June 20, 2024

Executive Search Services: Why Interim Executives Are Right for Fast-Growing Companies

Executive Search Services: Why Interim Executives Are Right for Fast-Growing Companies

Interim executives — experienced C-suite leaders who take on short-term roles — traditionally are found in turnaround situations, coming in to save companies on the brink. Or they are brought in to keep a company moving forward while a new permanent hire is identified and onboarded.

But there’s another leadership role that is tailor-made for an interim leader: Using their skills, experience and executive talent to guide fast-growing companies.

An experienced interim executive is the right leader for companies facing big points of change or growth. Interim and fractional executives often step in to address growing pains many organizations feel when they lack the systems and processes to scale. On the other hand, interim executives jump in as a key part of the diligence or post-acquisition integration strategy for companies and private equity firms leveraging an M&A strategy to expand.

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March 26, 2024

The Six Times PE Funds Use Interim Executives

The Six Times PE Funds Use Interim Executives

Many private equity funds hear the words “interim executive” and think the only application is an Interim CEO or CFO for turnaround or short-term fill-in of a portfolio company. But PE funds seeking a great return look to interims for their unique abilities to build and transform companies.

An Interim CEO brought on to lead a recently acquired private equity portfolio company, for example, may match the hold period of the fund. That could mean several years of working to build, grow, and ultimately exit the company, hitting big returns for everyone involved.

Here are six major use cases for an Interim CEO, Interim CFO, or other interim executive in PE-backed portfolio companies:

1. Interim Executives in Diligence

Most funds hope to spread their wings and work beyond industries where they’ve already had success. In looking at new industries where acquisitions may cost less and produce higher returns, a little more diligence is often needed. The further afield a fund goes, the more they need expert leadership removed from prior operating teams.

We recently matched a $5B+ fund with an Interim CEO expert in e-commerce and consumer goods to help determine if a potential acquisition made sense. While the fund had deep experience in the manufacturing space, understanding the current challenges and opportunities to expand go-to-market strategy was essential. Once the deal closed, the executive transitioned into an ongoing advisor role to ensure the acquisition would be a success.

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January 26, 2024

Case Study: AHIMA-HCPro Acquisition and the Crucial Role Played by a Team of Interim Executives

Case Study: AHIMA-HCPro Acquisition and the Crucial Role Played by a Team of Interim Executives

AHIMA, a nonprofit whose mission is to ensure that health information is accurate, complete, and available to patients and providers, had a big idea: To expand by buying a for-profit business.

The acquisition target, HCPro, was an industry leader in integrated information, education, training, and consulting products and services in healthcare compliance and revenue cycle management.

The combination, AHIMA CEO Amy Mosser believed, would broaden the reach of both organizations.

But, first came the challenge of the acquisition process – performing due diligence, planning for the integration, and setting a course for the future.

To do that, she needed help in three key areas: financial due diligence, workforce integration planning, and content licensing.

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August 4, 2022

Creating an Omnichannel Customer Experience and Why Retailers Must

Creating an Omnichannel Customer Experience and Why Retailers Must

Omnichannel is the new retail. It means that there are no walls between brick and mortar and online, between online and social media, between social media and email and, one day very soon, between humans and the metaverse. In other words, the omnichannel customer experience creates a seamless customer journey that allows consumers to move easily among all of the channels a retailer can use to reach a purchaser.

A Digital Commerce 360 analysis of US Commerce Department data shows that consumer spending online in the US rose to $870.78 billion in 2021, up 14.2 percent from the pandemic-inflated numbers recorded in 2020. Compare the 2021 figure to pre-pandemic 2019 stats and online spending rose a whopping 50.5 percent.

Those are numbers far too big to ignore. Customer retention demands a seamless experience that allows consumers to move from in-store to online to in-app purchases with ease.

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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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December 6, 2021

A Veteran CPG Executive on Building a Cannabis Brand

A Veteran CPG Executive on Building a Cannabis Brand

The cannabis business has been exponentially growing in the last few years — just look to the proliferation of dispensaries, and growing acceptance across state lines. But thanks likely in part to stress and stay-at-home orders, 2020 was a big year for the bud. According to a BDSA report, sales of legal cannabis in the U.S. hit $17.5 billion last year, a nearly 50% increase from 2019. And it’s projected to jump to more than $40 billion by 2026 as more and more states legalize cannabis overall or add adult use programs to existing medical ones.

