June 28, 2018

Latin Got Interim Right 2,000 Years Ago

Robert Jordan | CEO, InterimExecs

My daughter eagerly accepted an internship at the morgue. Wait – how does she put it? The medical examiner’s office. Regardless, all I hear is morgue. Anyway, let’s move past the whole your-daughter-is-around-dead-people issue because here’s the interesting thing. They ask their interns to sign a statement agreeing to work pro re nata.

This was a new phrase for me: pro re nata. It is latin for “in the circumstances” or “as needed” or “as the situation arises.”

I believe the phrase is really a guiding light for the best interim execs around the world, because the best leaders operate as needs demand – pro re nata.

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June 27, 2018

What is the Role of an Interim CIO? 5 Common Use Cases

Let’s face it: an Interim Chief Information Officer has to be of instant value to an organization. A top interim CIO can take on any technically-challenging project that would be assigned to the permanent CIO, though they usually have a focus on bringing change and transformation to an organization.

While some Interim CIOs may be brought in to perform initial work such as a technology audit — a fast way to assess if an organization is optimally set up from an infrastructure perspective — in many other cases the need for an Interim CIO is driven by a specific project or initiative:

Business and ERP System Implementation >

When a company wants to automate process or functions from finance to accounting to supply chain and customer relationships,

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June 25, 2018

Top Questions Companies Should Ask an Interim Executive in an Interview

We have spent years developing a methodology for matching companies and executives, but ultimately at the top of the list is chemistry between the executive, private equity fund, company owner, or management team. So once we suggest an executive or team to fit a company’s needs, the question usually arises: what questions should I be asking in an interview to see if it’s a good fit?

Here are a few recommendations so you will be armed with targeted questions for the interview process:

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May 29, 2018

How an Interim Chief Information Officer Transforms Good Companies to Great

All companies use information technology to some degree.

Great companies have CIO leadership on the management team to purposefully leverage information technologies in creative and sometimes disruptive ways – to grow business, produce faster than competition, enrich customer experiences, and make business transformation happen.

Many full-time CIOs dedicate their careers to one specific industry, and so their experience is vertically deep. Interim CIOs on the other hand, provide a unique perspective blending innovation and technology transformation across a variety of organizations and industries. They specialize in change, bringing an attractive depth-of-experience from a career of change management, while leveraging ever-evolving technologies. It is this change-leadership experience that is highly valuable to a proactive board or management team facing the challenge of business transformation, especially where information technologies are an enabling and differentiating factor.

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May 14, 2018

RED Team Members Publish Book On Interim Leadership

Congratulations to InterimExecs RED Team members Damon Neth, Bill Mince, and Jim Treleaven on the publishing of their new book, X-Formation. Damon, Bill and Jim made a conversation we had a few years back into a reality, combining their expertise to create the comprehensive book on the unique makeup of interim leaders and how they transform companies and bring incredible results to organizations worldwide.

The InterimExecs team added insights on finding, assessing, and engaging interim executives, drawing from years of matching companies with interim leadership. Check out X-Formation on Amazon here: http://a.co/3S42UdS!

May 3, 2018

How to Evaluate Executive Candidates

“A man’s got to know his limitations.” Clint Eastwood’s immortal line as San Francisco detective Harry Callahan in the movie Dirty Harry stands true today when board of directors and management teams think about how to evaluate executive candidates. If you have been in management, ownership or board leadership long enough, sooner or later you’ve learned that no one has a perfect track record when it’s come to hiring.

So how do you increase your chances of success?

You’ve already taken the first step – by thinking of interim executives in order to mitigate your risk. You are making sure you have a clear roadmap and understanding of the leadership skillsets needed to get you where you want to go before committing to anything permanent too soon. That’s good.

Whether interim or permanent, there are questions to ask and ways to evaluate your organization’s fit with an executive leader.

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March 28, 2018

M&A 101: What’s the Difference Between a Financial Buyer and a Strategic Buyer?

The world of mergers and acquisitions can be complex for owners focused on building their companies.

We’re often asked by owners about their options to exit and sell the company. Often, work needs to be done to prepare – in advance of any sale process – to ensure maximum value is realized. Owners may opt to bring in an outside perspective like an interim executive to provide an operational roadmap to improve operations and package the company for eventual sale. This process, however, typically begins with two types of targets in mind:

Strategic buyers (Strategics) are companies who are already operating in the field/industry where acquiring your business will be complementary to their business, expand their customer base, or give them a competitive advantage.

Financial buyers include private equity funds, family offices, and individual investors who provide their own equity funding and borrowing to acquire businesses as a path to future gains.

Let’s dive in to the difference between strategic buyers and financial buyers:

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March 20, 2018

Growth Story: $4B Company Engages Transformational CEO to Spinoff Software Startup

Corporations know that innovation is key to their continued growth, but what happens when serious product or service reengineering is not within the organization’s DNA? What if the company is just too successful or set in their traditional world?

That is exactly what happened when a multi-billion dollar construction company came to us with a software division they had launched internally. While the company was superb at architecting, planning, engineering and building major construction projects, developing software was a new ball game.

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March 13, 2018

Poor Company Performance? Work on Mastering Nuance

Bob Jordan | CEO, InterimExecs

The Olympics are the perfect example of the difference between champions who win gold, silver or bronze, and everyone else who goes home empty handed. The winner could be winning by just one ten thousandths of a second.

Why do you think you or I are any different in our work – if we could improve our performance just a couple percentage points, we’d stand out from the masses clear as day.

Steve Jobs was genius at nuance, the subtle improvement that could cause massively asymmetric outcomes in favor of Apple. Thirty companies had MP3 products delivering hardware, software and content for streaming music. The category was done. Then along came the iPod. Not major changes, but so much better!

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March 8, 2018

Scaling a Business Fast Is Hard for Entrepreneurs

Bob Jordan | CEO, InterimExecs

I was having a conversation with company founders in a healthcare startup who made the comment: “we’re new to being entrepreneurs.”

That was their opening for free advice. It’s hard building and scaling a business when most startups fail or have a tough time and that’s not celebrated enough. Instead we just marvel at the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and aspire to be like Uber, Facebook, Google.

The truth is that most every new businesses – it’s a slog. A grind. A tough battle at some point in their existence, if not in fact for many years. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft had a phrase for this: the long middle. He said its fairly easy to be creative, think up a brilliant new product, and decide to charge forward. Then comes the middle: the long slog.

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