not what you can do for the executive.
Pam: Oh perfect one. Thanks Kim. Alright next one. Company X needs to diversify its revenue stream. What type of an executive should they be looking for? Expertise, duration of contract, etc.
Maria: I would think expertise would be a marketing person or an innovation officer, and 3-6 months. And somebody from, that has some industry experience but that also has other verticals that you may be looking at.
Pam: Right. Thanks Maria. Matt?
Matt: I don’t know that I could add any more than what Maria said. I agree completely. To me it’s sales marketing, it’s experience. It’s having experience and multiple, looking at multiple organizations and being able to look at where they’ve been, where they need to go and how to get them from here to there. So still the marketing will be the obvious but I do think that there are other disciplines that could also get, make that happen.
Pam: Great, thanks Matt. Kristen?
Kristen: Let’s start off with a very specific strategic product individual. Someone who knows how to productize, because optimally you’re not just looking at the revenue streams not just within the industry. It’s what is the product, how I describe the product and is it marketable within that. And a great marketing product person will know that and be able to carry out the messaging, so that not just the market gets it but your team as well. And then one great news about management consultant is that from that point is they diversify more within other industries. An Industry is vertical specific to executive, so we already have the contact say they know how to do it and they’ve done it many times.
Pam: Great, thanks Kristen. Kim? Anymore to add?
Kim: Really no. I just, I agree with everyone but also agree with Kristen that if you can productize, you’ve got to have someone that understands other verticals and other applicability’s for the product.
Pam: Great. Thanks Kim. Alright before we wrap up here today, let me ask one last question to all the panelists. What last minute advice would you give business owners for thinking of hiring a temporary, part-time or contract executive? Kristen, why don’t we start with you?
Kristen: Telling them what I needed done. I’d want to know that they’re done it at least 3-5 times in other companies. I talk to those companies, I talk to the co-workers because I know that they’ve had used that expertise in those situations.
Pam: You like the experience that they bring?
Kristen: Yeah, I want to know that they’ve got the expertise that I need and they’ve got proven results on it. Not just they’re a great person to work with and they’ve accomplished so much. Have they accomplished what I need done?
Pam: So you don’t want somebody that just have an MBA and right out of college. Correct?
Kristen: Not just right out of college. There’s some incredible executives out there that have accomplished a lot of things. They just haven’t actually done and they have light team for balance. They haven’t actually done and been involved in my types of situation. It needs to be specific.
Pam: Great. Anyone else have anything to add?
Matt: I would add it. Our interims have both depth and breadth of experience in their specific discipline. The other thing that they have is that they come with usually 20-plus years of experience in a larger organizations or in large consulting firms. So what they bring to a CEO is that they bring that expertise, that is far-reaching under than just what that CEO is looking for us to come in and help them with. They can come in and provide advice on their whole organization, not just on the specific discipline that that CEO is looking for.
Pam: Great, thanks Matt. So thank you all for being here today and sharing your expertise on things CEO’s need to know when hiring part-time, temporary and contract executives. Next month tune in for our podcast on the advantages of boards and advisory boards, especially the companies today. Should be a great topic and one you won’t want to miss. See you then.
Pam: I’m Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative, or to provide specialized skills and knowledge for a temporary period of time. Today we'll be talking to members of the Cerius team who are experts in either hiring or placing executives in full-time, part-time or on a consulting basis. Let's get right to the questions shall we? Matt, why would a company hire a management consultant? And what is management consulting?
Mat: Well the reason that a company would hire a management consultant. One is that there may be difficult decisions that current management team doesn’t really want to make such as a downsizing situation or a situation where the company is in dire straits and they need to bring somebody in to help them make the most difficult decisions about how to streamline a company to make it profitable and there may very well be that the current owner is having difficulty making that decision on their own. Another one that I always like to use is, I’m the CEO of a company and my brother-in-law is in charge of sales. You know you realize that I’m never going to fire my brother-in-law but sales are stagnant. So I bring somebody in, I bring in a management consultant to head out my sales team and to teach my head of sales -my brother-in-law- how to do this job, how to go out and get new sales, grow organically and find new markets. And I get to keep my brother-in-law and the management person that we brought in at the end of the time when they’ve done their job they move on and they go do that for somebody else. As far as management consulting. Lots of different definitions, I think Kristen talked about it a few minutes ago, but management consulting is really that business where I have an expertise in a specific discipline and I no longer do it for a company, just one, but I provide that service to multiple companies. I go in, I look at what their needs are, I make an assessment, I help them put together a solution to that particular issue or problem and the difference I think between Cerius and most management consulting is that once I’ve made that proposal I move on and I go to another company and I do the same thing again. Cerius, we go in and we make a proposal on how to help them solve their problems and then we stay on and we become part of that management team long enough to actually execute a particular solution that we provided then.
Pam: So you don’t just advise, you also execute?
Matt: That’s correct, we do. Cerius, we do both of them.
Pam: Great. Thanks Matt.
Kristen: Pam, I would like to add on to that.
Pam: Sure.
Kristen: One of the biggest challenges is that the company is hitting that plateau and it’s really hard to come up with the solutions and see your company from an objective standpoint when you’re inside of it. You need that outside perspective and as much as you can hire in individual to your company, those individuals come with needs and a handful of other company experiences because they’ve not always been there full-time. Management consultants may have experience that you get when you work with 10 companies within the given year. They can bring that perspective into your company and give a whole different view and take on things. You and I both know as business owners, sometimes it’s just too hard when you’re inside of it. You need someone from the outside.
Pam: Excellent. Yeah, I totally agree with that. CEO’s today do not get enough outside perspective. They get very myopic. I get myopic in my business and all CEO’s complain that the same thing and they just need somebody from the outside to give them a different point of view. So thank you Kristen. So thank you all for being here today sharing your expertise on some things CEOs need to know when hiring part-time, temporary and contract executives. Next month, tune in for our podcast on the advantages of boards and advisory boards, especially in companies today. Should be a great topic and one you won't want to miss. See you then!
Pam: I’m Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative, or to provide specialized skills and knowledge for a temporary period of time. Today we'll be talking to members of the Cerius team who are experts in either hiring or placing executives in full-time, part-time or on a consulting basis. Let's get right to the questions shall we? What last minute advice would you give business owners for thinking of hiring a temporary, part-time or contract executive? Kristen, why don’t we start with you?
Kristen: Telling them what I needed done. I’d want to know that they’re done it at least 3-5 times in other companies. I talk to those companies, I talk to the co-workers because I know that they’ve had used that expertise in those situations.
Pam: You like the experience that they bring?
Kristen: Yeah, I want to know that they’ve got the expertise that I need and they’ve got proven results on it. Not just they’re a great person to work with and they’ve accomplished so much. Have they accomplished what I need done?
Pam: So you don’t want somebody that just have an MBA and right out of college. Correct?
Kristen: Not just right out of college. There’s some incredible executives out there that have accomplished a lot of things. They just haven’t actually done and they have light team for balance. They haven’t actually done and been involved in my types of situation. It needs to be specific.
Pam: Great. Anyone else have anything to add?
Matt: I would add it. Our interims have both depth and breadth of experience in their specific discipline. The other thing that they have is that they come with usually 20-plus years of experience in a larger organizations or in large consulting firms. So what they bring to a CEO is that they bring that expertise, that is far-reaching under than just what that CEO is looking for us to come in and help them with. They can come in and provide advice on their whole organization, not just on the specific discipline that that CEO is looking for.
Pam: So thank you all for being here today sharing your expertise on some things CEOs need to know when hiring part-time, temporary and contract executives. Next month, tune in for our podcast on the advantages of boards and advisory boards, especially in companies today. Should be a great topic and one you won't want to miss. See you then!
Pam: I’m Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative, or to provide specialized skills and knowledge for a temporary period of time.
BT: Welcome to Business Today brought to you by Cerius Executives, one of the largest interim executive and management consulting firms in North America. Today we are joined by Donald Nobel, a technology CFO who has spent a portion of his career as an interim executive. How are you doing today Donald?
Donald: Oh terrific, terrific! Nice to meet you Raj.
BT: Nice to meet you too! So you actually have a pre-existing relationship with Cerius Executives. We’ve kind of tapped into you to be one of our interim executives and a CFO for some of our clients. That just leads me to wonder. When you work with companies, are there types of leaders or companies that you enjoy working with specifically? Do you like have a sweet spot with personalities or industries?
Donald: Well let’s start with industries if you don’t mind, and in with regards to that even breaking it down further, I prefer the challenge of really high growth companies. Where you walk in the door and they are doing a 100, 200, 300 percent a year, and those are very exciting and challenging for me and I love them. I love being in the door and I’m already hit with 5000 questions. Those are amazing. When you expand that to the industry, one of the things I love most is technology companies and today that’s a very broad term. A technology company could be software, it could be medical devices, it could be professional services. There are so many types of companies lumped under technology but again, love it because they are very fast moving and they are usually challenged a lot. As regards to people, leaders and CEOs, I tend to work best with those that have an organization where they trust the people below them, they trust that a CFO coming in can be part of the team and not micromanage ever single detail. The worst thing in the world is for a CEO to micromanage his team. And I think its best if I and the CEO are on the same page. That there are functions for the CEO and there are functions for the CFO and that’s the best atmosphere to work in.
BT: And what do you do if you walk into a scenario where the CEO is micromanaging and doesn’t have a whole lot of trust with the people that work with him?
Donald: I probably try to do the best I can, but then shortly I recommend somebody else coming in. Again my job is not the long-term type job situation. My job is to do best for the company and sometimes the best for the company is a change.
BT: When we look at the interim executive industry the consulting work that comes with it, it can be challenging, obviously, which seems to be a driving factor for a lot of executives who do this type of work. But at the same time it also, it could probably have its nuisances, constantly having to look for new clients or customers or contracts or... How do you do some of that, how do get yourself out there in the market place? So people know that you’re there and these are the services you have to offer and basically how does an interim executive in today’s day and age market themselves?
Donald: A very good question. I chuckled a little bit because I remembered something that a colleague said to me once and he said, “You are either working or looking for work, you cannot do both.” And I find that to be true in the interim game where again I think a common theme of our conversation today Raj is that interims do tend to get put into situations where they have to work very hard and they have to get a lot of things accomplished in a very short amount of time. So you don’t have time to you know kind of be searching while you’re dong this work for this company. So what I tend to do is, I tend to do two different things. Obviously I have an extensive network of companies I’ve helped and I get referrals. But the other thing of course I do is I partnered with Cerius Executives and work with them because they are one of the few firms to take the extra time to match the right executive or management consultant with the company that can benefit the most from our expertise. There are a lot of companies out there doing it but it seems like Cerius has the best model for accomplishing both goals which is utilizing the expertise and helping the company.
BT: Well Don. I wanted to thank you for your time. We really appreciate you joining us. And sharing some of this, actually not some of this, all of this great knowledge and information with us and our listeners. For our listeners we will be back every week with a different podcast covering a different topic, so please stay tuned. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Play Store. And until next time, this is Raj Prasad for Cerius Executives.
Pam: I’m Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative, or to provide specialized skills and knowledge for a temporary period of time.
BT: Welcome to Business Today brought to you by Cerius Executives, one of the largest interim executive and management consulting firms in North America. Today we are joined by Donald Nobel, a technology CFO who has spent a portion of his career as an interim executive. How are you doing today Donald?
Donald: Oh terrific, terrific! Nice to meet you Raj.
BT: Nice to meet you too! So you actually have a pre-existing relationship with Cerius Executives. We’ve kind of tapped into you to be one of our interim executives and a CFO for some of our clients. That just leads me to wonder. You must have quite a few stories that have to do with startups or situations in which you’ve parachuted in. What’s one of your most memorable assignments, and the results that you achieved?
Donald: Well let’s continue on on the example I just gave. A few years ago I was called in by a friend who had a CEO who couldn’t understand why his company was not profitable. And his company was heading over a 100 million in sales and they were doing a lot of business, a lot of satisfied customers. But believe it or not, he was considering laying off staff members because he just couldn’t figure out what the bottom line problem was. I come in and within a month after analysing the entire company, I realise the sales people were not being compensated correctly and didn’t have the correct incentives to do the job. So I proposed and implemented a compensation plan based on gross profit, not revenue. Within two quarters, gross profit tripled. This enabled the company not only to survive but thrive and continue on by expanding the product line, doing some mergers and acquisitions. And even implementing an entire professional services department.
BT: Well Don. I wanted to thank you for your time. We really appreciate you joining us. And sharing some of this, actually not some of this, all of this great knowledge and information with us and our listeners. For our listeners we will be back every week with a different podcast covering a different topic, so please stay tuned. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Play Store. And until next time, this is Raj Prasad for Cerius Executives.
Pam: I’m Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative, or to provide specialized skills and knowledge for a temporary period of time.
BT: Welcome to Business Today brought to you by Cerius Executives, one of the largest interim executive and management consulting firms in North America. Today we are joined by Donald Nobel, a technology CFO who has spent a portion of his career as an interim executive. How are you doing today Donald?
Donald: Oh terrific, terrific! Nice to meet you Raj.
BT: Nice to meet you too! So you actually have a pre-existing relationship with Cerius Executives. We’ve kind of tapped into you to be one of our interim executives and a CFO for some of our clients. That just leads me to wonder, why continue down the interim executive path? I’m sure you get approached with full-time opportunities. Has the right opportunity not come by yet? Have you just fallen in love with being an interim executive so much that your interim executive career might become your next full-time career? I mean what keeps you going with it?
Donald: Wow. Good question. I’ll answer in part Raj, that of course I get approached by companies that want full-time work, long-term employment. I have also been approached by some of the interim companies I’ve worked for and said can you continue on as a full-term role. I am not sure I explicitly choose not to pursue those, but I do love the challenge that interim work brings to me. I am a puzzle solver.
BT: So let me ask you this – next question’s a little hard – Give me one mantra of Don that you use or give when you go into a company that’s either hitting a plateau, or going through growing pains or in the need of a turnaround situation. A Rajisim, one of mine, is what’s the difference between a butter knife and a sword? How you use it. You got a Donism for me?
Donald: Well there are some serval mantras that I live by but I would probably say the one I use most often is ‘hope for the best and plan for the worst’. The reason I say that and the reason I use that is when you go into any situation, whether it be a company or a life challenge or any situation, it’s OK to hope for the best outcome possible. However a good CFO, a good COO, a good management consultant should always be planning for all the scenarios that might or could happen. And I try to do that when I go in. I don’t just look for the best outcome and say that’s the one we’re going to pursue. I look at that one and say let’s pursue that one but here are five others ones that I am keeping in my back pocket.
BT: That’s actually a really good one. I’m probably going to steal that Don, I’m going to be honest with you.
Donald: Oh I have a few more if you want them, so.
BT: Give me one more. That was actually a really good one.
Donald: It’s interesting you should ask that Raj because one the other ones that comes up quite often, especially when both entering a company as an interim or choosing an interim, is something I heard from a CEO that I respect probably way more than he knows and it’s a simple statement that says, ‘fast, cheap or good, choose any two’. The purpose of that is you can either have it fast or good, but don’t expect it cheap. You can either have it cheap and good, but don’t expect it fast. There is very rarely a situation where you can have fast, good and cheap and I live by that because that’s true. There are many times that you have to pay more for something that you want fast and you want extremely high quality and there are times where when you come in and try to give the lowest bid whatsoever and have it done yesterday, you’re not going to get the quality. So it’s a good maxim to live by.
BT: Well Don. I wanted to thank you for your time. We really appreciate you joining us. And sharing some of this, actually not some of this, all of this great knowledge and information with us and our listeners. For our listeners we will be back every week with a different podcast covering a different topic, so please stay tuned. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Play Store. And until next time, this is Raj Prasad for Cerius Executives.
Pamela Wasley: Hi, I’m Pamela Wasley. CEO of Cerius Executives. Cerius is one of the largest North American providers of contract executives of part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. Cerius has a network of thousands of executives form operations, finance, sales, marketing, IT, engineering and human resources. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill a sudden gap, leadership, to run a key initiative or to provide specialized skills or knowledge for a temporary period of time. Cerius deals with thousands of CEO’s and over the past few years, more and more CEO’s have been telling us that they’re ready to sell the company. However, most don’t realize that they have to get a company ready for sale, and that they have many options when it comes to selling their businesses. Selling a company takes time and lots of preparation, as well as, picking the right partner to sell to. But today, we’ll be talking to four experts: an investment banker, a private equity partner, a CEO who sold his company to his employee- through an employee stock option program also known as an ESOP- and a strategic acquirer. All who can give advice to business owners considering selling their businesses in the next 1-3 years. Let’s look at it from the seller’s point of view. What are the reasons why a CEO would look to sell his company? John, let’s start with you on that one.
John Hammett: [laughs] Sure. Yeah in the first deal I was involved in as a shareholder where I was in my early 30’s and I was working for an entrepreneur in two divisions. We sold one of those. He said, and this guy was in his mid-50’s and as we were working on the transaction, he said that anytime you have an opportunity to get liquidity in a private company you need to seriously consider it because that’s a risky investment, it’s illiquid and it’s very difficult get out of that unless you go through a transaction like this. And that’s stuck with me. For owner’s create huge value when they build a business in the early stage they take risks because you don’t have as much to lose. But you get to be in your 50’s and you’ve built a company and its worth $20 million, then suddenly you become more conservative. And you do have the risk of losing it all and as you get older, you have as we call lesser runway to get it all back. If you had a bad five years, when you’re in your 30’s that’s one thing but if you’re over 60, a bad five years can really affect things. So I think owners need to always be thinking about how do I exit this investment. Doesn’t mean that the company’s bad, just that as a single investment it’s something to be concerned about.
Pamela Wasley: How many [Murray speaks] Go ahead Murray.
Murray Rudin: The one thing to always think about is really the as important as price, particularly if they’re doing a deal where they will continue to be engaged, is the caliber of the firm, the private equity firm that they’re going to partner with, the reputation, the references, the style, the chemistry, the cost. Those kinds of factors. I think the number one mistake sellers make in scenario’s where they intend to roll over significant equity is they obsess over the last few dollars valuation when the really important thing is the quality of people that you’re partnering with.
John Hammett: I absolutely agree with that Murray. That’s much more important.
Pamela Wasley: Cal, anything to add to that?
Ca Lai: Yeah, I think as a seller you really want to know why you want to exit. I think it’s true whenever you have a chance to get liquidity it’s worth looking at but I think that there are a lot of reasons why sellers want to exit. They want to retire and building a business takes a lot of time, energy and effort and I think after 15-20 years in the seat it’s very tiring. And I know a lot of people, a lot of CEO’s and founders who built businesses, at some point put so much into it that they don’t have the passion they once had. They want to do something different, so that’s another reason to think about why it’s time to be selling. So I think a good entrepreneur is always looking at their options going forward. Time is always a risk, and the more time you’re business is out there, the greater risk you have. So if you have, most of us do, some financial goals in the sale of a business you’ve always got to be looking forward to that and understanding what the best timing for a sale is, how you can get prepared to sell and finding the right potential buyers.
