November 25, 2024

What Are Core Values and How Do Yours Inform Your Worklife?

What Are Core Values and How Do Yours Inform Your Worklife?

Core values are the fundamental beliefs, principles, and ethical standards that guide a person’s actions and decisions. They define what is important and provide a sense of purpose and direction. Understanding our own core values and how they impact our decisions and how we interact with others is critically important to understanding how we approach our daily lives and why we make the choices we make.

In the workplace, that means understanding how we react to others, how we manage employees, and why workers who feel the organization’s policies and expectations run counter to their core values suffer “moral injury.”

InterimExecs CEO Robert Jordan invited his business coach, Brett Morris, to sit down for a chat to learn what a core value is, why they are non-negotiable, why our core values are unique to us, what happens when our core beliefs are in conflict with those of other people, and what happens when we believe someone has violated our core values.

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September 17, 2024

How to Build a Better Board of Directors in 4 Easy Steps

How to Build a Better Board of Directors in 4 Easy Steps

“A world of no surprises.” That is the lofty goal of private equity investors Eli Boufis and Steve Thompson when they take on a new company. It involves open communication with the CEO – including reminders of how much money they can make if the acquisition succeeds – and a plan to build a better board of directors.

Building a better board of directors is a four-part process:

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April 26, 2024

Private Company Governance: Why You Need a Strong Board of Directors

Private Company Governance: Why You Need a Strong Board of Directors

Bruce Werner has a blunt message for company owners. “Owners are leaving money on the table. They’re not getting full value from their boards,” he says. “We can improve the outcomes in your business, make your life a little better, and take risk out of the business by having a board do what it ought to. And it doesn’t take that much more effort. You just have to ask a few important questions.”

Werner came up in the family business, a $500 million company that made ladders until it was sold in a leveraged buyout in the mid-90s. After the sale, Werner started, grew, and sold four companies, was a partner in a private equity fund, and served on more than 10 boards, mostly for family-owned firms.

He’s distilled all of that experience into two books, Your Ownership Journey: 12 Secrets for Personal and Business Success, which published in 2022, and Navigating Private Company Governance: The Savvy Business Owner’s Guide to Developing an Effective Board, which published in 2023.

We interviewed him in the wake of the publication of Navigating Private Company Governance and asked him about his advice for business owners wondering whether they need a board of directors for better corporate governance.

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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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June 23, 2022

Rethinking Your Resume: Coaching from a Former Major League Pitcher

Rethinking Your Resume: Coaching from a Former Major League Pitcher

When Chicago White Sox relief pitcher Adam Russell’s baseball career ended, he had to figure out a whole new career, with virtually no warning.

Today, the former big leaguer works in the insurance industry and volunteers helping other sports figures make the transition to a post-playing career.

It starts with the resume.

“A lot of guys don’t know how to relate what they learned in professional baseball to the business world,” Russell says. “I was seeing resumes that said things like, ‘I set the record for triples in the month of August in Round Rock.’ Great. It’s awesome. But a CEO doesn’t give a crap about it.”

Not understanding how to sell oneself on paper is certainly not a problem limited to former athletes. At InterimExecs, we’ve seen resumes from C-suite executives with 30 years of valuable experience leading companies, making change, and having an impact, who headed their resumes – first item up – with the degree they got from an Ivy League college many years earlier.

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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 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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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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June 1, 2021

5 Trends Expanding the Need for Interim Executives Now

5 Trends Expanding the Need for Interim Executives Now

Even before the pandemic forced businesses to be more nimble and forward-thinking than ever before, the need for interim executives had been growing. In 2020, we asked 600+ execs to shed light on interim roles, a comprehensive survey that covered the who, what and why behind the growth of this category. And now as the world is finally defeating COVID-19, businesses are continuing to adapt and re-strategize with a new set of challenges, only amplifying the need for experienced, “make it happen” interim executives even more. 

To better understand how the current marketplace is dictating the need, we conducted a follow-up survey, asking 125 executives to answer the same question: “What trends do you anticipate having the greatest effect on the interim specialty in the year ahead?” 

Interim Management Trending Up

Across both surveys, the conclusion was clear: interim executives are needed now more than ever. 71% of respondents see opportunities for interim management trending up and another 21% seeing they will remain stable throughout the coming year. Here, we break down the five reasons why more organizations are drawing on interim executive leadership:

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May 7, 2021
Greg Voutsos

Great Interim Executives Are Partners

Greg Voutsos | Head of Operations & Client Engagement
Great Interim Executives Are Partners

When smart owners hire managers with the intent of working together for a long time, it’s easy to call their relationship – if it works – a partnership. It’s not a partnership in the legal sense and it’s not a partnership in the investment sense, where partners share costs and gains.

But in great working relationships between employer and employee, each looks out for the other. Each invests to build and maintain a good relationship and share the gains of working well together and advancing the mission and economic and social health of the organization.

The problem with rampant outsourcing is that it leads to thinking on the part of employers and contractors that relationships are reduced to a transaction. Pay me X and I’ll perform as ordered. Stop paying me and I’m gone.

The logic is the same whether it’s one contractor or ten thousand. While it is transactional in the letter of the contract, it is not in the spirit of one.

The danger of a purely transactional mindset is that loyalty goes out the window. Loyalty from a boss to an employee and loyalty from an employee or manager to the organization.

In organizations with a strongly transactional bent you can bet that any corporate talk about integrity is a watered-down concept at best.

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