That means standing out in the market is all the more important. Businesses can follow some parts of the consumer product playbook, but with wildly different rules and regulations from state to state, bringing a cannabis product to market is anything but traditional. That’s what InterimExecs RED Team executive, Leah Bailey — Chief Business Development Officer at Australis Capital Inc. an early stage, brand focused MSO that was originally an offshoot of Canadian LP Aurora and former CEO of Fluresh, a vertically integrated cannabis company based in Michigan — experienced when she made the pivot to cannabis.

“I’d worked for many years in consumer products and was looking to find new challenges and learn a new industry,” says Bailey, whose resume includes mass market personal care and beauty product providers Helen of Troy, Paris Presents and Unilever. “I love the fact that everything we do is a challenge. Many people are coming out of traditional consumer products companies like PepsiCo and Kraft and going into cannabis from a marketing standpoint. It’s become very accepted.”

What is the key to starting and growing a cannabis business? Here, Bailey explains how to translate traditional CPG skills to a cannabis brand, understanding consumers without traditional market research, and what the future holds for the industry.

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October 1, 2021

Lessons from Intel Capital’s Co-Founder Avram Miller

Lessons from Intel Capital’s Co-Founder Avram Miller

Avram Miller, a well regarded Silicon Valley luminary, has recently published a memoir that chronicles his journey in the world of technology.

It is called The Flight of a Wild Duck, which is how Intel’s CEO, Andy Grove, referred to him because Miller would always chart his own course. This included founding Intel Capital, which became the most successful corporate venture group, and playing a leading role in the creation of residential broadband.

The book is full of interesting stories of key figures in the tech world and well as important lessons.

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January 14, 2021

5 Marketing Insights from a Fractional CMO

5 Marketing Insights from a Fractional CMO

Contrary to the myth that good products sell themselves, behind every successful brand is a successful marketing strategy. The best products and services can fail to break through without a targeted marketing approach, especially in a time when messages blare at us from every direction, and consumers are highly sophisticated. If anything, there are numerous examples of superior products losing out to superior marketing. Companies that don’t know who they are selling to and how to message to them risk being lost in the crowd.

Marketing is part art, part science. While there’s no easy creative calculus, some basic principles can go a long way. The best marketing campaigns, such as Apple’s “Think Different,” are simple, powerful, and in retrospect, almost obvious. But there is nothing easy or obvious about crystallizing brand, messaging, and positioning. That’s why even the best entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs, don’t do their own marketing. They turn to help from expert marketing professionals.

InterimExecs RED Team executives, Ray Smale and George McGowan, share the marketing lessons they’ve learned over their careers and when it makes sense to bring in an interim or fractional executive for a CMO or Chief Growth Officer (CGO) role. They emphasized the need for fundamentals yet cautioned that, amid rapidly changing technologies and consumer patterns, companies must be prepared to pivot.

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December 15, 2020

How Zekelman Grew to a $3B Domestic Manufacturer

How Zekelman Grew to a $3B Domestic Manufacturer

When Barry Zekelman’s father passed away he was 19 years old and six months into college. His dad left behind a business employing 5 people manufacturing steel tubing. It wasn’t much of a head start with beat up machinery, negative $5 million of retained earnings, and losing $60,000 every month. The business was on the brink of bankruptcy. Everyone told Barry to shut it down and stay in school, but he admits, “quite frankly, school was boring,” realizing that for him he had already outgrown it. This was his shot.

Barry had to piece together how to run a manufacturing business, like a pilot learning how to fly as the plane takes a nosedive. “I learned how to read an income statement and put one together real quick. I learned that making money doesn’t mean having money. You can make a lot of income – but cash is king,” he says.

He had no sooner moved into his dad’s office when two employees came in asking for a raise. Problem was, he couldn’t afford it – and he honestly didn’t know how they were making a living off what they were paid. He told them to do that he needed more production. The cash wasn’t there. The employees pleaded, ‘well – if you gave us a $2 an hour raise, this machine would never stop.”

Barry remembers thinking: what comes first, the chicken or the egg? “If this machine never stopped, I’d be able to give you a $2 an hour raise,” he said. “If I give you a raise and nothing changes, are you going to give me the money back?” The guys looked at each other and said it doesn’t work that way. Barry told them they had to do this together to be successful.

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