Pamela Wasley: Hi, I’m Pamela Wasley. CEO of Cerius Executives. Cerius is one of the largest North American providers of contract executives of part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. Cerius has a network of thousands of executives form operations, finance, sales, marketing, IT, engineering and human resources. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill a sudden gap, leadership, to run a key initiative or to provide specialized skills or knowledge for a temporary period of time. Cerius deals with thousands of CEO’s and over the past few years, more and more CEO’s have been telling us that they’re ready to sell the company. However, most don’t realize that they have to get a company ready for sale, and that they have many options when it comes to selling their businesses. Selling a company takes time and lots of preparation, as well as, picking the right partner to sell to. But today, we’ll be talking to four experts: an investment banker, a private equity partner, a CEO who sold his company to his employee- through an employee stock option program also known as an ESOP- and a strategic acquirer. All who can give advice to business owners considering selling their businesses in the next 1-3 years. So let’s meet the talent. Our first guest today is John Hammett, an investment banker with Corporate Finance Associates. As a former company owner himself, John understands the unique situation a private company owner who decides to sell. John maximizes their value by finding high-value buyers and negotiating the best price and terms for the clients. Our next guest is Murray Rudin, managing director for Riordan, Lewis & Haden, a private equity firm. Prior to joining RLH, Murray was Chief Financial Officer and Director of business development of Voxel, a medical imaging company. Previous to that, he was the principal of Valley National Investors, a private equity fund based in Phoenix. Murray also practiced law at Riordan & McKinzie, specializing in private equity funds and their portfolio company. Our next guest is Steve LaRue, Vice-Chairman of Rico Solution. His work with strategic buyers and private equity firms over the years to sell and buy companies. His many stories propel when it comes to MNA. Our last guest is Cal Lai, President and CEO of Recom Technologies, a software development shop that builds quality solutions for government and business. Established in 1980, the ownership of Recom sold its business to 600 employees through an ESOP in 2000.
What would you tell, and I want the advice of this panel, I know what some of you are going to say. But what would you say to an owner on how to prepare his or her company for sale? I mean aren’t there things you need to do before you even start talking to people? Murray let’s start with you.
Murray Rudin: So, I would say that and this touches a little upon some of the topics Steve covered exceptionally well a few minutes ago. But I would say that the owner needs to take a really honest look and then go. They have to realize that whatever flaws, warts, whatever you want to call them are on business are going to be found. They’ll be better off finding those warts themselves and finding, or mitigating or fix them before they start the process. SO that includes things like, obviously, get all your legal documents really diligently reviewed by a professional, be a lawyer not by your local lawyer. Have definitely get an audit from your financial statements, going back at least 2 or 3 years even if it costs a lot of money, you just want to have that. Because all of these things although they cost a lot of money upfront ultimately yield enormous ROI in terms of getting a better valuation on the back hand. If there are limitations in, as was mentioned, kind of the depth of your management team or you’ve got customer concentrations, supplier concentrations, major contracts that are nearing the end with customers that need to be, that really are critically valued business, that need to be reviewed in order that you get value form. Anything. You really got to be tough on yourself and on the business and say if I were the skeptic, what would I be worried about in this business in terms of predictability, revenue and earnings? And what can I do to mitigate that? And that mitigation effort will take time and therefore almost every business has some weaknesses so you really should start thinking about that whole identify the flaws and try to mitigate them a year before you really suspect to be selling the business. Sometimes more than that.
Pamela Wasley: Right, thanks Murray. Anybody else have anything to add to that?
John Hammett: Well, well your lead is Pam was a classic because so often we find donors that say, “Oh, I can sell this. I know who’s going to buy it, my competitor across town I see him every year at the tradeshow and they’ll pay me a premium to get me out of the business.” In my view, selling to a competitor is probable one of the lowest value deals you can put together because there’s nothing new brought to the game. You already compete with them, if he’d wanted to hire your salesman he’d do that, and if he wanted to sell to your customers he’d go try to find them, but the customers go buy from you because they don’t like him. And there’s a negative synergy there. We love entrepreneurs. I’ve been an entrepreneur myself and they start, create fabulous companies. But they definitely do that on their own and they think that selling the company on their own is going to be easy. Um, what they’re going up against is very experienced buyers. And they need someone on their side of the table that brings equal experience and some insight as to where find the right buyer.
Murray Rudin: Perhaps unexpectedly, I would agree with you on that. Folks might say, well as a buyer why would you want a seller to have spawn representation? But in our experience, um, the having strong representation with somebody like John actually really, first of all it improves the likelihood of the process will get successfully completed as compared to a scenario where the seller does not have an advisor. And it helps the seller understand and get comfortable with what are the norms of the deal business. Typically sellers don’t have any prior experiences selling businesses and they just don’t know what requests, what approaches, what valuation technique, anything are pretty much given standards in the MNA world. And so, by having a Sherpa, a guy who’s already been to the top of the mountain before, the seller is much more likely to have an outcome he or she is likely to feel great about.
Steve LaRue: Can’t emphasize that enough. It’s amazing how many sellers go into the process thinking it’s just a foregone conclusion, I’ll just find a buyer and there’s going to be a happy ending at the end of this journey. And it’s not an automatic. The transaction, the MNA feels littered with deal which doesn’t cross the finish line because of various errors and mistakes that were made in the process. So having an, assembling an advisory team is the single most important thing a seller can do and that advisory team needs to consist of an MNA advisor who gets the big picture, the big picture guy. Whether that’s an investment banker or broker or a consultant with strong MNA experience. The CPA is critically important that Murray emphasized earlier and legal counsel, and we’re not talking about the transaction attorney or corporate attorney. We’re talking about somebody who has deep MNA experience. In addition, Murray talked about doing a financial audit that’s also really important that you have a legal audit done as well. I can’t tell you how many deals got delayed or ended up with deal breakers or legal hurdles, issues around status of IP, reviewing the key contracts. We ended up successfully buying the company but we looked at one company where during the due diligence process we discovered that all of the distributor agreements that they had with their distribution channel had expired. And, you know, we had to go fix that before we could go buy the company. So it’s really important that they do their homework, the seller does their homework, does the housekeeping on both the financial side and on the legal side before they start the sale process.
Pamela Wasley: Yes, Steve you just mentioned due diligence. Tell me, talk a little bit more about that. What does that entail and how long does it take?
Steve LaRue: Yeah, the due diligence process is really the, it’s the risk mitigation activity conducted by the buyer. And it primarily focuses on 3 key areas: financial risk mitigation, operational risk mitigation and then legal risk mitigation. In the old days when I first started doing this it involved just a very exhaustive process of pulling together all the documentation, the information, the data necessary. Putting it in the binders, putting it in a data room. Today they have a, we have virtual data rooms. It’s all on electronically which all makes it a, a lot easier. It’s extraordinarily detailed. Very, very intrusive. It can take anywhere from a few weeks if it’s a relatively small transaction and the seller’s well prepared, to literally months if the process properly taken care of in advance. The most important thing I would know about due diligence is for the listeners which are thinking about selling their business. Perhaps, the most important thing I want to emphasize is that the due diligence submission that are entered into that data room typically become the schedule’s supporting the seller’s rep and warranty in a definitive agreement. So, it’s really important that you’re totally honest and very, very accurate in those submissions in the due diligence in the data room.
Pamela Wasley: Yeah, John you have a data room you talked about before. Anything you’d like to add there about that?
John Hamett: Yeah, yeah. I could give you a couple of antidotes. I think the advice we just heard about being brutally honest, totally complete is really, really important. Because you know you’ll have to indemnify the buyer against anything you did not disclose. Sometimes there’s a temptation to not disclose something and to think that you can scoot it by the buyer but I’ve never been a party to that happening but it can come back and bite you pretty severely. We sold a company here a couple of years ago to a Fortune 25 buyer. It was a mid-market company like most of the deals we do but we ended up, the buyer had 60 people in the data room looking at 2400 documents. And it took about 4 months to get it through right. I was astonished. They had the deal guys, the financial people, the legal people and then they had HR people in there, they had the safety person, risk management. It was the most extensive due diligence I’ve ever been through. But we got it done and we got the deal done so it turned out fine in the end.
Murray Rudin: You know I might add something on that. We kind of look at the due diligence process with 2 different purposes. One of course being of risk mitigation elements that were mentioned just a minute or two ago. But what we’re really more interested in, particularly because we’re looking at going forward in a 60-40 partnership with the entrepreneur, is we’re trying to learn about business in conjunction with the entrepreneur to help map out strategy, and opportunities, needs for additional people in the organization. All those kinds of elements for what will happen going forward. And so we don’t get the diligence so much as a ‘us against them’ project as we do a joint effort to try to understand, help us understand the business and start to develop in conjunction with the owner what the high-level plans moving forward to maintain and accelerate the business’ growth and revenue and profits and value would look like. SO there’s kind of a second purpose for us in that process as well.
John Hammett: Yeah, Murray I’d like to respond to that. About half the deals we sell are to private equity and half strategic. Before I became a full-time investment banker, I was the president of a couple of companies that we sold at private equity. And the process is very interesting early in the deal you sort of share information and then you negotiate the letter of intent, it can be adversarial. Each side wants to get the best deal structure. And the adversarial thing begins with, carries over with the beginning of due diligence. By the time we get through, it becomes highly collaborative. I always enjoy watching that happen. The best private equity buyers do look at it as a partnership with the owners and they do have legitimate interest in where the opportunities are as well as the risks. In most cases it’s not a game of gotcha’, oh look what I found here, but very much a collaborative thing. It’s very nice to hear you speak to that too Murray.
Murray Rudin: yeah, particularly the issue: is it collaborative or is it adversarial is mitigated to some degree in some circumstances where the seller is rolling over a substantial portion of their equity which is typically the case in our transactions. Because conversely, when the seller is selling almost all of their positions then there’s really, the seller doesn’t really have any incentive to help the buyer become better educated and a better helper. Because there’s really no helping going post-closing. But in our scenarios we all view the second bite of the apple as the opportunity for everyone and it’s in everybody’s interest to get that process off to a strong start as possible.
Pamela Wasley: Hi, I’m Pamela Wasley. CEO of Cerius Executives. Cerius is one of the largest North American providers of contract executives of part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. Cerius has a network of thousands of executives form operations, finance, sales, marketing, IT, engineering and human resources. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill a sudden gap, leadership, to run a key initiative or to provide specialized skills or knowledge for a temporary period of time. Cerius deals with thousands of CEO’s and over the past few years, more and more CEO’s have been telling us that they’re ready to sell the company. However, most don’t realize that they have to get a company ready for sale, and that they have many options when it comes to selling their businesses. Selling a company takes time and lots of preparation, as well as, picking the right partner to sell to. But today, we’ll be talking to four experts: an investment banker, a private equity partner, a CEO who sold his company to his employee- through an employee stock option program also known as an ESOP- and a strategic acquirer. All who can give advice to business owners considering selling their businesses in the next 1-3 years. So let’s meet the talent. Our first guest today is John Hammett, an investment banker with Corporate Finance Associates. As a former company owner himself, John understands the unique situation a private company owner who decides to sell. John maximizes their value by finding high-value buyers and negotiating the best price and terms for the clients. Our next guest is Murray Rudin, managing director for Riordan, Lewis & Haden, a private equity firm. Prior to joining RLH, Murray was Chief Financial Officer and Director of business development of Voxel, a medical imaging company. Previous to that, he was the principal of Valley National Investors, a private equity fund based in Phoenix. Murray also practiced law at Riordan & McKinzie, specializing in private equity funds and their portfolio company. Our next guest is Steve LaRue, Vice-Chairman of Rico Solution. His work with strategic buyers and private equity firms over the years to sell and buy companies. His many stories propel when it comes to MNA. Our last guest is Cal Lai, President and CEO of Recom Technologies, a software development shop that builds quality solutions for government and business. Established in 1980, the ownership of Recom sold its business to 600 employees through an ESOP in 2000. Do you have any last minute advice you’d give to business owners thinking of selling their companies? Murray let’s start with you.
Murray Rudin: Sure I would say, your question highlights one of the interesting aspects of our business which is that when we make the investment, that’s not the end of the road. That transaction is the beginning of the road. And where is, as for example, somebody in John’s position does a transaction he gets a seat and moves on to the next client. We, when we’re doing a transaction we’re just beginning a 5-7 year business marriage, you might call it, with the entrepreneur. So I might say the measure of our success is not when we do the investment transaction, it’s when we exit. And there is a real satisfaction. We sell companies, you know, every year. Probably something in our portfolio turns over one or two transactions depending on the maturity of the company in the light. But there is a real satisfaction after you work with a business and a management team for those many years to see a couple of things happen. Most importantly the entrepreneur realizes their dreams, they get a second bit of the apple, a windfall that allows them to do whatever they want for the rest of their lives. Which is wonderful. You see the opportunity that has been provided for the management team to have the experience of building a great business. And then typically to remain in place with the new owner. And then, you know, we try to make sure that we sell our business to typically strategic buyers where there’s a really good cultural fit and so we want to make sure there’s opportunity for everybody in the company to continue to blow their careers and make a good living. So when you have something like that, there’s a real satisfaction. And that’s probably what gets us up in the morning every day.
Pamela Wasley: Murray, can you give an example of that? A recent transaction?
Murray Rudin: Well sure. We just, in the last 12 months or so we have a sold a portfolio company called Secure Mission Solutions that provides federal agencies with cyber security services. Basically helping IT services to help protect federal agencies data and networks against hackers from places like China, North Korea, Iran and everywhere else. And we sold that company to a very large multi-billion dollar privately held engineering services company. Actually based here in Southern California called Parsons Engineering. Prior to that we had a portfolio company called Cybercoders which was an extraordinarily successful replacement recruitment business that was acquired on by assignment, a publicly held staffing and recruiting business and that’s proven to be a wonderful transaction for both us and for the, all the members of the Cybercoders team that are doing really well with their new owner.
Pamela Wasley: Thanks Murray. Cal?
Cal Lai: I don’t have any recent transactions other than the one that I did, the one that I described. I still here working on it, on the company. The advice I would give is really think about what you want to do. Surround yourself by good outside advices. I think we’ve heard that a lot today, and I think that advisors are key. One thing I heard a lot is that, “You sold your company to employees that must have been a really quick transaction.” It took a year and a half. When you have to go through the due diligence and all the legal aide work needs to be done and the creating of the trust and the refs and warrants, and the passage of liability from ownership to the company itself, it’s a very arduous process and I think the one thing is that it’s easy, easy to believe these transactions are very simple and easy to pull off but they’re complex, they take a lot of time and I think that invariably throughout the process you reach a point of exhaustion where you’re like, God this is taking a lot of effort why am I doing this? And the risk there is that you spend so much time in the transaction, and as said earlier you lose sight of operating the business. So something the key takeaway for me was we were fortunate in that we were able to pull off a complex transaction or deal and at the same time grow our business and not take our eyes off the ball. But that took a lot of thought and effort and planning ahead of time. So we had actually a team of people who did nothing but operate the business while we had an outside team primarily of people who helped advice and pull us through the ESOP transaction. So I think creating two separate teams in that example really helped us to continue to grow the business at the same time and execute the transaction.
Pamela Wasley: Great advice Cal. Thank. John, can you give me a transaction? I recent transaction? And then any last minute advice you’d give companies?
John Hammett: Sure, let me give you the advice first. Because I’m going to give you a story that sort of relates to that. My biggest piece of advice is to be realistic about what the value of the company is and to be thoughtful in the final valuation. It’s so tempting to try to get the last half a million bucks out of a purchased price out of the last million dollars of the deal. And it does, the competitive juice get flowing, but I’ve seen two circumstances. One we negotiated a high price and the buyer couldn’t close it because he couldn’t get financing. The price was too high for financing. And in another case where we sold the company and negotiated a strong price and then went through 5 times of due diligence to buy or retrade the price. And I think they agreed to the price thinking that they can get it back again. We did a pretty good job of holding the line for our clients. But the story I want to tell you just came up about 2 weeks ago. Actually we sold a company 2 years ago and for our client who was 36 years old, and we often times most of our clients are in their 50’s or 60’s retiring. This was a young man who was 36 and his company was 20 years old. And if you do the math which isn’t tough, he started it when he was 16. It was an ennui based company started in his bedroom. And he built it up over time and took it through a number of different iterations. He was in the internet security business, a hot sector. And we sold the company for him 2 years ago. He ended up with a very interesting structure because of who he was and what his interest were. And the deal was about one-third in cash, one-third in a seller’s noted – a lot of sellers don’t like that but in this case it was good- and one-third in stock of the buyer. And it was a pre-IPO company. And he thought that stock, well I’m willing to take the risk, I like the people a lot, I like the company. So it was structured that way. Two weeks ago the company that bought him was sold to a Singaporean company. So the shares that he took, he’s probably going to get an extra 50% valuation on that second bite of the apple in this case. So that was a wonderful success form and the seller note when we negotiated that, the buyer was going to pay 4% and then we went back and said please don’t insult us to tell our client you’re only going to pay 4%. It should at least be 6. And they agreed to that. So I asked the client here, they’re going to pay the seller note. He said I don’t want them to. I got a good interest rate at 6%, I’m going to keep at another year until it matures. I couldn’t get that kind of rate anywhere else, so all the different components that he took of this thing meant something to him and solved a different need. He’s now a CEO of a company owned by his father and I’m hopeful in a couple of years we’ll sell that company for him again. But it was probably my favourite transaction with this young guy.
Pamela Wasley: Thanks John. Steve?
Steve LaRue: Yeah, like John I’d like to start with the advice. You know most entrepreneurs and founders of the company spend most time nurturing their company than they probably do their own biological children at home. So the companies become their babies. And during the selling process, especially during the due diligence process, it is a process where the buyers are looking for weaknesses in the business. And as a result it can get to be very challenging from an ego perspective for the sellers, so my advice is don’t bring your ego into sale and don’t take the process personally. There’s going to be moments during time, whether it’s negotiating the letter of intent or the process of due diligence where it’s going to get potentially adversarial. But at the end of the day, as many of the folks pointed out here on during this session, at the end of the day as the process comes to fruition it’s really about two parties coming together and putting together a deal that creates a win-win scenario for everybody. In terms of the example of a business I recently acquired, at Rico we acquired 6 companies. One of them was a company in Canada, which two brothers owned the business. They were ready to exit the business. They had run it for 30+ years and they were looking to profiticize their investment in that business. And we saw an opportunity for us to come in and acquire that company and take their product line which was very, very complementary to our own. And rapidly grow the business by leveraging our sales and distribution channel. So at the confirmation of the deal, one of the things the founder was really concerned about was not only getting a fair valuation but making sure that the employees, were really, really like extended family members for the, were taken care of. They were pleased to see that over the course of next 2 years after acquiring the business that the business grew substantially. We increased the employment up in Canada, and the manufacturing operations by over 50%. And it turned out to be a very favorable transaction for us as the buyer, for the seller’s in terms of the valuation they get. Perhaps, most importantly they got a terrific deal for the employees as well as the customers and suppliers relying on that company.
