May 5, 2023
Walter Simson

The Speech All New CEOs Should Give

Walter Simson | Interim CEO, Turnaround
The Speech All New CEOs Should Give

I once took one of those business simulation courses. In it, we were given a computer terminal, an inbox, and a walkie-talkie. Our simulated company, Acme Widget, was said to be in trouble, and the point of the exercise was to evaluate our crisis management skills. There was a team of psychologists who were looking for leadership and other soft skills that might help us do well during a pressure-filled day.

The fellow who had been chosen as simulated CEO of our team was an up-and-coming executive in a Fortune 100 company. He was clearly acting as CEO in the exercise because his company had indicated he had so much potential.

The psychologists asked the “CEO” to give his motivational speech as the simulation began.

The CEO said, “Our job is to grow revenue faster than expense. Now get to work!”

That was it.

Would it surprise you to hear that Acme Widgets did not survive the simulated crisis? The emails flew, the disasters proliferated, and the team fell apart. I thought then, and I still believe, that the CEO’s speech could have made a big difference in how our team performed.

Here is what he should have said instead.

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April 7, 2023

Seeing with New Eyes: Cross-Pollination in Business Has Advantages

Seeing with New Eyes: Cross-Pollination in Business Has Advantages

When a company is in need of new leadership, chances are the board and CEO are going to enlist a search firm that will comb through the same old group of people in search of that new leader. They will search for someone who has served in that job at a similar type of company and almost always in the same industry.

It’s the way the business world works.

But is it always the right approach? Not necessarily.

Instead, Lloyd A. Perlmutter, a C-suite executive with years of experience leading businesses through exceptional growth curves, says cross-pollination in business — hiring executives outside of the industry — can be the way to get the kind of innovative ideas that spark innovation and disruption.

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February 14, 2023

2023 Predictions: Business Trends Accelerating Need for Interim Executives

2023 Predictions: Business Trends Accelerating Need for Interim Executives

Every new year means new challenges and new opportunities. This new year, 2023 is no different! When we asked 204 C-level executives for their 2023 predictions, their responses reflected five clear business trends:

  • A surge in executive retirements and leadership departures
  • Ongoing workplace changes
  • Continued supply chain challenges
  • Technology needs
  • The looming threat of an economic downturn

Let’s take those one at a time.

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December 21, 2022

12 Secrets to Family Business Success

12 Secrets to Family Business Success

There are some family businesses that have been around for 100 years and continue to thrive under the leadership of 5 or more generations. But they are rare – as rare as a child who loves basketball making his way to the NBA.

So notes John Messervey, an organizational behavior consultant who counsels high-wealth families through very difficult conversations about their family dynamic, their family business, and their hopes for the next generation.

His years of experience working with family businesses and entrepreneurs led him to develop these 12 lessons for family business success:

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March 21, 2022

Business Exit Strategy: Owners Neglect at Their Peril

Business Exit Strategy: Owners Neglect at Their Peril

InterimExecs founder Robert Jordan learned early the tremendous weight an entrepreneur must bear: “When you own the company, it’s nothing like being an employee,” he writes in exploring the sacred trust of ownership. “You might as well compare lifting up a hundred pound weight versus a feather.”

Jordan, who founded his first small business at age 26 and “hit every speed bump you could possibly think of, and then a couple more just for creativity points,” has learned a lot along the way. Among the most important lessons: while business exit planning is critical, it is usually neglected – at the owner’s and board’s peril.

Alejandro Cremades, author of Selling Your Startup: Crafting the Perfect Exit, Selling Your Business, and Everything Else Entrepreneurs Need to Know, agrees. He says that a company’s management team must add “crafting an exit strategy” to their business goals.

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March 10, 2022

How to Improve Your Company’s Performance: 5 Critical Questions to Ask

How to Improve Your Company’s Performance: 5 Critical Questions to Ask

Every business owner is looking for ways to improve company performance. But where to start? Management consultants talk about KPIs and workflow, business strategy and culture. All important, to be sure. But in a rapidly changing world, owners and managers do well to ask themselves how they can improve business performance — even when financials look great at the time.

Often, by the time a company calls us for help, the signs of peril have been lurking or shouting out for months or years. The bottom line is that the leader missed or ignored signs of pending crisis because they failed to ask themselves these critical questions.