Pamela Wasley: Hi, I’m Pamela Wasley. CEO of Cerius Executives. Cerius is one of the largest North American providers of contract executives of part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. Cerius has a network of thousands of executives form operations, finance, sales, marketing, IT, engineering and human resources. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill a sudden gap, leadership, to run a key initiative or to provide specialized skills or knowledge for a temporary period of time. Cerius deals with thousands of CEO’s and over the past few years, more and more CEO’s have been telling us that they’re ready to sell the company. However, most don’t realize that they have to get a company ready for sale, and that they have many options when it comes to selling their businesses. Selling a company takes time and lots of preparation, as well as, picking the right partner to sell to. But today, we’ll be talking to four experts: an investment banker, a private equity partner, a CEO who sold his company to his employee- through an employee stock option program also known as an ESOP- and a strategic acquirer. All who can give advice to business owners considering selling their businesses in the next 1-3 years. What is some of the mistakes you see business owners make when they try to sell a company today?
Steve LaRue: Oh gosh. There’s probably four key things I’ve seen in my experience. The first and foremost is that you typically will find, especially sellers of smaller private businesses that they’re pennywise and dollar-foolish. They resist going out and hiring professionals to help themselves in the business. This is probably going to be the single most important financial transaction that a founder’s ever going to have, selling their business. So it’s really important to get professional advices and help them through the process. The second is and perhaps the most, the biggest reason why most deals in experience has failed is because of a sense of valuation by the small business owner. The founder doesn’t accept the unreasonable offer from a seller but also refuses to get a valuation resulting in an impasse [laughs]. I just had this experience, just last week trying to acquire a business and I’m talking to the founder and I finally, just had come straight out and say, “Help me understand, where you came up with this valuation number?” [Wasley laughs] And you get some really, really interesting processes that people go through to value their business. The third is that small businesses tend to have a lack of discipline and the buyer won’t do the necessary preparation in advance sales so sometimes small businesses for example don’t always follow business practices or principles, they have inadequate or improper documentation, and as a result of not having that cleaned up in advance of the sales process, that can result in either a delay or derailing of the transaction. Once the sales process starts, there’s really very little time for house cleaning and so you really need to get your house in order before you enter into the sales process. And then finally the selling process can be long and it requires a tremendous amount of commitment, prime commitment on the part of the founder and often the management team selling the company. And we found in some cases that the founders have either not have the necessary resources or willing to commit the necessary time to file the transaction all the way through to completion.
Pamela Wasley: Great thanks Steve, and Murray you’re not buying this that owner’s think that their companies worth a whole lot more than they, than you think it is. Are you?
Murray Rudin: [laughs] I tend to think a line. I tend to believe that, you know, we have as a firm pretty good idea of 30+ years of experience what the kinds of businesses we invest in are worth. Um, you know, in our view when somebody says, well I think it’s worth 50% more, you know, that’s great. If you can find somebody who will give you that valuation you should definitely take it because based on our experience that will be an extraordinary valuation and we want you to do the right thing for you. And if you get somebody to pay that, give you that kind of valuation today in cash, that’s wonderful. We’re really happy for you and you should grab that.
Pamela Wasley: [laughs] John, are you finding any other mistakes that companies are making today in selling their company?
John: Yeah, well Steve said something I think is important and it’s what we call ‘deal fatigue’. It is a long process and at some point in this the owner gets, could get so wrapped up in the deal itself he neglects the business. And that’s one of the worst things that can happen is you’re right in the middle of selling your company, you’re starting to get into the final two months of due diligence and suddenly the growth slows down or there’s a dip in the backlog or things that come from taking the eye of the ball. And that’s always, always frustrating. One of the reasons people hire guys like us is so that they, we handle a lot of the transactional stuff so that they can keep the business going well. Um, I think the other big mistake is depth in management. Owners, entrepreneurs start a company and they build it and they know everything, they know every customer and how the product’s made and all the technology, and that’s great and it’s very satisfying to entrepreneurs. I’ve been one myself. But if you want to leave the company and go retire to a beach, you have to have someone who will run it after you. So owners really do need to identify and hire and groom a number 2 person who can step into the company and lead it forward. Sometimes owners think like I can’t spend a quarter million dollars to train a chief operating officer here, it’s too much money. But when in fact we package a company to sell it, that’s what we call it, an add-back. We would leave that person’s salary and take out the owner’s salary and say he’s there because he owns it not because he’s running the business. So it does not affect value from a math calculation standpoint and in fact enhances value because the buyer feels like he’s got an experienced manager to run the company once he owns it.
Pamela Wasley: Hi, I’m Pamela Wasley. CEO of Cerius Executives. Cerius is one of the largest North American providers of contract executives of part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. Cerius has a network of thousands of executives form operations, finance, sales, marketing, IT, engineering and human resources. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill a sudden gap, leadership, to run a key initiative or to provide specialized skills or knowledge for a temporary period of time. Cerius deals with thousands of CEO’s and over the past few years, more and more CEO’s have been telling us that they’re ready to sell the company. However, most don’t realize that they have to get a company ready for sale, and that they have many options when it comes to selling their businesses. Selling a company takes time and lots of preparation, as well as, picking the right partner to sell to. But today, we’ll be talking to four experts: an investment banker, a private equity partner, a CEO who sold his company to his employee- through an employee stock option program also known as an ESOP- and a strategic acquirer. All who can give advice to business owners considering selling their businesses in the next 1-3 years. Well Cal, let’s talk a little about the ESOP.
Cal Lai: Yep.
Pamela Wasley: So you did that with your company, but you probably could’ve gone out and done a deal with a strategic buyer or a private equity firm or gone through a private investment banker. What was it that, what was the over-arching reason why you went with the ESOP? I mean you could discuss a little to begin with but what were those real reasons and why should any business owner consider it?
Cal Lai: You know, we actually did have much better offers. We could’ve sold the company for a lot more money. Probably 50% more money if we took a strategic buyer and as I said earlier we got a couple of them. But as we went through the diligence process, we realized that the company would be a really different company and the founders really felt strongly that they’d spent ... the company started with one guy who built a thousand person organization, and you know one person at a time. And the company had a really strong sense of family values we really believed in doing things the right way and working hard and rewarding staff, we had great perks and benefits that people were highly incentived to perform and stick around. And we really created a family like environment. And we, we knew that once we were hired by a strategic buyer that would kind of like go away and since many, many, many other people in the company had been there through most of that time and contributed a lot to the success of the company, we didn’t think it was fair that we put their jobs in jeopardy or change the culture so I think management was willing, the ownership was willing to take a lot less because they could see the continuity of the organization that was built with a lot of pride in that. And I think if you ask the ownership that sold at the time, they would all tell you that even though they could’ve made more money they felt better about the transaction because the company was able to continue with a set of values and culture that it had built. Many of our key employees were able to continue in their roles, we had a succession plan planned out and put into effect and many of us are still around operating the business. So ultimately we just felt that it was the right decision to make a back of our employees to sell it to them, rather than to maximize our returns and leave them in the bag. So it all comes down to what we talked about before, the seller’s intentions are as an entrepreneur and as a business owner you really have to understand what your ultimate exit and goal is and you know having been through this I can tell you from my personal experiences it’s all about the money. You know, I think when you work very hard to build your company and you say yourself wow, I don’t want that change. Is there no way I can exit without changing everything I built? In that case you might take less, but you may have the satisfaction knowing that what you built remains. So, I think that’s, you know, owners always have to be clear about what they’re goals are and why they’re doing what they’re doing. You know, if your goal is maximize your financial returns that’s probably a different strategy than, you know, seeing continuity in an organization that you built. So you’ve got to think about what your goals are.
Pamela Wasley: So Cal, you weren’t ready to step down either. I think that’s one of the reasons?
Cal Lai: No, it was odd because there was basically 3 primary owners of the business. Two wanted to retire. I didn’t. If they were going to sell the company I was planning to step out anyway, and actually I was the one who had arranged the purchase from the few strategic buyers. So I’d spent 9 months working through that process. Because I thought that’s what the other two, who owned the business more than I did, wanted to do. And we came down to it, it was a matter of them deciding that they didn’t want me to leave, they didn’t want employees to leave. I still want… There’s a significant age difference. I’m probably 25 years younger than the two other founders, so I didn’t have an incentive to go sit on the beach and retire, so I wasn’t in that mode. So I think ultimately it was a really good decision that the ownership really thought about what was best in the long-term interests of the organization that they had built, not necessarily their individual pockets. Having said that they exited at a fine amount of money and were able to comfortably retire and not have to work again. So they did accomplish their financial goals as well.
BT: Hi and welcome to Business Today, brought to you by Cerius Executive Solutions. Today we are joined by Kristen McAlister and Matt Sauer from Cerius Executives. How are you guys doing today?
Kristen: I’m great, thank you.
Matt: Great, thank you.
BT: Great. So today we just want to kind of get right into it. Today’s conversation is about contract executives, interim executive and consultants who were once CEO’s, C-level executives that are either trying to make the transition, have made the transition or are looking for ways to find more consistent work and some tips that may help them. How is it, and I know the answer to this and maybe the answer that I have is the ultimate answer, but for me hiring experience is a lot like shortcuts. If you play video games, it’s like plugging in cheat codes. You’re paying an executive to come in, to give you experience so you don’t make those mistakes that you can only learn via experience. How does Cerius work with companies to kind of explain that? Because when looking at an executive contract they’re usually not cheap. They’re relative because the experience that’s coming in will actually save you and make you money in the long-term. But in that one moment instance where that proposal gets to the client, there could be that feedback or that thought. What would you say to that CEO who’s looking at your proposal going “oh I think this is expensive”?
Kristen: Matt, I’m going to let you take this one first because you are, this is your sweet spot.
Matt: So first thing that I would say is, I think that we are worth what you pay us to do for you. And I think that if I were hiring, if I were a CEO in a startup situation and I were hiring a head-of-sales in marketing because that’s what I that was where my focus was. And the fact that this executive is going to cost me more than if I went to the marketplace to hire somebody. One of the things that we tend to forget is our executives, almost every one of them have been in the marketplace in a very senior position for 20-plus years. And with that they bring a not only a depth of the knowledge of what their discipline is, but a breath of other knowledge because they’ve been in large corporations or they’ve been in large organizations where they’ve seen more than just their discipline. They’ve been exposed to, many of them they’ve been exposed to acquisitions, divestitures, startups. They know what to look for in addition to just their discipline. So while they’re doing their job in this startup organization, they also can council the CEO, the board and say “now I want to make sure you know that from my experience, this is what you can anticipate on this side over here. Or this is what you should be prepared for over here.” So while they may be paying for sales and marketing, they’re actually getting a whole lot more knowledge, information sharing than they would get if they just went to the marketplace and hired someone who was the head of sales and marketing. And that’s the value that we try to make sure that our clients understand that they’re getting when they engage us, and they engage anyone of our interims that they’re always getting more than what they’re paying for.
Kristen: Some of that depends on what you’re comparing it to. In contrast, if you’re comparing apple-to-apple that’s actually not more expensive. Especially when you look at fully loaded, the time to hire and the cost of [3:35] package when the time comes. For a full-time executive, you only get an interim executive and what you need them to accomplish they’re very focused, they’re accomplishing on that, and that heavily involves HR and office politics [3:48] water cooler. They don’t need to go through iterations, they’re an expert in what they need for what you would… If you’re thinking you need to hire a full-time executive when you can actually have an interim come or part-time come in couple days a week for the next 6 months in order to address yourself or help you accomplish strategic planning and executing it, or addressing your sales team and improving sales, re-doing the comp plan. Whatever those areas is, what are you looking for your executives to accomplish, you have a part-time executive accomplish it in likely a shorter period of time and that’s actually going to cost you a lot. Is it more expensive than the do-nothing option in the short-term? Yeah. If I do nothing, I don’t bring an executive in and I go with my assistive team, just remember your, their thinking is limited to the handful of companies that they’ve worked with. They’re likely not going to all of a sudden jump in expertise and have the answers that you need, or the expertise that you need the next couple of weeks, or the next couple of months. And that’s by design. It’s a double-edged sword. You’re internal team, you don’t want them to be drop jumpers, you don’t want them to have work in 10 to 15 different companies at that point in their careers because you want them to stay with you for the next, you know, at least the next 5 years. The double-edged sword is that means they’ve only worked in a very small amount of companies, and when bringing someone in like an interim executive management post, someone may have worked in 5 to 10 different companies in a single year, and they’re raining all their experience, all that knowledge and all that possible worth to your company. So you’re condensing what might be a 1 year cycle onto a 6 month cycle because there’s no testing, there’s no guessing. You got the action book all ready when you’re bringing them in. Just why we really focus on what you need them to accomplish, and what expertise is needed. Why we focus with the executives on knowing what their expertise is so that they can come in and head the [5:43]. Most cases it really is not an expensive option. In the long-term it is going to save or make the company more money, as long as it’s managed correctly. Always put that caveat on.
BT: Excellent. Any last minute comments before we say goodbye?
Matt: [laughs]
Kristen: Well, I think you’ve covered a range of topics and [laughs] a lot of information is out there. It’s not easy but it certainly makes the world look different. And for us to see a company, and I’ve been in a company – we grew from 5 million to 50 million in a period of 18 months. I wish I would have had this option back then. I wish that I could have brought in an expert, rather than relying on “we have such fast growth, we have a limited cash flow budget, we can only afford this expertise.” It might help that there’s never a company where a CEO, especially a business owner, who’s in a situation and they’re not getting that leadership and expertise that they need to take their company forward because they can’t afford it. Because they think that they need to hire a full-time executive. There are other options for a range of situations. The only limitation there is thinking outside [6:58].
Matt: I think the only thing that I would add is that we’re not new to this. You know Cerius has been at this for well over 12 years and I think that you know we’ve learned how to work with potential clients. That there are always ways to help them when they think that it’s too expensive, we can work with them to try to figure out ways for them to still get the knowledge and the expertise that they need from our interims and not spend as much money as they thought they would have to spend with us. So I think that there are ways of us working with clients, and I think the biggest thing to remember is that you know we can get an interim into their organization within a matter of days, and that with that that interim brings a breadth and depth of knowledge that it will take them months to try to find if they go out and try to find somebody on a full-time basis. So I think that they just need to remember that we’re there. And we can help.
BT: Excellent. Well Kristen and Matt, I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for listening to all my questions and answering them. And for everybody else that is listening you can find Business Today on iTunes, the Play Store and off of the Cerius Executives website as well as Podbean. Please visit us at www.ceriusexecutives.com. Thank you!
BT: Hi and welcome to Business Today, brought to you by Cerius Executive Solutions. Today we are joined by Kristen McAlister and Matt Sauer from Cerius Executives. How are you guys doing today?
Kristen: I’m great, thank you.
Matthew: Great, thank you.
BT: Great. So today we just want to kind of get right into it. Today’s conversation is about contract executives, interim executive and consultants who were once CEO’s, C-level executives that are either trying to make the transition, have made the transition or are looking for ways to find more consistent work and some tips that may help them. So the first question I have for both of you is what 3 things would you consider a consultant/ contract-based executive needs to know to be successful as an executive that is no longer part of an organization full time? Kristen?
Kristen: You sure I can’t list more than 3?
BT: You can go 14 if you want to.
Kristen: [laughs] Obviously there’s a big difference from when you’re going, from when you’ve had a very successful career as a long-term full-time employee inside of an organization, to being someone who has more of a characteristic for you parachuting into an organization for a shorter, medium term time and you’ve got specific objectives to do. It’s far more focused as one person thinks of making that transition as one, you’re always out there marketing, you’re always doing business development. Because you need find a situation. One of the best ways to find a situation is you no longer have a title, you’re no longer AVP of sales. You’re a problems solver. So start looking at your history and in your communications, in your conversation be clear on here’s the type of problems I solve. Most companies don’t say I’m looking for part-time VP of sales. They say I have a sales problem, I can’t sort my problem is. Let me find someone who can solve it. One of those specifics. And the third thing is making yourself memorable. Nothing does that better than numbers. You want someone to be able to meet you today and tomorrow and still remember the types of situations you have solved and what kind of impact you had on them. And those are really the 3 biggest things in making a shift. And I know those are all focused on that marketing and business development, but until you can do that just to get yourself inside an organization, you’re not able to in an area that make an impact. Matt?
Matthew: So, you know one of the best, one of the things that I tell every new executive, new interim that I talk to, they all ask very similar questions of me is you know, how can I be productive? And how much work am I going to get from Cerius? And one of the things that I always tell them is that, you know, the most productive and the best interims are those that use Cerius as only one of the resources. That they constantly need to work at their business. You know they’re used to being under a corporate umbrella, they’re used to having business come at them as opposed to having to go after business. So one of the biggest transitions for them, and one of the best pieces of advice I give is, you know, you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to market yourself. You’ve got to go after friends, family, you go after past acquaintances, you go after past assignments, you talk to everybody that you know about taking an assignment. And don’t necessarily think about an assignment as you know a 6-month assignment or a 9-month assignment which is usually what we provide, but go after a week assignment, a day assignment. Get your name out there so that people know that you are now no longer Mr. or Mrs. Corporate America. But that you are John Smith. And that you are John Smith LLC. And that this is the business you’re in. And you go after that business aggressively and for us, if we have an opportunity for you we will bring it to you. But also for you to be looking for as many opportunities as you can.
BT: Well Kristen and Matt, I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for listening to all my questions and answering them. And for everybody else that is listening you can find Business Today on iTunes, the Play Store and off of the Cerius Executives website as well as Podbean. Please visit us at www.ceriusexecutives.com. Thank you!
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time.
Today we will be discussing advisory boards and boards of directors and why companies, especially today, need them not only to grow but also to survive in this competitive environment. Our first guest is Ginger Silverman. Ginger is a 25 year veteran specializing in marketing and regeneration. After studying her discipline with the leadership of Fortune 1000 companies, she turned her focus to small to medium family owned businesses with a launch of a private consulting practice Aha! Unlimited. She had served on advisory boards and boards of directors for private, public and non-profit companies including Norco Delivery Services, IVIU technologies, Brain Disease Management, Cutagenesis, Oroscience, Susan G Komen and the South Coast Singers. Our next panelist is Merissa Levin. Merissa is a renowned authour, speaker and expert on boards. Her TED talk 'Women taking their place in the board room’ shares why there's never been a better time to increase the number of women board members. Her most recent book, Built To Scale, discusses how top companies create breakthrough road to exceptional advisory boards. She also writes a monthly column for smart CEO magazines as their board expert. Is ABC's small business expert on the number 1 ranked business show in the DC region: Washington Business Report. Is a board member at SMBC, a technology company located in Fairfax, Virginia. Our third panelist is Jeff Thompson. Jeff served in the board of directors for 10 years at Edelbrock Corporation, publicly traded automotive active market company when the ads back exchange. He was responsible for all financial reporting and served as shareholder liaison. He was also a member of the executive, compensation and audit committees. Alright, let's get to the questions. Merissa, let's start with you. What are the key differences between a board of directors and an advisory board?
Merissa: Well there's quite a few but I would say the most important ones are fiduciary responsibilities. So your advisory board members are people that are hand selected and that don’t have any fiduciary liabilities, or fiduciary responsibility to the company. When you have a board of directors, if they advise the CEO or the executive team in the wrong direction, they're actually liable, financially liable for that advice. An advisory board is really just a team of hand selected advisors, you can take their advice, you can decide not to take their advice but definitely the level of fiduciary obligation is much different between the two structures. That's probably the main difference.
Pam: Excellent point Merissa. Anybody else have any other difference between a board of director and advisory board?
Jeff: Yeah, this is Jeff. I'd like to say that the advisory board is more of an informal type board consisting of a third-party, typically, and probably not that important factor besides the fiduciary responsibilities. The advisory board has no voting rights. It’s the board of directors that will typically make the votes on behalf of the shareholders.
Pam: Great. Thanks Jeff.
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. So, here’s one last question. How, and Merissa you mentioned this, so where do you go to find really good board, advisory board members? Obviously you’ve got some parameters of great board members that you love to have on your board. But where do you find them?
Merissa: You want me to weigh in on that?
Pam: Please.
Merissa: Ok, so yeah I give a whole laundry list. But the first place that you want to ask is actually any current board members that you have that actually know the organization. That’s one place you can go, you can ask your partners, you can ask your employees. LinkedIn is a phenomenal reference, I mean resource. I mean, I use LinkedIn very extensively and strategically for a lot of reasons and it’s you know a great place to go and connect with potential advisors. The other thing is to attend events where CEO’s are. So smart CEO magazine, I don’t know even if they’re out on the west coast but I know on the east coast they’re all up and down on the east coast and they have incredible events where it’s all CEO’s. You know I mean they have got Fast 50, they have tons of award events so when you go there it’s just a great place to be able mingle with other people. And you want to make sure that you are looking for advisors that are not in the exact same place you are. So if you’re a company of 1 million or 5 million or 10 million, you want to be looking for advisors that have already achieved what you have achieved, and have already hit a milestone that you’re aiming for because when you surround yourself like we just talked about with the people who are exactly like you, or where you are right now then you’re not really stretching and growing and doing the things you need to do to move to the next level. So there’s lots of places you can go. You definitely need to be part of the networking community. You’re not going to connect with the people you’re going to connect with just sitting at your desk, you know being on your phone. You actually have to be out and investing in the relationships that can help you move forward.
Pam: Excellent. And on the west coast, Ginger, Jeff any comments? Where do you find great board members?
Ginger: Yeah I look for, I try to get the owner of the company to really drill down to what the essence of their business model is. You know just because they sell something or they manufacture something or they offer service, they tend to focus on what that specific services instead of the business model that they have and I would, I recommend that people look for successful businesses, not competitors but other businesses models in other industries where that have gone from stages whether it’s to turn around or it’s a 50 year old family business that needs to jumpstart itself into today’s world. Or if it’s a startup. Look for similar paths. This is paths and then try to bring those folks in because if they’ve done it once they can do it again. And then I also think that if they understand who their core audiences, if they really have an understanding of their business proposition, what they sell and what the value is and then having business advisors who can open doors is very valuable. But not, not linear but look broader. If you’ve got a software platform that is dealing with chronic disease, don’t just look for other people who deal in the disease you’re working with. Look for people whom have grown internet businesses based on software platforms. Look for parallel industries that where their best practices you can learn from. That’s hard for people whom aren’t, haven’t been in today’s business world outside of their own family and business. That’s a new concept for those whom have been in business working for larger companies, structured companies. We kind of get that but I find that’s one of those aha’s for families owned businesses especially.
Pam: And do you-
Jeff: I, I –
Pam: Oh, go ahead Jeff.
Jeff: I was just going to say and I think networking with real professional groups probably where you find successful business men is a great way to find advisors. You know there’s financial experts, there’s banking people, there’s attorneys. Also another aspect a company could look at is through associations in their industry and you know could possibly conventions. When they go to conventions they see, maybe someone is not in the same type of business but that’s, they are successful in their trade that can align with you to create successes for your company.
Pam: Yes, sometimes outside perspective goes a long way. So yes you could be right Jeff.
Jeff: Yeah, big time. It’s really important that you get outside help through your boards and your advisors because you want a clean set of eyes to help, you know, give you thoughts and ideas to help your business expand.
Pam: Exactly. So do you guys, and anyone can jump in to answer this one, but what if somebody doesn’t have board experience? Whether its board advisors or board of directors experience, but they’ve got lots of great experience in the industry or in platforms or whatever and they’d like to get on a board, but again they’ve never been on one. Are they good to bring on to a board or do you dismiss them totally?
Jeff: Well I think you’d have to give the opportunity like on any type of business is kind of like a sport or something. You got to bring in new people. They may not have the experience but you find sharp intelligent people with pragmatic business mind and they’re something you can groom and mix a combination of experienced board members. You can often train your novices or interns as you might call and to have groom and give them the experience and plus your guidance for the future. So I think it’s good to have an advisor or someone on your board that may not have had the experience that they haven’t been set in their old ways that you can giving their independent feedback.
Pam: Ginger, Merissa-
Ginger: Yeah, one of the things I’ve done with the family businesses that I’ve worked with in developing advisory boards. They don’t really understand how to even run a meeting, a lot of times. So I will as, even though I’m a member of the board, I will also act as the meeting facilitator because people don’t know the Robert’s rules of order you know. I mean not that you have to get strict, but there’s certain etiquette. You know parking lot, and running meetings and just successfully running meetings. So I will do that on behalf of some of the companies that I work with and in doing that when you bring on somebody that doesn’t have prior experience, it’s really important to give them a starter kit, a guideline. Some very clear instructions as to the purpose of the board. It’s not just everybody getting together to you know to talk about, to look at sales. These are the objectives. And to run it very strategically and if you do that and the person is willing to participate and learn the process then that could be effective. I run into that a lot with these wonderful family businesses and they have to learn how to manage themselves within meetings, much less an advisory board meeting. So having some guidelines and some clear objectives that get reiterated and then feedback, giving feedback to new people if they’re on the board and their behaviour isn’t productive. You need to be able to give them feedback right away so that they can learn.
Pam: Excellent. Merissa, do you want to jump in on this one or do you think the other two did a good job on it?
Merissa: I think they did a great job. [laughs]
Pam: Excellent, excellent.
Alright, let’s get to the questions. If we wrap up here then are there any further thoughts that you’d like to leave with our audience today about boards?
Merissa: Yeah, this is Merissa. I actually want to touch on one thing that we didn’t talk about with advisory boards. I don’t know if it really pertains to board of directors because they’re much more external but especially in small companies. You know I’ve owned multiple companies and especially had information experts where it was a very collaborative environment and you know we had upwards of 45-50 people. Like I mentioned, anytime a change is made in an organization whether it’s bringing an employee, a customer, a partner, changing policy, changing a jar, programs. Whatever it could be, the employees are always thinking how does this impact me. That’s all they’re thinking. They just want to know how does this change affect me. So look when we bring in an advisory board into our company, our company is going to change. If we had all of the answers and everything we were doing was right we wouldn’t need an advisory board, so I think it’s very important for the CEO and the executive team to have very honest and transparent communication with the entire organization. And when you bringing in the advisory board into the company, what we did is we really made a conscious effort to associate them in. They would attend all hands meeting, they would attend social events like our holiday parties. Prior to when they came on we made sure that had business cards for them, they had their title of advisor or consultant, whatever they wanted it to have on the cards. So when they were out in public, they were really representing the brand and our company was on top of mind with them. And conversely when we would have the advisory board meeting at our office, we always left it open for the employees for like the first half an hour, 45 minutes. Sometimes even an hour so that if the employees had questions for the advisors it gave them an opportunity to come in, or even if they just wanted to sit in. That’s just how I ran a company, it was extremely communication based. A lot of transparency, a lot of honesty. And so I think associating an advisory board into a company, like I said it could be a very strong recruitment and retention tool. It needs to be done strategically. And another thing I would just mention is the other type of association is making sure you’ve got all of your legal documents in place, you’ve got your board, your board agreements in place. You’ve got NDA’s, you’ve got non-competes. This has to be very methodical in terms of how you get your board in place so that everybody knows what is expected of one another and there are no surprises and you end up with really great relationships that can extend far beyond the board room. So I just wanted to add that in about how you associate them in.
Pam: Oh that’s fantastic advice. Ginger?
Ginger: I just want to encourage anyone who doesn’t have a board of advisors to consider doing it sooner rather than later. It’s such a value add to the company and to have a sounding board of people you can trust who are smart and can contribute. Makes you less alone and I think that’s one of the emotional bonds, emotional handcuffs that many family owned business owners feel is that they carry the world on their shoulders and there’s no one to help. They’ve been doing this alone for so long. Well if you’ve got the right advisory board, you’re not alone and you’ve got folks there that can, will have your back and that can actually help you get further into the future.
Pam: That’s also good advice. I think some CEO’s or companies think that your board of advisors are not actually going to have your back and you know they’re not to be trusted. I mean they just don’t know how to handle a board of advisors. So great advice Ginger. Jeff?
Jeff: Yeah, the thing I’d like to add to Merissa’s comment is that it’s important that company also have professional liability insurance for the board. If you become a member of a board that you make sure that the directors insurance is in place. And the last thing and it’s just for everyone, it’s a very rewarding experience being a part of a board or an advisory board and it allows you the opportunity to input your thoughts and ideas on how to adjust the company growing. And I urge anyone that’s thinking about it that they’d undertake the task. And if a company’s looking for a board members or advisor boards, I think you have both because the advisory board is there to assist you and any help you can get and assistance, brain storm or just go through thoughts and ideas and it’s just good for the company.
Merissa: Yeah, it’s great for the company and if you head over to my website which is successfulculture.com, I have all of my smart CEO articles archived under the media section and there’s so much great information for business owners there on every topic. And my book ‘Built To Scale’ is on Amazon, you can also get it on my website. And anyone who orders it by listening to the show, if you just shoot me an email, I’ll go ahead and send over all the templates in Microsoft Word because it really will give them a leg up in helping to build their board.
Pam: Terrific. Thanks Merissa, and one other comment I want to make on the insurance. That also applies to non-profit boards. On a non-profit board typically they have insurance, make sure you get a copy of the certificate or they show you proof.
Alright, I want to thank you all for being here today and sharing your expertise on the topic of advisory boards and boards of directors. Tune in next time for a podcast on the topic of 5 warning signs that your business is in trouble. Should be an interesting topic and one you won’t want to miss. See you then.
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. What are some of the signs, and Jeff I’m going to go to you on this one, what are the signs that you just might have a dysfunctional board?
Jeff: Well they’re not following the mission statement of the company. They’re not doing the right things to maximize shareholder value and I think that’s probably the most important things talked about by Ginger that mentioned that if you have a public corporation that’s for-profit that you’re looking not only, you’ve got to make your numbers and you’re there to maximize shareholder value. And if your board is not on that same boat and somebody’s making a bad decision. Or maybe they’re self-serving or maybe they’re part of some other boards that creates a conflict. We also had that situation then it’s time that you have some type of internal vote through a committee normally the executive committee. And you talk about removing that board member if he doesn’t want to resign.
Pam: And how do you do that?
Jeff: A particular instance I had an experience in is that fortunately for us the board member did resign. He had a conflict of interest with another public company and he was being investigated by the FCC. And, you know, we were fortunate enough that with all this and our ammunition that we got him to resign. Other than that, I believe there’s typically stuff in the company’s charter or in your board member minutes that allow you to remove a bad board of director.
Pam: Merissa, what experiences do you have?
Merissa: Well with the board of advisors, I mean this is getting back to why you do a 1 year agreement, right? So that you revisit it every single year and again getting back to making sure that you’re doing really strong due diligence when you select. I mean the idea is to mitigate, you know, and eliminate any risks that you’re going to have to actually forcibly remove somebody. So I think that if you are really clear upfront with creating a strong set of performance based parameters and dedicated swim lanes for the board, and you know really what your objectives are moving forward then you can avoid that. I think, you know, regarding some of the pitfalls that can happen on an advisory board that I’ve seen are that, you know, people give you suggestions and you don’t implement them. There’s nothing more frustrating for an advisor than to dedicate their time and energy and they get behind an owner, and they get behind a company and they want to see them succeed and things don’t get done. Now that being said a lot of time board meetings will result in a dozen different action items. So it’s really important that you prioritize the action items and you put some of them in the parking lot and you commit to actually following through on maybe 2 or 3 of the action items in between meetings. So there was some ways you can actually set up a board for success. Just having realistic expectations of what can be done. And as the CEO and the executive team commit to making the changes that the board is suggesting.
Pam: Ginger? Any comment there?
Ginger: Yeah, a couple of other things that I look for when I’m participating in a board or I’m advising an owner in how to select a board. I will say to them, and I do believe this from my own experience that if there is no disagreement or there are no challenges going on in there then you’ve got to the wrong mix. People tend to hire people like themselves unless they’re evolved and conscious so you don’t want to have a board of clones, you want to have a board of different experiences and expertises that can give a holistic look at the company and the plan for the company. So that’s one thing that I say is don’t have disagreement challenging going on in there then the mix, you may need to look at the mix. Another thing is to the point that Merissa just made about making sure you’re just checking that you’re executing upon the ideas that your board has graciously given you. Also, if you have a board where there’s lots of discussion and no action items listed, there’s no outcomes, there’s no direction and decisions made then I think that’s an indication that it’s a dysfunctional board as well. It’s not just a therapy session. It needs to be, and in my opinion and for a successful special board, there needs to be real strategic conversations going on and action plans coming out of it.
Pam: Very true and I’ve been on a board by the way Ginger with Yes Men or Yes Women that literally just follow everything with the CEO, that the chairman of the board wanted to do and that company did not, I mean we tried to get that company to advance was almost impossible so, yeah, I can see your real problem there.
Pam: So what are some of the big differences between a non-profit board and a for-profit board? Ginger?
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. So what are some of the big differences between a non-profit board and a for-profit board? Ginger?
Ginger: Well, differences. I, uh, the first thing that comes to mind is not the answer to your question which is similarity. There’s still for board of directors and for non-profit, you have fiduciary responsibility to make sure that whatever monies are being managed properly and used according to the charter and all the agreements, the tenants of the organization. Some of the other benefits or differences I find is that for the non-profit there’s usually some sort of ultraistic motivator that you don’t see very often in the for-profit role. Certainly not in the board room. They’re much more interested in shareholder value than they are you know the other aspect. So there’s a lot of conversation around the ultraistic charter as well as how are we using the money and does it fulfill on the ultraistic side of what they’re trying to achieve. The best run non-profit boards that I’ve ever worked with, one example that comes to mind is the Susan G Komen organization. They are extremely strategic and have as highly functioning leadership and all the way from the way the organizations run, all the way to the advisory board and the board of directors as well. They are extremely professional in the way they approach running their organizations. And they’re very similar to my experience with for-profit public boards.
Pam: Interesting you should say that because I have the same experience being on the board of Orange County Head Start. They too are a very professional organization. One of the reasons being they get so much federal money that they really need to be, you know, held liable for what they do and making sure it matches their charter so there are non-profit boards that are very professional out there.
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. So here’s a question that’s always debated. Is it good for the CEO to also be the chairman of the board? So let me turn it over to your Merissa first. Give me your opinion on that.
Merissa: You mean for an advisory board? Or board of directors?
Pam: No. Board of directors.
Merissa: You know, I would defer to some of the other people on the call. My expertise is really in the advisory board realm and it seems like we’ve got some really good board of director’s experience on here. I will tell you the board of directors that I serve on, the CEO’s are the chairman but I don’t feel that I have enough knowledge on board of directors directly to say whether or not that’s the best practice.
Pam: Ok. Ginger, let’s move to you then.
Ginger: It is my experience that the CEO is the chairman and for-profit group. There is a practice in not-for-profit group where it is actually different and they do that by design, so that there is a kind of a built-in failsafe if you will. The 4 non-profits that I’ve served on there was a definite, there was an executive director and then a chairman of the board and there was, that made, that created some really good checks and balances.
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. Do companies need either or both board of directors and an advisory board?
Merissa: You know, I think it also depends on the industry that you’re in and even geographical location. Like we’re on the east coast and I know the east coast is a lot more risk aversive when it comes to investment as opposed to the west coast. On the east coast, a lot of the advisory boards do not have investors on them because the structure and the advisory board members end up constituting a lot of presence from the government. So a lot of the advisory board members on the east coast, people who do business with the government. That is a huge presence on advisory boards. Whereas I know on the west coast where investors play a very large role in advisory boards. I think it really depends on where you are geographically in the industry that you serve. They can really drive the makeup of your advisory board. That’s been my experience.
Ginger: I agree with that and like to just add another point in that from my experience. The advisory board can, thinking of the west coast there’s so many startups, so much Silicon Valley and Irvine area startup activity, and the advisors that are typically brought in may or may not have the specific experience for the overall leadership of the company or directional set from the company. From the west coast side of things, my experience is that they can run more myopic, if you will. You know there’s not as much diversity of experience. It’s more narrow. And I think the broader a company can go to include more vast differences in experience in experience and contribution, the more successful the company will be. Now in the near-term that can create more conflict and discussion but the more that can happen from an advisory board level, I think the more successful the company can be. Same with the board of directors but again they have to deal with the pressure of the shareholders and the fiduciary rigor, and sometimes that can limit the range of discussion. You know you’re pretty locked in sometimes.
Pam: Absolutely Ginger. And Merissa, if I’m not mistaken, you’ve written on this topic?
Merissa: Yeah, I have a book out. It’s called ‘Built to Scale’, how top companies create breakthrough growth through exceptional advisory boards. And SCALE is a model I created that when I wanted to put in a board in my first company which is Information Experts, that’s a 20 year old multi-million dollar government contracting firm. I wanted to put a board in place about 7 years ago, and when I went to look for information on how to build a board there were lots of articles that said you should build a board. There was literally nothing out there on how to do it. So I created a model called SCALE and that is Select, Compensate, Associate, Leverage and Evaluate, Evolve and Exit. That is literally the full end and soup to that process on how you make sure that you are selecting advisors that really meet the needs of your company because typically what people do is they meet somebody, that they think is great and they say do you want to join my board but they haven’t really thought about how they sit them in to the board or what role they would play. And that’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, so in my model, the SCALE model, the entire Select phase is very strategic in making sure that you identify who you need according to your holes and your goals inside your organization and you put a very methodical approach to selecting and vetting and then bringing them on. There’s a whole way to associate them from a legal perspective as well as how you actually integrate them into the culture of your organization because your advisory board is really an extension of your company, it’s is an extension of your brand and if you do it well, if it’s a phenomenal recruitment and retention tool as well. So my book covers the whole model and the appendix has all of the templates, the worksheets, the tools, everything that a business needs to put this in place. And I typically provide those to the people that buy the book in Microsoft Word and it’s basically board in a box. They just build their board with the information in there.
Pam: Excellent Merissa. Excellent, excellent.
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. Since you mentioned compensation. How are boards of directors and advisory boards, let’s start with advisory boards first, how will they compensate it? Everyone think that you either give them stock or have to pay them a huge amount of money. What is it in reality?