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February 7, 2022

Discover Your Unique Leadership Style

Discover Your Unique Leadership Style

Get excited! We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new book Right Leader Right Time: Discover Your Leadership Style for a Winning Career and Company, set to hit Amazon and other outlets, March 29. First a little backstory:

Since 2009, we have had the good fortune of speaking with thousands of executives, owners, and investors. If you look at interim as a specialty, it almost always is associated with some type of change happening within an organization. Maybe exponential growth is on the horizon. Or the opposite and the building is on fire. It could be competition is looming and fresh thinking is needed. In matching executives from the RED Team with companies big and small, we saw firsthand that the biggest predictor of success always came down to one thing: leadership.

We wrote Right Leader Right Time, to share our lens on leadership and to help leaders and organizations move toward bigger and better opportunities. Let’s jump into just a few key insights:

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December 21, 2021

A Look Back on 2021 and the RED Team

A Look Back on 2021 and the RED Team

As we reflect on the past year, we are grateful to the incredible executives that make up InterimExecs RED Team, as well as our clients who have put their faith in us and the leaders we deploy. We’ve jumped into companies from fintech to healthcare to manufacturing. Some struggling with declining revenue, lack of systems and process, or high turnover. Others experiencing big growth — maybe even spurred on by the last two years in a pandemic and changes to consumer behavior.

We’ve wrapped up a few top highlights from the year here: 2021 Year in Review

Wishing you and your families happy holidays and a prosperous New Year!

2021 YEAR IN REVIEW

September 2, 2021
Robert Jordan

Great, You Saved on Executive Compensation, But to What End?

Robert Jordan | CEO, InterimExecs
Great, You Saved on Executive Compensation, But to What End?

Low price is the last refuge for marketers who don’t have the patience or guts to demonstrate value for those that need it. – Seth Godin

When it comes to buying gas for your car, fertilizer for your lawn, or for that matter the price Apple pays for the copper in your iPhone, lowest price makes sense. These are the classic definition of the word commodity – something which comes from the ground and whose price rises and falls with supply and demand.

Unfortunately, we all now use the word commodity to mean much more, applying the sense of generic-ness to just about every product and service available to us. If you are marketing soap, for example, you face over 1,000 competitors on Amazon. If however you’re the marketer behind Tesla or NetJets or the Chicago Bears football team, your job is simpler. You won’t sell as much, but your product is so highly differentiated that when your customer wants you, there’s no close substitute. You are not a commodity. You are unique.

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April 21, 2021

How a New Platform is Revolutionizing Dispute Resolution (And Will Forever Change Your Contracts)

How a New Platform is Revolutionizing Dispute Resolution (And Will Forever Change Your Contracts)

Many company owners and board members are familiar with some aspect of litigation – or at least the threat of it. The paperwork, the Zoom calls, the meetings, hearings, depositions, the back and forth, the cost—democracy might promise a jury of our peers and having your day in court, but adjudicating a dispute the traditional route is for many, impractical, long, and expensive.

Shutdowns during the pandemic made that point all the more clear. Since the start of COVID-19, the volume of disputes has increased by more than 65% for companies over $1 billion, 50% of in-house legal teams are being pressured to spend less, and 75% of corporations want new preventative dispute mitigation procedures.

“The first question is never, ‘What is every single thing we can fight about?’  The first question out of any executive’s mouth is always, ‘This is a distraction—how quickly can we get this done and behind us?’ says attorney Rich Lee, whose 15 years in the field include general counsel roles at Livevol and Civis Analytics, a data science company stemming from Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. “Nobody, when you’re on the business side, ever relishes that dragged-out fight in any form.”

That’s why Lee teamed up with two fellow general counsels and a legal operations exec to form New Era ADR, a private arbitration and mediation platform rooted in efficiency, transparency, experience, and innovation. He says their process is 90% faster and up to 90% cheaper.

“Anytime there’s a potential dispute, it’s a massive distraction,” Lee says. “It costs the company a lot of money, a lot of time, and frankly, I think the worst part that’s immeasurable is that attention that you end up devoting to navigating a potential dispute. You could be in a sales meeting and you’ll be thinking about that dispute. It’s our firm belief that it just doesn’t have to be that way.”

We spoke with the New Era CEO and co-founder about the intricacies of arbitration vs. mediation, how to de-risk your transactions, and the best ways to protect yourself from arbitrary outcomes.

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