Merissa: So for advisory boards in my book, what I did was I interviewed a long-standing attorney that I’ve known for 15 years who is also a CPA and he is a compensation expert. And in there everything is transcribed. And the way I broke it down was monetary compensation, non-monetary compensation – because there’s creative ways to actually compensate your advisory board — and then also with equity. So what weighs out is that the person that I interviewed, he broke it out in 4 different ways that you can compensate with equity but his main role was that you never give more than one quarter to one half of one percent to each board member that you have. And you basically put in a 1 year agreement that with a restricted stock agreement that allows you to buy back that stock, basically at a penny, in the event that you roll off that board member. Because the last thing that you want to do is that you want to give a large chunk to somebody who’s working very part-time for you and if they don’t work out what happens is you’ve got someone who’s walking around out there that owns stock within your, you know, of your company. And getting back to the point that was made earlier about startups. They might have nothing. They might literally be under a million dollars in revenue and they think ‘oh, I’ll just give this person 5% or 6%’. Well 6% of nothing is nothing. But if you build a company to 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 million dollars, that’s a lot of money to be giving to somebody basically part blanch. And you’ve got think that you’ve got a board of 4, 5, 6 people, you have to make sure that you’re very judicious with the amount of stock that you’re going to want to give. You don’t know who you’re give stock to, whether you do like an ESOP, you want to give it to your employees, you want to give it partners, maybe you want to have an LTI, a long-term incentive agreement in place of your employees. So you have to be very, very judicious with the stock. So that’s kind of the, you know, the framework in a nutshell when you’re going to give equity. When you have money that’s involved-
Pam: So just for clarification, so at the end of the year you have a buy back for that whole quarter to a half of one percent? You have a buyback of one penny?
Merissa: Yes. So the way, this what Wayne recommended in the book. Yeah, you put in a restricted stock agreement because in the event that it doesn’t work out and he recommends and I recommend that you basically do a 1 year agreement. Look, you know what, when you bring someone, when you bring anyone on whether it’s an employee or a partner or even a customer, a board member. Obviously when you first bring them on everybody gets along, everybody is, you know, happy and enamored with one another. You never know how a relationship is going to go. And so if you have an advisory board member that is not showing up and is not delivering, it’s important to get them out of your board because they’re taking up a seat that’s someone who actually could be delivering for you. And you want to make sure that you get them out and you get them out clean, so that they’re not walking around with your stock that you can give to somebody else. And also that they’re not a liability down the road when they actually own a piece of your company. So it’s really important to set that up with a restricted stock agreement and get them out cleanly if they decide to roll off.
Pam: I can’t tell you Merissa how many CEO’s I’ve heard say ‘gosh, you know I’ve got this advisory board that’s just really not very good and I give them equity, and how do I get rid of them?’ I mean I can’t tell you-
Merissa: Well that’s how you get rid of them.
Pam: [laughs] Too bad.
Merissa: And the thing is when you’re exactly right when you first get the group together, you got a vision and this is true for small family businesses as well that have been around for a long time and they first start to do it, they think they know what they’re looking for and then when the time comes that you’re in discussions and there’s significant issues that have to be addressed and conflict arises. Not everybody plays the same under conflict and stress that do when things are copasetic. So you just need to have some flexibility and for the long-term so that you’ve got options.
Pam: I totally agree with that.
Merissa: But that is why you really have to let them upfront that is very specific selection model right. Because it isn’t just looking at the resume of the person or wondering you know what contacts they have, what experience they have. Like I said before, this is an extension of your brand and you’ve got to make sure that there’s a cultural fit. I know we had our advisory board. You know they were integrated into my company, my advisory board members I didn’t want them just showing up just once in a quarter, I wanted them to be accessible in between meetings and I wanted them accessible to my executive team. So that’s why putting all this out in front, you know, and really saying these are really the expectations, and this is the framework on how I want you to engage with my company. All that has to be decided and agreed to upfront and signed off on in a board agreement so that hopefully when you get to the end, everybody wants to continue. And you know at the E part of my phase which is evaluating all the exits, we, I actually have a full interview in there, an exit interview. You know I have the human capital background, and so when you’re rolling off an advisory board member the most important thing you want to do was keep the doors open and never burn any bridges because you don’t know if maybe you want them back or maybe they could lead you to another advisor. You want everybody to feel good about the experience so I have a full exit interview in there so that there’s closure in a very professional manner that makes everybody feel good about the experience and people aren’t left hanging, that’s the other thing.
Pam: Perfect, perfect. Jeff, let’s go over to the public board. So give me your advice on compensation for public board of directors.
Jeff: We did things a little bit differently. We paid every member a fee for the quarterly meeting. It wasn’t a large amount of money but there was a small fee. Plus, obviously we carried all their expenses. We had some people from the east coast and it’s good to have east coast and west coast kind of merged together to get different ideas and thoughts about business and regular trade environment, etc. And the last thing we did as an additional perk. We created a small pool, and it wasn’t a big amount like 1 or 2% of the company. And invested over 5 to 7 year period. So in order to earn that small amount, you had to have long-term plans and goals with the company. So if you left early, you didn’t get much of anything so the different aspect on the stock restricted plan we talked about earlier.
Pam: So Jeff what if somebody got, ended up being there for 5 years and then they rolled off or they left good or bad. What do you do? Get that equity back? Do you get that percentage back? Or would they keep it?
Jeff: No, they would earn that. They invested into it and they’d have the right to either take the stock or sell it back to the company. And again, it wasn’t 1 or 2% that was shared, wasn’t a total 1 or 2% per board members who wanted 2% put into a pool and was shared equally by the number of board members and it was just an idea. It was an additional perk outside the fee, paid you to come to meetings and be available and also to cover your expenses.
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. Great. Let’s move to another topic here Jeff, and we’re going to stay with you for just the moment. I hear a lot of references to inside, outside independent directors. Can you tell the audience what that means?
Jeff: To me the inside directors were the ones that were, you know, some had either a family member or a part of the management team that were on the board. We had both where I was. And also the outside where the independent or 3rd party investors or directors that would not have had an interest in the company, but they had valuable insight through their knowledge and experience to give direction to the board and help with the judiciary aspect to running the company.
Pam: Is there a ratio of inside directors to outside directors?
Jeff: That’s a good, good question. Where I did, we had a… the majority was the management and the family. I think it was like 7 on the board, we had 4 inside management and family members total and 3 outside directors.
Pam: Ginger-
Ginger: That’s been my experience with family run businesses as well. It’s that there’s a, even though there’s no on an advisory board capacity, there’s no voting situation or fiduciary control aspect to what the action is. But still because of the, I think the commitment from the family and the fear of bringing in outsiders. They may have the courage at some point to say that ok, I’m going to bring in a board of advisors. Still want to make sure that they have a controlling interest in the conversation which makes it challenging for advisory board members to really speak the truth and you’ve got to be very good at debate and consensus building you know to be effective I think. But it’s, so that’s one. And then again, I’ve consulted with others with a startup for example, where it’s not family. There might be one or two operating folks there like a high level executive who’s actually in the business day-to-day but there’s more variety and a pitch more collective.
Pam: Thanks Ginger.
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. Jeff, you actually have been on a fairly decent size board and how did you go about finding and recruiting your board members? You were on the NASDAQ exchange so you had to be careful.
Jeff: Right well we used a combination of well knowledged individuals in the industry, so that they could give us feedback. We put a team of financial experts in that knew financials and knew the regulatory requirements. One, another one was a retired accountant that was with the business. And the last one was an attorney that could help give us guidance during the meetings or anytime we publicized or put out anything making sure it was regulatory compliant.
Pam: Ok and Ginger, what about the boards you’ve been on?
Ginger: They’re different depending on the board and the industry, and the stage of the company also. When the participated in a lot of early stage startup boards and in those situations there tends to be more of a focus on opportunities to open and support the growth of the company, the early stage growth and exposure of the company and risk assessment along the way. As opposed to the more established companies that maybe have the round, well-rounded approach that was just described a few minutes ago. It just, I think the stage of the company really has an impact, and my other comment here is to go back to Merissa’s description of the book, early stage companies would definitely benefit. I think from having a more methodical approach. There tends to be random, in my experience, there tends to be ‘I just met this person and I think they could maybe invest in my company’, whether or not they have a strategic capability or experience that could be a long-term contribution and I think it’s short-sighted if you only look at possible investment potential for an advisory board or a board or directors, but speaking specifically here an advisory board.
Now, Ginger you mentioned startups a couple of times now. So if a startup doesn’t have a VC or investor and they’re just starting up, do they need an advisory board?
Ginger: Uh, I believe they do. The primary reason I think is for the strategy and being able to identify gaps, as you said, holes and roles for where the company is going, what it’s going to do, its primary point of difference, value proposition. All of those things can. The board can be a sounding board typically, my experience again, that the folks who have a startup, an idea, an incubated idea, are very, very passionate about what they’re doing. And sometimes that can keep them from seeing the bigger picture or seeing their vulnerabilities. An advisory board can provide that sounding board and be the devil’s advocate for an enthusiastic, zealous startup originator. So that’s one reason. Another reason to have a board of advisors is that it can be a financial, an investment syndicate. You know, where there’s a syndicate of investors, and then there’s representatives from those investors that represent a role on the board. And typically they will request that because they want to make sure that the money that they’re investing is being utilized in a way that is compatible with what they understood the proposition to be. So it’s in a way, similar to the fiduciary response on board of directors but different in that it is different, it is startup and early stage. And they’re basically shepherding their own investments.
Pam: Great. Excellent. And one other, since you have actually have a lot of expertise in the family owned business world. You know I’ve noticed that a lot of family owned businesses, they do have a board that is all family members. Do you recommend that family businesses also have outside directors? Whether it’s a board of directors or advisory board. Do you recommend that?
Ginger: Absolutely. I have over the past 10 years, I’ve worked with several companies that were long-standing family owned businesses that had changed leaders because of inheritance. The founder of the company had aged out and then the siblings or the children of the company had to come in to the leadership roles. Well that’s a perfect storm of problems for companies because they can be stuck in their old ways. They have a heritage which is wonderful, a legacy that’s gotten them to where they are. But if their competitive environment has changed, which I can’t think of an industry where it hasn’t, a lot of times that entrenchment can keep them from being objective about what they need to change. I’ve had the good fortune to work with several family-owned businesses that had the foresight to put together a board of people who were. For example digital, many old-standing companies, 25-35 years old, have just ignored the digital world. And you can’t be in business today without having some sort of digital presence. Not necessarily social media but certainly internet. And they don’t know how to do that themselves and many of them are frightened of it. So by having a board of advisors who can help them overcome their fear of it, it can definitely help them transition into the new millennium from a marketing positioning and value proposition to their customers.
Pam: Excellent. And Merissa, I’m going to go to you for just a second.
Merissa: Sure.
BT: Hi and welcome to Business Today, brought to you by Cerius Executive Solutions. Today we are joined by Kristen McAlister and Matt Sauer from Cerius Executives. How are you guys doing today?
Kristen: I’m great, thank you.
Matt: Great, thank you.
BT: Great. So today we just want to kind of get right into it. Today’s conversation is about contract executives, interim executive and consultants who were once CEO’s, C-level executives that are either trying to make the transition, have made the transition or are looking for ways to find more consistent work and some tips that may help them. You mentioned a little bit about client expectations [0:39]and I wanted to kind of get into another question, and it’s still along the lines of things executives need to know to be successful. When I was in college, and I’ll forgive me when I was in college I wasn’t really paying attention a lot, but when I was in college there was this sociology class and in that class we had discussed 3 different types of leaders. One leader was effectively very aggressive and it was one of those you steal, your hand gets chopped off. Second leader was overly understanding and compassionate, and then the third leader was actually a mixture of both. The society that actually ended up lasting the longest was the society that had a mixture of both good strong beliefs in terms of punishment for crime, as well as, a good compassionate understanding personified in general. Now I bring this up because one of the biggest changes that executives go through when they leave a organization and they start their own consulting business, or they start getting into consulting. Even though you’re a good leader in you executive days, one of the airier C-level days, one of your tricks in your back pocket constantly is the ability to become aggressive if needed or become assertive if needed by working on writing employees up, having the final say on their employment status. Kind of being the final word in the organization. Now when you make this transition that goes away. You have any advice on how a former CEO, now executive, can kind of manage client expectations as well as get the job done without having their, you know lack of a better phrase, normal superpowers?
Kristen: Some of that’s going to depend on why they’re being brought in and the type of project. Because looking at the 3 that you described, interim executives or management consultants could be brought in specifically to help change or form the leadership process in the organization. Especially when you’re looking at an entrepreneurial organization [2:38] by the seat of the entrepreneur’s pants not necessarily because they’re a good leader, but because they’re a good businessman as well. So in some cases they actually step in and they take that leadership role and they spread it out throughout the organization. So sometimes Cerius is more of a driver in what a temp, seen as a temporary situation than what they were in a more permanent situation. There’s probably more consistency there. In these situations there’s a lot of inconsistency and the executive is there to bring consistency to the situation. In whatever manner it takes. Sometimes it probably feels like Jekyll and Hyde, and you’ve got multiple personalities in a given day depending upon what situation you’re in, which company you’re in, what that culture is, and who you’re working with throughout the organization. But in most cases, the executives that we work with haven’t made it to the point in their careers by being that aggressive over-bearing type, and there’s a fifth where the individuals who are not looking to do interim executive or management consulting work. So some of that is just a natural selection, they vet themselves out or they’re vetted out at that point. We keep that expectation management separate from that but I’d love to hear Matt’s thoughts on that. I know you’ve come across and you’ve really talked to executives on a daily basis. I’d love to hear some of their perspectives, you talk first.
Matt: You know, I guess what I would just add to what you said Kristen, and that is that most of those who realize that they are no longer going to be in charge, let’s say, and are going to have to persuade and have to provide information and that they’re not necessarily going to be whatever they recommend is not necessarily going to be followed depending on the situation there is. You’re right, they do, they self-select out. When you start talking about what an interim assignment is and the company that they’re going to be going into and who they’re going to be working for, whether it be a board or a CEO or the owner of the company, and what their role is going to be. I think that those that realize that they, hate to say it this way, but they have to be in charge and they realize that they can’t be in charge. That they realize that you know I think I need to go look and do something else. I need to back into Corporate America, I need to be on a board, I need to do something different because I want people to listen when I have something to say, and I want them to act on it. As opposed to, I just want them to hear what I have to say and I need to try to persuade them to follow my lead. And I think that’s a big change.
Kristen: When all else fails that has a great assessment tool. That doesn’t necessarily look at culture and the personality of an individual but the work style. If we can easily change, and alter and adjust our personalities, our work styles are a little more consistent in what we are most, what type of work style we are comfortable with. So looking at that you go through an assessment of what work style works best for this company and the world that they’re looking to fill their needs, and what’s the work style of the executives that we work with. So again another tool in ways of leading [5:59] and figuring out does the company really need a hug-in-the-mug and compassionate executive, and not even so much a mixture in this situation. Because many companies in that case situation are alike. Matching that leadership style with the situation is key. You can have two executives with the exact same skill set. It’s how they address the situation, how they work within it and their approach that can make one successful and one fail.
BT: Interesting. Well Kristen and Matt, I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for listening to all my questions and answering them. And for everybody else that is listening you can find Business Today on iTunes, the Play Store and off of the Cerius Executives website as well as Podbean. Please visit us at www.ceriusexecutives.com. Thank you!
BT: Hi and welcome to Business Today, brought to you by Cerius Executive Solutions. Today we are joined by Kristen McAlister and Matt Sauer from Cerius Executives. How are you guys doing today?
Kristen: I’m great, thank you.
Matt: Great, thank you.
BT: Great. So today we just want to kind of get right into it. Today’s conversation is about contract executives, interim executive and consultants who were once CEO’s, C-level executives that are either trying to make the transition, have made the transition or are looking for ways to find more consistent work and some tips that may help them. So let’s talk about that a little bit more. I mean, I think that’s kind of a good thing to discuss. As an executive you do have a diverse skill set that you had to have to get the level that you are. How do you focus on that? How do you focus on one specific expertise? For example, let’s say you’re a marketing executive who eventually ran your own company so now you’ve got an idea of sales, you’ve got an idea of marketing and operations, and you’ve done various amounts of business deals that have given you lots of experience in contract law, and so forth. So you see, quite a few different scenarios in front of you. So how do you focus on that? I mean is it focused on per assignment, I mean when you’re out there in the field and you’re trying to find work, you’re looking at some point, the best opportunity whether it’s experience, financial, compensation, whatever it may be. So how do you focus on your expertise without it becoming more of a full-time executive’s lesson?
Kristen: Matt, do you want to take that one? Or do I need to?
Matt: Well I’ll start and then you jump. One of the things that we do is that, again, our team works with both the client and the executive in creating a statement of work. And in that statement of work, we make sure, we don’t create it when we work with interim to create a statement of work. And we coach them on how to do a great statement of work. So we make sure it includes the beginning date, we make sure it includes an end date. And we make sure that we put in all of the details in between. And the reason for that is that it’s for both sides. It’s the client, as well as, the interim so that no one gets off track. You know, clients have a tendency that when they get a really seasoned, C-level executive with lots of experience they have a tendency to want them to start doing a lot more than what they were originally engaged to do. And because the executives can do more, they have a tendency to veer off track and start doing more. So the purpose behind the statement of work is just to make sure that both sides stay focused. Which is exactly what you just asked Raj. It’s that we help them to stay focused on what the assignment was. Not that they can’t do more. Not that the client doesn’t want them to do more. But really they were brought in to get something completed within a certain period of time. And if they, either side starts to veer off then the time starts to expand, which means it costs the client more money which you know is not a satisfying solution to why they brought us in. So we’re very focused on making sure that that SOW is making a thing or two which helps most sides stay focused on exactly what they were brought in to do. And it also helps the interim stay focused on what their background is. Whether it be marketing or whether it be sales, or finance. Whatever the case may be, it helps them stay focused so that, that is how it’s accomplished.
Kristen: I’d really like to go back to the example that you gave for the marketing exec. And that’s absolutely right. Making it curt. Not just figuring out what that expertise is, it’s making clear to the company here’s what they’re being brought in for. Do we need to expand on that? Do we need to stick to it? And we’ll get to, I’d love to hit on expectation management between interim executives and [3:36] the very subject. Going back to your marketing example, that’s probably not a more common situation we run into is, I... Executives have been doing, have been taking on executive involvement [4:10] credified companies, and sometimes they are supervising variables of their own. And they’ve gone out and they manage their own company, a marketing services company and they had to go out and sale in business development. The question for figuring out what are you an expert at [4:26] executive is, right now if I had to get up on stage with, in front of 50 of your peers, what subject, and what situation could you talk about and give a lecture on as an expert? You could cite more than one case study. A case in point, walking them through here’s how we’ve done and here’s how it was done then, sent on successfully. If you can’t stand up in front of your peers and sell confidence that you are an expert and you’re teaching them something that they likely don’t know, probably not your expertise. So when you look at an owner of a small marketing services company, could they stand up there and talk about sales and business development in front of 50 other sales executives? Probably not. But they stand in front of other marketing service company owners and talk about business development and sales within a small boutique marketing services firm, if they’ve been doing it long enough, they’ve trading up things and giving up examples, probably so. So then it should take just a matter of narrowing it down and focusing it to what situation can you be dropped in when you’re the expert on, stand in front of the audience and lecture on it.
BT: Wow, that’s excellent. Excellent advice. I mean I think that’s great when someone would know where your great expertise would be. Right to be able to, kind of, where will you be able to be a thought leader and have actual presentations and be basically a source expert. So excellent advice. Well Kristen and Matt, I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for listening to all my questions and answering them. And for everybody else that is listening you can find Business Today on iTunes, the Play Store and off of the Cerius Executives website as well as Podbean. Please visit us at www.ceriusexecutives.com. Thank you!
Pam: I'm Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. These executives are available to step into companies on short notice, to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative which provides specialized skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. OK, what role do board members and advisory board members play and are they different? Ginger, let's go to you.
Ginger: In my experience they are definitely different. I've served on many advisory boards for small and big companies and I can talk from my experience. The level of tender and hands on tactical advice is higher for me on the advisory board capacity. The board of director’s role, when I was acting in that capacity, it was much higher level. It was more strategic, and again shareholder focused. So you really had more high-level impacts to consider. The advisory board work for me has been more specific to the actual changes that are happening in the company, are the future vision of the company and there's more active participation in an advisory board.
Pam: So Ginger, the advisory board is not strategic?
Ginger: No no, it is strategic. It's just when the differences. There's strategy on both sides but when I served on advisory boards, the work has been more hands on tactical operationally focused if you will. It is, when I was hired to join an advisory board the work was specific to the expertise that I brought so I was able to advice and then actually, in some ways participate in the execution of what was being discussed and agreed to in the advisory board. My role on the board of directors was higher-level. More strategy, less hands on. Where there was guidance provided but then there were other folks who were doing the operational execution of those.
Pam: Excellent.
BT: Hi and welcome to Business Today, brought to you by Cerius Executive Solutions. Today we are joined by Kristen McAlister and Matt Sauer from Cerius Executives. How are you guys doing today?
Kristen: I’m great, thank you
Matthew: Great, thank you
BT: Great. So today we just wanna kind of get right into it. Today’s conversation is about contract executives, interim executive and consultants who were once CEO’s, C-level executives that are either trying to make the transition, have made the transition or are looking for ways to find more consistent work and some tips that may help them. Quick question, you both have mentioned the making yourself memorable using numbers and marketing yourself and so forth. Now what’s the best way to do that, because let’s say you are one of those executives who have achieved some ridiculous amount of success in your life and sometimes when you put things on paper, people will find it to be a little, I guess I’m looking for the right word, exaggerated. How would an executive kinda deal with that? Especially if you have a résumé that is filled with one amazing feat after another, how do you position yourself so you don’t look fake? Because I mean I’ve seen that in the marketplace where anytime I meet a consultant or an executive or former executive, I mean, their papers, their marketing documents are very, very strong in terms of this is what I’ve achieved. How do you bring a level of authenticity to that marketing?
Matthew: I’ll go first this time if it’s OK Kristen? What I would say that, that’s where Cerius comes in. You know that’s where our regional VP’s come in, the business development team. Because they have to talk to the client and make sure that they understand that it is that level of expertise, it is all of that knowledge that that senior executive is bringing to the table, that is what they need for to help them transition through whatever issues they have or help them grow their company or whatever it is that they were hiring Cerius to do that they want that person who has that you know that huge amount of experience. Our team has a way of being able to tone it down some, so that the client is comfortable with the fact that we are bringing in this level of expertise, but that this is really what they need to turn their business around, or to solve the problem. Or again, to grow the business to do a merger, to do an acquisition. That’s what our interims bring to the table that they don’t have on their team.
Kristen: Yes. And at that point bringing in interim executive management consultant is very different than hiring for a full time executive. For a full time executive if you were to put down on paper that you have had incredible, amazing results in these five different areas it might be a little more than attractive to me, and I am certainly going to follow up to verify that it’s accurate, but we are looking at in interim or management consulting it’s going to be less believable and I want someone who is an expert in one area who can come in and be the best at solving my problem. So I’m going to look more for consistency and not stellar résumé. At executive level I better see a stellar résumé, you’ve had twenty to thirty years in order to reach that level of competency, so it had better be stellar but I’m going to look for it to be consistently stellar and incredible results and a more narrow set of areas and competencies in order for me to gauge are you the expert I’m looking for. Which is certainly where you get into the challenge of most executives we talk to or come in from [3:47] and want to make a career shift is, how do I take thirty years of work experience and all that I’ve done and narrow that down into either resume or profile, or narrow it to expertise. This is probably one of the most challenging things that executives could possibly go through.
BT: Well Kristen and Matt, I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for listening to all my questions and answering them. And for everybody else that is listening you can find Business Today on iTunes, the Play Store and off of the Cerius Executives website as well as Podbean. Please visit us at www.ceriusexecutives.com. Thank you!
Transcript Below
BT: Welcome to Business Today brought to you by Cerius Executives, one of the largest interim executive and management consulting firms in North America. Today we are joined by Donald Nobel, a technology CFO who has spent a portion of his career as an interim executive. How are you doing today Donald?
Donald: Oh terrific, terrific! Nice to meet you Raj.
BT: Nice to meet you too! So you actually have a pre-existing relationship with Cerius Executives. We’ve kind of tapped into you to be one of our interim executives and a CFO for some of our clients. That just leads me to wonder, how long have you been an interim executive or how long have you been doing interim executive management consulting work?
Donald: I have worked as an interim or fractional CFO, COO for nine years now.
BT: Being a fractional or interim CFO, what are some of the things, or some of the projects that you get called in to kind of work on?
Donald: Many times I’m called in to accompany those looking to grow rapidly, or perhaps in a turn-around situation. Sometimes it’s a company that has hit some kind of wall and needs an executive to push them over the wall. Perhaps they’re struggling with the new product line or looking for ways to expand, or can’t quite seem to get the profitability they’re looking for.
BT: I see. So I’m one of those people that tries to do as little work as possible, and you get brought into scenarios that aren’t exactly perfect. What prompted you to kind of become a savior of sorts? [Laughs] For small businesses?
Donald: Well interesting, interesting comment. Well I was working as a CFO for a technology firm in New Hampshire and when we sold the firm off, a former CEO called me and said, “Help me. Can you please be fractional CFO and help me grow my company?” Since I had already known him and knew his company well, it fit me at the time. But as I stepped in, I fell in love with all the work that we could accomplish. And 18 months later I helped him open a new warehouse, hire a controller, grow the revenue by over a 100%, implement some new pricing models and grow the staff by 50%. Next thing I knew, I fell in love with it. And I didn’t realize how much I loved the scenario of, as you put it, parachuting into a company. Maybe not necessarily in trouble, but definitely needing some expertise. And then all of a sudden, nine years later I’m still doing it because I love it.
BT: Do you find that companies are more responsive to you when you go in as a fractional CFO or do you think it’s about the same amount of trust and knowledge, and I’m having a loss of words here, and I talk professionally for a living. Don’t believe that [laughs].
Donald: I think I understand the question. Let me give it a shot and you tell me whether I’m correct. Um, it’s a different type of respect. It’s not better or worse, and it’s a different type of expectation that they put on you. First of all they know that you’re fractional or interim, and that by nature is shorter term than, you know, hiring for a 10-year or 20-year career. So there’s, it’s a different type of view that they have for you. Which allows you to get more done in most cases because you can come in and they expect you to be dynamic and they expect you to be direct and blunt instead of you know working through all the issues, as a long-term employee might do.
BT: So you mentioned it allows you to get more done. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that because that does seems to be a driving force here in the interim executive industry where the interim executives themselves are highly driven, highly motivated individuals like yourself. Can you give some examples of how an interim executive has the opportunity to get more done in a short period of time?
Donald: I think in my experience, the best way to describe that is from the standpoint of what you’re expected to do. As you put it, you’re asked to go in and parachute into these companies. Immediately, you don’t have time to worry about what I would call the ‘niceties of the job’. For example, if the CEO calls me — and this has happened to me — and says, “We have a lot of sales but we just can’t figure out why we’re not making any money.” I’m allowed to go in, and uncover, and poke and prod in places that perhaps other people are not allowed to do. And that enables an interim to really pull the covers away from the operations, the finances and get to the bottom of things really quickly which by example enables them to do more.
BT: Well Don. I wanted to thank you for your time. We really appreciate you joining us. And sharing some of this, actually not some of this, all of this great knowledge and information with us and our listeners. For our listeners we will be back every week with a different podcast covering a different topic, so please stay tuned. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Play Store. And until next time, this is Raj Prasad for Cerius Executives.
Selling yourself as an interim executive is more about selling results and outcomes. When a company needs an interim executive, they don’t necessarily need a person who has x, y, z experience, they need someone who can accomplish and deliver successful outcomes. A client is looking for specific results. Rather than, “I improved the morale of the team”, it should be “We reduced turnover by 20% and increased employee referral recruitment 300%”. Rather than, “I am a versatile executive with over 20 years of experience in the C-Suite who can help companies maximize the value and increase returns,” consider using a specific example that exemplifies what you can do for a company – “I have over 20 years of experience working with start-up companies in the energy industry. The last 3 firms I worked with each exited within 5 years for at least an 8x multiple.” Or, “I work with small growing companies and help them get past the curve where their sales have outgrown the talent of their team. I helped the last company I worked with grow from $10 million to a run rate of $18 million and increase their net profit by 50% in the 9 months I was there.”
Listen to hear more tips!
I never know from one day to the next when contacted by a client what their situation will be and which combination of resources and expertise will be needed. Though many businesses share a number of underlying principles about how they run and how they are successful, each company is very unique. They differ from where they are at in the lifecycle, how it was founded, what has spurred the growth, the leadership team, the culture, the challenges and what types of expertise is needed at what point. At Cerius, we have been working with companies for over a decade to find them the right interim executive or management consultant to fit their exact needs.
Accountability In The Workplace: Sustaining mutual accountability
Inside a company, there are two groups of people: the management, and the people or team under them. They’re like separate islands. Both groups work towards a common strategic goal, yet they are separated by a unique set of responsibilities and priorities.
Listen to our podcast to learn more.
When is it time to hire a CFO?
CFOs are mainly financial people, but they can be more than that. In addition to financial and accounting numbers, they can add value and help drive company growth, in terms of planning and generating revenue.
Hire a CFO - What CFOs do
A CFO is primarily involved with the financial side of the business. That includes managing relations with investors, financial projections, rolling cash forecasting, budgets, pricing, debts, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.
They have the greatest control over cash, which is especially important in startups. They keep a check over where it's used, where it's going and where it's at. They direct and manage how the company's cash should be used - including that which is expected to be raised through future revenue and other resources.
A CFO puts together the key metrics a company should be looking at and managing towards. The information they hold is essential to the running of the business, because of which they also interact heavily with other departments, like sales, and executives.
Raising equity and debt also come under the CFO's responsibilities. They invite investors and negotiate the best terms for the company.
All in all, a CFO is an executive who along with the CEO is involved in managing all departments in the company towards common strategic goals, using their knowledge and involvement with the company's finances. A CEO or founder of a company may be equally involved in all aspects of the organization, but they may not have the skills and expertise to help drive a company forward. They may be great at product development, attracting customers or branding the product, but creating policies and internal planning is much more complex, and CFO’s generally do a better job at it.
Hire a CFO - How a CFO drives startup growth
Because of their extensive knowledge, CFO’s are relied upon to watch over in many companies, particularly for accounting and financial processes. However, they are used more as a watchdog in startups as founders feel that they do not need them for growing the company. A good CFO can do much more than watching.
They are better able to understand current market opportunities. They ask the right questions to make sure that the other executives are thinking about things from a strategic standpoint as well as a tactical point of view.
A lot of the time, especially in startups, executives spend more time focusing on day-to-day operations. In the midst of routine drama, they have little time to plan for the long-term. A CFO can think of possible futures for the company, and what the company needs to be doing today to reach their long-term goals.
A company goes through many new ideas in an effort to grow and increase revenue and productivity. They are only considered successful after the CFO has assessed them. The financial executive goes back and compares results from both before and after the campaign. If the program isn’t delivering results as expected, they analyse and find out what went wrong, and determine whether or not it’s worth the company’s resources to continue. Using numbers and figures they make informed decisions to help the company succeed.
Hire a CFO - When to engage with a CFO?
If your startup or business has generated a significant amount of money, it’s time to hire a CFO or the services of a financial firm. At this point, the financial arm of your company has many things going on at the same time which need attention. Contracts you may have signed, accounting, revenue recognition, projections, and budgeting are just some of the things that need individual attention. A professional financial person will not only manage it but also give valuable insight into your company based on the numbers.
Institutional investors – venture capitalists – have certain expectations on financial reporting, plans and transactions. If you are dealing with institutional investors, it would be smart to hire a CFO to deliver answers to their questions. First-time CEO’s are not usually aware of the rigorous standards expected and need a professional to handle their finances.
A lot of complexity and activity in a company brings greater risks with it. If processes and outcomes aren’t reported correctly, something can fall through the cracks and hurt the business. As a CEO, the one thing you need to have for external stakeholders is accurate financial reports. Accounting daily expenditures, updating forecasts, managing equity and debt are some of the most important things that need to be attended to, and no better person to do that than a CFO.
Today we discuss being profitable.
Topics Include:
Running a business is not just about increasing sales. It requires being profitable and business efficiency as well. If you want your business to succeed truly, you need to make sure its processes and people deliver the best results at maximum profit. Being Profitable - Gross Margin Being Profitable - Cost Structure Being Profitable - Inventory Days Being Profitable - Days Sales Outstanding Being Profitable - Days Payable Outstanding
In this podcast we discuss how you can create a culture of accountability. To increase accountability in the office, you need to change your culture in a way that centers on accountability. As a leader, you need to figure out how to create an environment of responsibility using the right processes, practices, metrics and tools to monitor productivity. Employees should know that are accountable for their work based on a set of guidelines.
Topics include:
Low accountability at work
Accountability starts from the top
Recognizing failures
Set guidelines and measures
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Every company has been there the next great hire is a dud. At Cerius Executives, we work hard to help you find the right candidate first. Here are some of our tips to help prevent bad hires.
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Are you an executive looking to expand your work portfolio? Here are a few things that you need to know.
If you're a consultant you know finding consistent work is no easy task. We talk with Matt and Kristen about a few ways Consultants can find consistent work.
In the back of their heads, entrepreneurs are always thinking about ‘when should I be selling my business?’ An owner who ponders over selling their business, most of the time, does not do so out of financial desperation or trouble, but for a wide variety of other reasons.
Pam: Ok, let’s do a little bit of rapid fire session here and each of you give me one answer to each of the next 3 questions. Things to avoid when hiring an executive. Maria, let’s start with you.
Maria: Anyone that uses the word “I” too much and not “we”, meaning they’re not a team player.
Pam: Excellent. Matt?
Matt: Don’t hire somebody in my image.
Pam: Ah yes. Kristen?
Kristen: I would like to be careful from recycling within your industry. You may have an expert in your industry but they’re just going to recycle ideas and other concepts that are within it and not bring a great outside innovative perspective.
Pam: Great. Great answer. Kim?
Kim: Hiring an executive that cannot talk about his or her accomplishments.
Pam: Alright. Next one. Things to ask an executive that you want to hire? Maria?
Maria: I would ask them, what would you do in the first 30 days on your job.
Pam: Ok. Matt?
Matt: What were you brought in to do on your last assignment, and what did you accomplish?
Pam: Right. Thanks Matt. Kristen?
Kristen: Ask them about the results from their last couple of assignments or positions. Some one can’t come up top of their head. What type of numbers, what type of impact that they’ve had? Especially using numbers other than, I just increased morale. They weren’t measuring it then, and they’re not going to measure it for you.
Pam: So you want specifics. Correct?
Kristen: I want specifics. Better have it all on the top of your head because if you don’t have it from your past, how are you going to measure it and monitor it for me, and get me results.
Pam: Exactly. Kim?
Kim: I’m just going to reiterate. You’ve got to talk to executives what can you do for the company, not what you can do for the executive.
Pam: Oh perfect one. Thanks Kim. Alright next one. Company X needs to diversify its revenue stream. What type of an executive should they be looking for? Expertise, duration of contract, etc.
Maria: I would think expertise would be a marketing person or an innovation officer, and 3-6 months. And somebody from, that has some industry experience but that also has other verticals that you may be looking at.
Pam: Right. Thanks Maria. Matt?
Matt: I don’t know that I could add any more than what Maria said. I agree completely. To me it’s sales marketing, it’s experience. It’s having experience and multiple, looking at multiple organizations and being able to look at where they’ve been, where they need to go and how to get them from here to there. So still the marketing will be the obvious but I do think that there are other disciplines that could also get, make that happen.
Pam: Great, thanks Matt. Kristen?
Kristen: Let’s start off with a very specific strategic product individual. Someone who knows how to productize, because optimally you’re not just looking at the revenue streams not just within the industry. It’s what is the product, how I describe the product and is it marketable within that. And a great marketing product person will know that and be able to carry out the messaging, so that not just the market gets it but your team as well. And then one great news from headhunters from that point is diversify within another industry. An Industry is vertical specific to executive, so we already have the contact say they know how to do it and they’ve done it many times.
Pam: Great, thanks Kristen. Kim? Anymore to add?
Kim: Really no. I just, I agree with everyone but also agree with Kristen that if you can productize, you’ve got to have someone that understands other verticals and other applicability’s for the product.
Pam: Great. Thanks Kim from headhunters Alright before we wrap up here today, let me ask one last question to all the panelists. What last minute advice would you give business owners for thinking of hiring a temporary, part-time or contract executive? Kristen, why don’t we start with you?
Kristen: Telling them what I needed done. I’d want to know that they’re done it at least 3-5 times in other companies. I talk to those companies, I talk to the co-workers because I know that they’ve had used that expertise in those situations.
Pam: You like the experience that they bring?
Kristen: Yeah, I want to know that they’ve got the expertise that I need and they’ve got proven results on it. Not just they’re a great person to work with and they’ve accomplished so much. Have they accomplished what I need done?
Pam: So you don’t want somebody that just have an MBA and right out of college. from headhunters Correct?
Kristen: Not just right out of college. There’s some incredible executives out there that have accomplished a lot of things. They just haven’t actually done and they have light team for balance. They haven’t actually done and been involved in my types of situation. It needs to be specific.
Pam: Great. Anyone else have anything to add?
Matt: I would add it. Our interims have both depth and breadth of experience in their specific discipline. The other thing that they have is that they come with usually 20-plus years of experience in a larger organizations or in large consulting firms. So what they bring to a CEO is that they bring that expertise, that is far-reaching under than just what that CEO is looking for us to come in and help them with. They can come in and provide advice on their whole organization, not just on the specific discipline that that CEO is looking for.
Pam: Great, thanks Matt. So thank you all for being here today and sharing your expertise on things CEO’s need to know when hiring part-time, temporary and contract executives. Next month tune in for our podcast on the advantages of boards and advisory boards, especially the companies today. Should be a great topic and one you won’t want to miss. See you then.
Transcript Below:
When to sell your business Pamela Wasley: I keep hearing from CEO’s today, “Well, look I’m ready to ready to sell my company so, I guess I should start talking to my competitor’s”, or “I could probably sell this company in the next 6 months.” What would you say to an owner on how to prepare his or her company for sale? I mean aren’t there things you need to do before you even start talking to people? Murray let’s start with you. Murray Rudin: So, I would say that and this touches a little upon some of the topics Steve covered exceptionally well a few minutes ago. But I would say that the owner needs to take a really honest look and then go. They have to realize that whatever flaws, warts, whatever you want to call them are on business are going to be found. They’ll be better off finding those warts themselves and finding, or mitigating or fix them before they start the process. SO that includes things like, obviously, get all your legal documents really diligently reviewed by a professional, be a lawyer not by your local lawyer. Have definitely get an audit from your financial statements, going back at least 2 or 3 years even if it costs a lot of money, you just want to have that. Because all of these things although they cost a lot of money upfront ultimately yield enormous ROI in terms of getting a better valuation on the back hand. If there are limitations in, as was mentioned, kind of the depth of your management team or you’ve got customer concentrations, supplier concentrations, major contracts that are nearing the end with customers that need to be, that really are critically valued business, that need to be reviewed in order that you get value form. Anything. You really got to be tough on yourself and on the business and say if I were the skeptic, what would I be worried about in this business in terms of predictability, revenue and earnings? And what can I do to mitigate that? And that mitigation effort will take time and therefore almost every business has some weaknesses so you really should start thinking about that whole identify the flaws and try to mitigate them a year before you really suspect to be selling the business. Sometimes more than that. Pamela Wasley: Right, thanks Murray. Anybody else have anything to add to that? John Hammett: Well, well your lead Pam was a classic because so often we find owners that say, “Oh, I can sell this. I know who’s going to buy it, my competitor across town I see him every year at the tradeshow and they’ll pay me a premium to get me out of the business.” In my view, selling to a competitor is probably one of the lowest value deals you can put together because there’s nothing new brought to the game. You already compete with them, if he’d wanted to hire your salesman he’d do that, and if he wanted to sell to your customers he’d go try to find them, but the customers go buy from you because they don’t like him. And there’s a negative synergy there. We love entrepreneurs. I’ve been an entrepreneur myself and they start, create fabulous companies. But they definitely do that on their own and they think that selling the company on their own is going to be easy. Um, what they’re going up against is very experienced buyers. And they need someone on their side of the table that brings equal experience and some insight as to where find the right buyer. Murray Rudin: Perhaps unexpectedly, I would agree with you on that. Folks might say, well as a buyer why would you want a seller to have strong representation? But in our experience, um, the having strong representation with somebody like John actually really, first of all it improves the likelihood of the process will get successfully completed as compared to a scenario where the seller does not have an advisor. And it helps the seller understand and get comfortable with what are the norms of the deal business. Typically sellers don’t have any prior experiences selling businesses and they just don’t know what requests, what approaches, what valuation technique, anything are pretty much given standards in the SELL YOUR BUSINESS world. And so, by having a Sherpa, a guy who’s already been to the top of the mountain before, the seller is much more likely to have an outcome he or she is likely to feel great about. Steve L’Heureux: Can’t emphasize that enough. It’s amazing how many sellers go into the process thinking it’s just a foregone conclusion, I’ll just find a buyer and there’s going to be a happy ending at the end of this journey. And it’s not an automatic. The transaction, the SELL YOUR BUSINESS feels littered with deal which doesn’t cross the finish line because of various errors and mistakes that were made in the process. So having an, assembling an advisory team is the single most important thing a seller can do and that advisory team needs to consist of an SELL YOUR BUSINESS advisor who gets the big picture, the big picture guy. Whether that’s an investment banker or broker or a consultant with strong SELL YOUR BUSINESS experience. The CPA is critically important that Murray emphasized earlier and legal counsel, and we’re not talking about the transaction attorney or corporate attorney. We’re talking about somebody who has deep SELL YOUR BUSINESS experience. In addition, Murray talked about doing a financial audit that’s also really important that you have a legal audit done as well. I can’t tell you how many deals got delayed or ended up with deal breakers or legal hurdles, issues around status of IP, reviewing the key contracts. We ended up successfully buying the company but we looked at one company where during the due diligence process we discovered that all of the distributor agreements that they had with their distribution channel had expired. And, you know, we had to go fix that before we could go buy the company. So it’s really important that they do their homework, the seller does their homework, does the housekeeping on both the financial side and on the legal side before they start the sale process. Pamela Wasley: Yes, Steve you just mentioned due diligence. Tell me, talk a little bit more about that. What does that entail and how long does it take? Steve L’Heureux: Is that directed back to me? Pamela Wasley: Yes, it is. Steve L’Heureux: Yeah, the due diligence process is really the, it’s the risk mitigation activity conducted by the buyer. And it primarily focuses on 3 key areas: financial risk mitigation, operational risk mitigation and then legal risk mitigation. In the old days when I first started doing this it involved just a very exhaustive process of pulling together all the documentation, the information, the data necessary. Putting it in the binders, putting it in a data room. Today they have a, we have virtual data rooms. It’s all on electronically which all makes it a, a lot easier. It’s extraordinarily detailed. Very, very intrusive. It can take anywhere from a few weeks if it’s a relatively small transaction and the seller’s well prepared, to literally months if the process properly taken care of in advance. The most important thing I would know about due diligence is for the listeners which are thinking about selling their business. Perhaps, the most important thing I want to emphasize is that the due diligence submission that are entered into that data room typically become the schedule’s supporting the seller’s rep and warranty in a definitive agreement. So, it’s really important that you’re totally honest and very, very accurate in those submissions in the due diligence in the data room. Pamela Wasley: Yeah, John you have a data room you talked about before. Anything you’d like to add there about that? John Hamett: Yeah, yeah. I could give you a couple of antidotes. I think the advice we just heard about being brutally honest, totally complete is really, really important. Because you know you’ll have to indemnify the buyer against anything you did not disclose. Sometimes there’s a temptation to not disclose something and to think that you can scoot it by the buyer but I’ve never been a party to that happening but it can come back and bite you pretty severely. We sold a company here a couple of years ago to a Fortune 25 buyer. It was a mid-market company like most of the deals we do but we ended up, the buyer had 60 people in the data room looking at 2400 documents. And it took about 4 months to get it through right. I was astonished. They had the deal guys, the financial people, the legal people and then they had HR people in there, they had the safety person, risk management. It was the most extensive due diligence I’ve ever been through. But we got it done and we got the deal done so it turned out fine in the end. Murray Rudin: You know I might add something on that. We kind of look at the due diligence process with 2 different purposes. One of course being of risk mitigation elements that were mentioned just a minute or two ago. But what we’re really more interested in, particularly because we’re looking at going forward in a 60-40 partnership with the entrepreneur, is we’re trying to learn about business in conjunction with the entrepreneur to help map out strategy, and opportunities, needs for additional people in the organization. All those kinds of elements for what will happen going forward. And so we don’t get the diligence so much as a ‘us against them’ project as we do a joint effort to try to understand, help us understand the business and start to develop in conjunction with the owner what the high-level plans moving forward to maintain and accelerate the business’ growth and revenue and profits and value would look like. SO there’s kind of a second purpose for us in that process as well. John Hammett: Yeah, Murray I’d like to respond to that. About half the deals we sell are to private equity and half strategic. Before I became a full-time investment banker, I was the president of a couple of companies that we sold at private equity. And the process is very interesting early in the deal you sort of share information and then you negotiate the letter of intent, it can be adversarial. Each side wants to get the best deal structure. And the adversarial thing begins with, carries over with the beginning of due diligence. By the time we get through, it becomes highly collaborative. I always enjoy watching that happen. The best private equity buyers do look at as a partnership with the owners and they do have legitimate interest in where the opportunities are as well as the risks. In most cases it’s not a game of gotcha’, oh look what I found here, but very much a collaborative thing. It’s very nice to hear you speak to that too Murray. Murray Rudin: yeah, particularly the issue: is it collaborative or is it adversarial is mitigated to some degree in some circumstances where the seller is rolling over a substantial portion of their equity which is typically the case in our transactions. Because conversely, when the seller is selling almost all of their positions then there’s really, the seller doesn’t really have any incentive to help the buyer become better educated and a better helper. Because there’s really no helping going post-closing. But in our scenarios we all view the second bite of the apple as the opportunity for everyone and it’s in everybody’s interest to get that process off to a strong start as possible. Pamela Wasley: Great thanks Murray. OK, let’s change positions now. Let’s look at it from the seller’s point of view. What are the reasons why a CEO would look to sell his company? John, let’s start with you on that one. John Hammett: [laughs] Sure. Yeah in the first deal I was involved in as a shareholder where I was in my early 30’s and I was working for an entrepreneur in two divisions. We sold one of those. He said, and this guy was in his mid-50’s and as we were working on the transaction, he said that anytime you have an opportunity to get liquidity in a private company you need to seriously consider it because that’s a risky investment, it’s illiquid and it’s very difficult get out of that unless you go through a transaction like this. And that’s stuck with me. For owner’s create huge value when they build a business in the early stage they take risks because you don’t have as much to lose. But you get to be in your 50’s and you’ve built a company and its worth $20 million, then suddenly you become more conservative. And you do have the risk of losing it all and as you get older, you have as we call lesser runway to get it all back. If you had a bad five years, when you’re in your 30’s that’s one thing but if you’re over 60, a bad five years can really affect things. So I think owners need to always be thinking about how do I exit this investment. Doesn’t mean that the company’s bad, just that as a single investment it’s something to be concerned about. Pamela Wasley: How many [Murray speaks] Go ahead Murray. Murray Rudin: The one thing to always think about is really the as important as price, particularly if they’re doing a deal where they will continue to be engaged, is the caliber of the firm, the private equity firm that they’re going to partner with, the reputation, the references, the style, the chemistry, the cost. Those kinds of factors. I think the number one mistake sellers make in scenario’s where they intend to roll over significant equity is they obsess over the last few dollars valuation when the really important thing is the quality of people that you’re partnering with. John Hammett: I absolutely agree with that Murray. That’s much more important. Pamela Wasley: Cal, anything to add to that? Cal Lai: Yeah, I think as a seller you really want to know why you want to exit. I think it’s true whenever you have a chance to get liquidity it’s worth looking at but I think that there are a lot of reasons why sellers want to exit. They want to retire and building a business takes a lot of time, energy and effort and I think after 15-20 years in the seat it’s very tiring. And I know a lot of people, a lot of CEO’s and founders who built businesses, at some point put so much into it that they don’t have the passion they once had. They want to do something different, so that’s another reason to think about why it’s time to be selling. So I think a good entrepreneur is always looking at their options going forward. Time is always a risk, and the more time you’re business is out there, the greater risk you have. So if you have, most of us do, some financial goals in the sale of a business you’ve always got to be looking forward to that and understanding what the best timing for a sale is, how you can get prepared to sell and finding the right potential buyers.
Cerius Executive Management Consultant CEO Pam Wasely recently led a discussion with CFO's to see what challenges they encounter that give them heartburn. Transcript below. Pam: "Good afternoon, I'm Pamela Wasley CEO of Cerius Executive one of the largest North American providers of contract executives for part-time, temporary, interim and consulting assignments. Cerius has a network of thousands of executives from operations, finance, sales, marketing, IT, engineering and Human Resources. These executives are available to step in the companies on short notice to fill a sudden gap in leadership, to run a key initiative or to provide special hire skills and knowledge for temporary period of time. We often like to speak with C-level executives to hear about their in-the-trenches experiences. Well some of the toughest business problems, some others in the same situation can benefit from their experiences. So today, we have two CFO's joining us on the podcast: Angie Chin, former CFO with Coffee Bean and Tea, and Yumbrands that’s working with both public and private lien companies today. Next is John Lovingood who travels around the country stabilizing companies in distress and then gets them growing again. As CFO's I know you handle some of the organization's toughest problems. I'd like each of you to talk about the key issues that you give you heartburn. You know, the kind of situations that really put a company in jeopardy? I'm sure you all have great stories you'd love to share. So Angie, thanks for being here today. Why don't we start with you and describe some of the businesses you're working with and the types of issues you're constantly running into?"
Angie: "Thanks Pam for the introduction. It's my pleasure to be here. This is Angie Chin and I have supported different companies; both private and public companies in CFO roles. And one of the heartburns that I have been through is actually with the public company and it relates to basically company running out of money, having regulatory compliance issues and even concern about their potential shareholder and lawsuit. So in many ways that all are a multitudes of challenges associated with each of those theories I just mentioned and occasionally I wonder if there is a heartburn or actually a heart attack that was going to happen"
Pam: "[laughs] yeah I would probably say heart attack. So you also work with private lien companies as well. What are you finding there?"
Angie: "Well private companies in several cases the heartburn issues were related to liquidity, working capitals issues, lack of talent in terms of the depths of the talent within the organization to do the job that is needed to be done, as well as, their scalability in terms of their business model. You know wanting to go from one platform to the other and without the depth of the talent and people resources that is needed, as well as, with liquidity and the working capital constraints, scalability let's just say becomes a much bigger challenge."
Pam: "Yeah I can see that. But are you finding, as far as getting working capital, are you finding it’s easier to get working capital today or harder?"
Angie: "I would say that the playing field has changed quite a bit post-recession. In many cases I would say that I'm going through obtaining working capital either via the route of getting a lender, a credit facility, a factory or revolver or through private equity set up the equation, private investors. Their due diligence and the expectations side of the equation is a few notch higher than where it was before compared to pre-recession."
Pam: "Hmm OK. And back to the talent piece real quickly. So where do you find the talent? I mean if it’s getting harder and harder to find the talent or the companies are lacking in the talent. What are they doing about it?"
Angie: "That actually is a tough question to answer and some times in many cases we would think that hey you know with the unemployment rate a little bit higher than where it was before we should have plenty of talents to source from even if we could not find internally, we could find it on the street. I don't think that notion is accurate. As a matter of fact there are many more resumes to weave through and having to do more work in terms of finding the right person with the right fit. So you know in many cases I try to look within the company to see if there's any body that could be mentored and groomed to be where it needs to be, to build those specific roles. And in other places, unfortunately that time length is going to be too far-fetched and have to source from all sides, so I have to go through different agencies and even potentially utilize, you know, temp-to-perm or interim-to-perm type of arrangement to test out the water and see whether the person is the right fit for the organization and source it that way."
Pam: "So kind of like a try before you buy?"
Angie: "Correct."
Pam: "OK. John let's go on over to you. I know you're involved in quite a few things these days. Can you tell me a little bit about that and the types of issues you're seeing?"
John: "Yeah yeah. My name is John Lovingooth. I mainly work with, I mainly do interim-type CFO consultant CRO type assignments, with owner managed, privately-held companies that are experiencing some sort of distress, or restructuring, or things have gone a little sideways and they need some help to get out of it."
Pam: "OK and so the same question I kind of asked Angie before. How easy is it to get money today to help with you know cash flow in companies and to help with their growth?"
John: "Well usually the kind of situations I get involved in they have a line of credit, they have a bank loan, they have a factory receivable, they have something. But for whatever reason they've maxed out their line for getting extreme pressure from the lender to pay down the facility. The advance rates against the collateral is decreasing daily causing them to be even less liquid than they were before. So in those situations it’s difficult to refinance because the lender is trying to force you out and you don't have a lot of options. Now given situations where that isn’t the case, I've found it a little easier than it used to be, because interest rates are so low now. There are a lot of people out there that are marketing money for companies, for growth, for asset-based loans and I have a good network of those people that I talk to. Now, they're all buying for the same work and they're all very competitive but as long as interest rates are pretty low I find them to be real aggressive"
Pam: "Excellent. And so how do you stop this, you know, cash running out the door? How do you stop that from happening? Are they doing 13-week rolling in cash flows? What are you suggesting for the company?"
John: "Well what I always do first day on any assignment or any job that I take on I want to figure out what the cash flow is. That’s the first thing I do. I don't care about a cruel based accounting or a gap. It’s all cash. What’s coming in, what’s going out, what are your contractual arrangements? What’s the payroll? When your tax deposit are is due? When are your leases due? When do venders need to be paid? When do your loan payments need to be made? And schedule out in a 13-week roll, 13-week cash flow that I use that legisly on whether the company is in trouble or it’s not. And I got a lot of people that use it. In fact I've made a pretty good living out of putting those into companies over the last 10 years and some of the people still use them today. It’s a good indicator of what’s going on in your term, you can plan for short falls and operational short falls. Once you've done them for several cycles, several 13-week cycles. It’s a good predictor of what’s going to happen down the road. You can put together a pretty good 12-month cash flow budget. You know... it’s a required document when you file for bankruptcy for chapter 11. That’s why the first thing that you have to do is to get used to the cash collateral. You have to put out a credible 13-week cash flow showing that the collateral is not going to decrease over the 13 weeks otherwise you’re likely not to get use the cash collateral and you'll get converted to chapter 7."
Pam: "OK and we had kind of asked Angie to elaborate on getting talent today. Are you finding it hard to find the right talent for your accounting departments to support the CFO?"
John: "Well I'm finding it’s hard to maintain talent. When we're working with smaller companies in the 20- 100 million dollar range. You don't always get the best talent, you don't always get the CPA trained accountants. You get people that are self-taught. Sometimes you get somebody with a CPA or someone with a book keeping background and I've had trouble keeping them. In troubled situations everybody’s like got one foot out the door because they don’t think the company's going to survive."
Pam: "Wow. One of the things I keep hearing about... Oh John?"
Joh: "Uh Yes"
Pam: "OK One of the things I keep hearing about today is how companies are starting to expect CFO's to get more involved with operations. Are you finding that?"
John: "Yeah. I've noticed that a lot. Especially in the kind of things I've been working on. You know the CFO is not just a debits and credits person. Not just an accountant to make sure the books are closed and everything's in accordance with GAP. The CFO's often the number 2 person in the company and relied on very heavily to, sort of, think outside the balance sheet and the PNL to get involved in operational issues. And the longer you've been on the job, the longer your curve goes. The more experience you get than those other types of things and you... director in dealing with other people in the company. You're involved in all the strategic meetings, strategic planning and it’s just all a lot more than just basic finance accounting job."
Pam: "Helpful. Ok. Umm... let’s go into a couple other areas here. Angie, I'm going to go and turn this over to you. What are the tell-tale financial signs that signal that a company is headed for trouble? What are those early warning signs?"
Angie: "I would say that I caught a lot of the early warning signs even just looking at some of their cash-ual issue factor John just mentioned. You know because in every company see there is goodness in terms of financial publication and waiting for that PNL and balance sheet to be published. But the pulse of the company is literally with the cash-in, with the real cash-in, real cash-out. How that is doing and if you know that you were actually paying a lot more than you can collect, or there will come a time whereby that well is going to run dry very quickly. So many times that is an area the treasury function, the cash management function is something that I focus on very tightly just to get a powerful influence and understanding what is happening in the barest part of the company's business operations which is correlated to the earlier question you mentioned. So CFO's in my point of view is not just being counter. CFO's really have to know that the ins and outs of what is impacting the business and what are the levers that is coming in and out of the business equation. So those are early signs and early warning signs that a CFO will have a pulse check on."
Pam: "Excellent. So you're kind of on the same line with John; Cash is king."
Angie: "Correct, correct. And just to give you an example there. There was a company that was north of 300 million dollars that I was working with and they are not in financial devastation or what not. They were still in the black. They have a good chuck of cash in their bank but at the same time when I first arrived there, they were having almost a 300% variances in their cash forecasting which is very scary if you imagine that. You know you expect it to be X and the number comes in to be, either way swinging 300% and so let’s just say that a part of that reason of that big swing is that because the people that are doing the cash forecasting is not really understanding the business pulse of what is happening. So by virtue of me coaching the team or the treasury team to be more involved and I personally take the bulls by the horns to be more involved in operations. We were able to pin down our accuracy in cash forecasting 3 months out with about a 90% accuracy. So that is pretty darn good and we measure that every single week in terms of where it comes in, our verses, our actually verses our forecast. And we’ve always come in at about the 90% accuracy ranges so it gives us a good heartbeat of what is really happening in the organization and managing our working capital more effectively without you know me or the CEO's losing sleep."
Pam: "So even though a company's going through a high growth period, they could be having problems on their cash side because they're not paying attention to all the tell-tale signs that are telling them that hey the profitability's not good, their operations could be run more efficiently. So they could be having those problems even though they're growing fast?"
Angie: "Correct. And actually to even leverage on that the high fast-growing company's usually stands the greatest risk of running out of money because they are not really monitoring the amount of working capital that's needed because they might be growing offices, expanding their plans and beefing up their inventory and all that. And people are not really paying attention because they're looking at perhaps their PNL and say everything's OK. But if you're beefing up your inventory and having plans, having branches open here, there. It is not necessarily showing up in your PNL at all but those are sucking up your working capital big time and in no time you wonder, where's the money? Because that is where the money is going."
Pam: "Wow. So John how would you say a company should monitor their growing capital needs?"
John: "Well it’s just staying on top of it. It's really ... they need to stay on top of it. They need to fork. In-purchases is the points of receivable, your day’s outstanding accounts. You need to monitor all those matrix to really get a handle on you know on what the cash flow is. I think I mentioned to you the other day this cash conversion cycle. It’s never days that you, you it takes to land product before you sell it and you collect on it. So if you're a distributor and you're buying a product. That’s one thing that you buy it and you do whatever you do to it and then you sell it and then you wait 30-45 days to collect it. So you're out maybe 60-70 days. If you're shipping across the ocean like when I was working in Hawaii and we had a bit of a thing from the mainland, we had to pay for it in advance then it got put on a boat and then it came over. So by the time we got it, sold and collected it was almost 75 days. It’s really important to really monitor your cash flow, stay on top of it at all times you know in situations like that. Whether it’s your growth company or whether it’s just a regular distributor flat you need to monitor it."
Angie: "And Pam just to leverage on what John just shared is that I have one of the clients that is hyper growth situation and literally double in size in two years in a row. Well needless to say that’s phenomenal growth for a company to be growing at that pace and at that speed and when a CEO talked to me saying Angie I'm just wondering how come I'm not seeing the strong cash flow that should be coming in? What is going on? And after I did some work and shared it with the CEO. Basically somehow the AR was building up so big that nobody spoke on collections. So you can be doing a lot of work and revenue looks great but if nobody is paying attention to the escalating AR at the exponential rate and collecting them, then you don't have that in your piggy bank. So in every area that John as illustrated there has to be buttoned-up even in a hyper growth situation."
Pam: "You know Angie believe it or not, I see that a lot in companies I mean they're like I don't know why we're not making any money. And you know there's not a lot of money coming in to our pockets these days and then you look at their AR and their accounts receivables and it’s like oh my gosh, you've got million in accounts receivables you haven't even collected yet. So we see that a lot with companies out there today."
Angie: "Yes. [Laughs]"
Pam: "So, here's another question. John, let’s move this over to you so how involved -since CFO's are getting involved with the operations side of the house now- should CFO’s also be involved in the sales side because obviously that’s the revenue side of the house. How involved should they be there and if at all?"
John: "Oh you mean, the sales side you mean the top-line?"
Pam: "Yes"
John: "You know I'd like to think that they should be involved and they are with respect to strategic planning and in terms of sales and marketing, in my experience, I've not been involved much in that. I've kind of worked with the bottom side of the income statement. From the cost of sales, on down. And let the marketing guys and the sales guys work on the sales and I'm not saying that’s the way it should be and I think probably in larger companies the CFO gets more involved. In my experience, I haven't been as involved as much. I pretend to be because I think I know something about it but it always doesn't happen where you have an impact on the top-line. I've always told my clients you can't cost-contain your way out of a problem. You need to sell your way out of it. So no matter what you cut, if you don't have any sales it’s not going to work."
Pam: "Right. Angie, any comments on that?"
Angie: "Yes, I agree with the point. You know, you can cut your expense to profitability for the longest time, it’s not sustainable. Needless to say there is fiscal responsibility with managing a company but at the same time it’s only through growth that a lot of. They say that all sales q's are all evil so you need to have the top-line to sustain through a long period of time. To answer your question Pam, I have partnered and I see myself as a partner to the CEO in terms of researching on areas for strategic positioning and in several cases you know .Because CFO's has a different mind-set. I mean not necessarily we're writing the sales pitch or marketing shield per say. But nonetheless I think you know for a CFO we probably have the mind-set of doing due diligence and doing research and reading up and in some cases I have presented business segments that the company have never ever dwelled into and presenting that as an option and you know companies have great success when they tried it and say wow, you know, we didn't know that we could grow a company at 35% in one year just venturing into the segment. And you know sometimes I think CFO's brings that to the table and I'm very happy that by being able to be that kind of cripple sun of reason and yet presenting a different point of views to the table could also drive revenue not just a cost-containment and cost measurement of the financial performance of the company."
Pam: "So then people stop looking at you as strictly the numbers cruncher right?"
Angie: "Correct correct."
John: "Yes I would agree with that. There a lot of times you're asked to evaluate the profitability of a certain product, certain product line and you as the CFO and your staff can then analyse it to say you know what, we may be selling a lot of this stuff and it looks good on the revenue line, but we're not making any money on it. And you can have a big impact on the profitability by just looking at sort of the composition of your sales."
Angie: "And actually you know John, on that point I have one company I work with and I literally told them not all sales are good sales and as a matter of fact when we actually terminated some of the accounts that I consider are not good sales, the profitability in terms of percent and dollar actually went up so like why do we do all this extra work and making less money when we can do less and make more? Right. And sometimes it’s not easy for a CEO who tends to be much more aggressive and more sales and marketing driven to understand it. And I think that is the balance complementary equation that a good CFO brings to the table to be able to meet to a mutually beneficial partnership to drive the company’s profitability forward."
Pam: "Angie, to link on to what you just said. So how do you maintain that dynamics between your role as a CFO and the CEO. How? Because you're right a lot of CEO's are very sales oriented and you’re the number sides of the house so how do you work that so there’s a good relationship between the CFO and the CEO?"
Angie: "Yeah, I think you know the key part is really respecting and trusting the intentions of where each of us are coming from and that’s why I think you know when I mentioned about partnership, the fundamental element that is needed in a partnership is the trust of the intent where it’s is coming from. And so the point of view that I always wanted to share with a CEO is literally we're driving the company forward together with a common vision, with a common goal and ultimately I'm supporting his or her success as the CEO of the company and when I present some of these options I also build several scenarios of what could be the possibilities and then go from there."
Pam: "Excellent. Thanks Angie. John, I'm going to turn to you. I know you've been involved with a lot of, getting companies ready for sale. Can you tell me a little bit about that?"
John: "Sure, it’s a whole process. To sell a company you need to scrub it up and get the accounting books in order, you need to clean out all the sort of the junk that's buried in the PNL. Especially in the private owned companies, you know there's a lot of personal expenses and things that are buried in the accounts that need to be cleaned up. It’s really getting the house in order and getting ready to sell. The valuation of a company is largely based on a multiple of its earnings and those earnings need to be scrubbed so that they're the real earnings. And what’s the multiple, what’s the EBITDA? Which is the earnings before depreciation, taxes and appreciation? I've done this a lot. You've got to be involved in the due diligence side as well in terms of what’s expected of you, when potential buyers come in, what kinds of information is going to be presented, in what format is it going to be? You have to answer a lot of questions. It’s really a long, a long ardour process and the CFO is heavily involved in, and really the point person for the transactions."
Pam: "What happens if there's no CFO in the company and they're trying sell their company and they have an accounting department, maybe a somewhat controller but not a real experienced controller. What happens to a company like that? "
John: "They call Cerius"
Pam: "[Laughs] thank you John."
John: "An example of one that I did as a project for Cerius was exactly the case. They didn't even have an accountant. They had a book keeper that was basically doing the books on QuickBooks, a 1000 miles away in Northern California and the company was in Arizona. They had a CPA down in San Diego that was kind of looking everything on Lolly every month. And you know making adjustments to the books and they never counted their inventory, they just made adjustments just based on what they thought it should be. And they really needed someone to come in and put in the controls and processes into place to make it so that you could get a multi-PNL balance sheet out the door. They had a bank loan as well and they had multi reporting requirements that they were pretty much ignoring so you really need to find someone who can come in and help if you really want to sell your company and you think it’s the time to do it and you just got a book keeper in there that's probably pretty good and does a good job at what they're doing but they don’t have the sort of the where with all to complete a transaction. And that’s where you needs someone’s experience and it doesn't have to be a full time person, you could probably get someone on a part-time basis to do that. But it is a process and you need to have someone with experience who knows what they're doing. That could work well with potential buyers that could work well with your MNA attorney and work well with the CEO or the ownership of the company."
Pam: "Angie, do you run into that as well?"
Angie: "Uh Pam, you asking me?"
Pam: "Yeah, do you run into that as well?"
Angie: "Yes, yes definitely. And one of the things that I believe that the CEO's as well as the owners of the company's also important for them to understand is not to go cheap skate in that aspect. I've probably met a handful of them that they think they can go without and you know try to just struggle or limp themselves through either a private equity fundraising situation or a sell-out situation. And I think they're doing themselves more harm than good. You know because this is really important that they present themselves well to a potential buyer. Or if they’re raising capital for the growth that they have, the presentation format to click with whoever that's going to cut that cheque to them. So in many cases you know when I work on those type of clients or companies as John said, I may not go in for a full-time basis, it could be a couple days a week or what not. But really get their house in order so that it looks professional and it looks attractive. That will really maximize the evaluation to a seller, partners or a potential investor that’s going to cut that mill and dollar and what not cheque to them."
Pam: "I see we're nearing the end of our podcast but before we wrap up what advice would you give other CFO's? And John let’s start with you. What haven't you mentioned already and what great advice would you recommend all CFO's to help them in their jobs today?"
John: "I think that’s a good question and I have to think about it a minute. But I've found that when I've been most successful is when I've formed a real partnership with the CEO of the company where you work well together. Kind of arm in arm. And I've always said that if you can make a CEO do his job better, then you're doing your job."
Pam: "Excellent. Good advice. Angie?"
Angie: "Yeah, there are two folds that I give to existing CFO's. One is needless to say the partnership as I mentioned before is very very critical and especially in the matter of transactions or what not, the workload and the things that I suspected of the CFO literally tripled if not quadrupled. So there is a lot of burden on the CFO shoulder and needless to say that stress level is huge and for some of them I would also even coach that you know maybe just carve out a portion of it, if it’s too much to handle to get additional support because sometimes even when I was in those positions I cannot be doing A-Z and expect it to be done well. So if I need to carve out a portion of the things that needs to be done pertaining to a potential transaction and get expertise whether it’s through Cerius or some other form to support, to fill in those big project gaps. I think CFO's will really do themselves and their company a service as opposed to try to push themselves through 22 hours a day or whatnot. And not necessarily optimizing to what needs to be done at those specific timelines. So again its building the trust with the CEO and really calibrating what needs to be done by when and knowing where to put up the hands and say I need help in certain areas and you know and hang the ego at the door and just get the help so that the work can be done."
Pam: "That’s great advice. Because I see too many CFO's trying to do it all and you're right. Instead of doing it good and well, they do it really really poorly because they just couldn't handle it all."
Angie: "Correct. And as you know when it doesn't get done well. Then CFO may get blamed for it not coming through the way it should be and the CFO will feel totally demotivated because he or she would have been working all day and all night with no sleep and no weekends and feeling unappreciated. So really is a no win situation even though there's that conviction wanting to do a good job is also a self-awareness and the wisdom just that I really need help in this specific areas and not be afraid to say that I need to have some research in the time mean to do this over this period of time and give myself a little breathing room so overall in totality it will be a greater success personally and professionally and good for the company you know."
Pam: "Yep. Well thanks everyone for your insights and what CFO's are running into today. Next month, tune in for Cerius's podcast on the topic on the 5 warning signs that your business is in trouble. A topic every CEO is going to want to hear. See you then."
Angie: "Thank you"
Cerius Interim Executive Solutions CEO Pam Wasely recently had a discussion with CEO’s about the business challenges that keep them up at night. Here’s what they had to say.
Transcription Below:
I’m Pamela Wasley, CEO of Cerius Executives, an on-demand, searchable database that matches business problems with thousands pre-vetted, part-time, temporary, interim, and contract executives. These executive level management consultants provide key insights, execution, and results to companies of all sizes and in all industries.
Today, we have four CEO’s joining us on the podcast, Antoine Ford, CEO of Enlighten, located in Washington, D.C.; Jenny Rosoff, CEO of Village Green Foods, located in Irvine, California; and Dave Kearney, CEO of Boomerang, located in Palo Alto. We have a diverse group of CEO’s here today, so I’d like to give each of you 30 seconds to describe your business. Antoine, let’s start with you. Tell us a little bit about your business.
Antoine Ford: Hello, how is everyone? My name is Antoine Ford, I’m President and CEO of Enlightened, Inc. We’re a technology consulting firm located in Washington, D.C., primarily focused on government contracting in the cyber security area, big data analytics, and a lot of software engineering. We do work in the top secret cleared space, as well as other government entities. We are aggressively looking at diversifying into the commercial sector. Glad to be here with the other CEO’s.
Pamela Wasley: Thanks, Antoine. Jenny, tell us a little bit about your company. Jenny, I think you’re on mute. Jenny, can you tell us a little bit about your company?
Jenny Rosoff: My company is a wholesale food manufacturing business. We make food primarily for restaurant chains and other manufacturers. We have 30 employees on the production floor where we’re cooking. We have about 150 different products we make for about 30 different clients.
Pamela Wasley: Excellent, thanks Jenny. Dave, tell us a little bit about what your company does.
Dave Kearney: Thanks Pam, thanks for having me. Boomerang, for the most part we’ve been running for the last 20 years on the CEO Boomerang, and we’ve been doing online marketing, mostly around email marketing, newsletters, and so on for large and small companies as well as event management and social marketing now we’ve added recently. The other side of Boomerang is we do – for a lot of our customers we do automated marketing software consulting, so a fair amount of software enabling systems integrations and so on to make that marketing application work very well.
Pamela Wasley: Great, thanks Dave. As CEO’s we run across some really tough problems that we have to deal with, such as the organization losing money, declining profit margins or sales, non-performing employees, finding and keeping the right talent, system outages, the need to reduce costs, and how to get your entire company culturally on the same page. Today, I’d like each of you talk about those business issues that keep you up at night. Antoine, so does dealing with the government keep you up at night?
Antoine Ford: Yes it does. If you look at my business, being a government contractor, as soon as we have a budget crisis between the two parties, we’re greatly impacted by that. When there was a government shut-down last year, we were greatly impacted by that. One of the things that keeps me up at night is making sure the government continues to function, and to let the two parties get out of the way of folks that want to serve.
That’s important, and that does keep me up at night because we have to look at not where we are now, but we’re looking at budgets in the next two to three years. You win a contract as an entity, you’re thinking about the next contract immediately because you only have a number of years before you have to perform in other places.
The second thing that keeps me up at night, quite honestly, as you mentioned it earlier, was people. Your investment in people, people representing you, the other CEO’s have this same issue probably ensuring that the people that we have that are going to carry the culture are carrying it in the way that we think they should. One of the things we do at Enlightened is try to make sure that our leaders have the same DNA as the executive management. When I don’t have somebody who doesn’t have my DNA, that keeps me up at night.
Pamela Wasley: Thanks, Antoine. Jenny, being in the food business, what issues are robbing you of sleep these days?
Jenny Rosoff: Actually, one of Antoine’s issues is also one of ours because we’re regulated by the government. We have USDA and FDA in and out of our plant regularly. When the government’s not functioning well, neither are our inspectors nor are their agencies. That is something that does, from time to time, keep me up at night. Another one is that the product that we make is going inside of people. That’s one of the most intimate things that you can do with somebody.
I wake up at night wondering if the metal detector’s working right, if the people running the metal detector understand what they’re doing, if everybody’s following the protocols that we’ve put in place to make sure that everything’s functioning well. I don’t – 24 years, I haven’t had it happen yet, knock on wood, I don’t ever want to get that call saying that something that we made, made somebody sick.
Pamela Wasley: Thanks, Jenny. Dave, as the CEO of a service company, what issues are bugging you these days?
Dave Kearney: Well, as a services company, specifically a high tech services company in Silicon Valley, there’s the constant battle of maintaining relevancy, being relevant to our customers, and competing against a large number of companies that are well-funded. As you might be aware, the online marketing space is very crowded, with companies providing the latest tools and technology to market to your customers, to help other companies market to their customers.
The things that keep us up at night are the idea that we have to constantly, constantly innovate and compete against not only the companies that have been in business for a long time, but also the very new ones that are up and coming. We have to stay relevant, and we have to make sure that the choices we make today, and the technology that we’re releasing in the next year or so are going to be the technologies that people need and want, and are going to be coming across as better than the competition.
Pamela Wasley: Absolutely, Dave, it’s even hard to keep up with technology these days. I get it. Thanks for sharing today; however, before we wrap up, I’d like to ask each of you what advice you would give to other CEO’s on how to effectively deal with tough issues. Antoine, let’s start with you again.
Antoine Ford: One of the things that a CEO has to have is a good ego, and they also have to have good judgment, when to let their ego go. One advice I would give to other CEO’s is to know when to ask for help from advisors, mentors, other CEO’s because we’re all facing the same game, and although we may be in different business segments, the advice, even that I heard today, is helpful for me. Know when to let your great ego go, and ask for help.
Pamela Wasley: Thanks Antoine, Jenny?
Jenny Rosoff: Something that I’ve been told for years is to surround myself with good people, preferably people smarter than I am, and at this point, people younger than I am. That’s something that I’m working on regularly is bringing on more people who can support and take the culture and the vision that we have here and move it into the next day, week, month, or hopefully the next generation, to keep it going the way I’ve always wanted it to go.
Pamela Wasley: Great, thanks Jenny. Dave, what advice would you give?
Jenny Rosoff: I’d like to second the opinions of Antoine and Jenny there, but also add on in that your – to stay on top of things, relationships with other companies and other people outside. A fair amount of networking and collaborating with other groups and folks to help you grow and stay relevant in this amazingly fast-growing business is important. It’s not just to look inward, it’s to look outward as well.
Pamela Wasley: Great, thanks Dave. Thank you all for being here today, and sharing what problems were keeping you up at night. I’m sure that many other CEO’s around the world are having similar problems and appreciate your insights. Next month, tune in for our next Cerius podcast on the topic of the six business challenges that give us [00:13:18]. CEO’s and CFO’s will not want to miss this. See you next month. Thanks guys, I really appreciate all of your patience with us getting this started. Harry, if you’re still on, my apologies. We’ll try another venue next time, and we’ll have you participate. Again, thank you everyone, and have a great day.