Every year most organizations have a number of challenges and key initiatives that if executed effectively will lead to advancements in their business. (Examples include: penetrating a new adjacent market segment, improving quality systems, creating a new distribution channel, implementing and gain adoption for CRM, advancing new products). Traditionally, when organizations face a new challenge where they lack the internal knowledge and experience to advance the initiative inside the organization, they have approached it in three different ways:
- Hire a Full Time Employee who has the right knowledge and experience. This doesn’t make sense when the initiative is really a project lasting less than 12 months.
- Hire a Consulting Company. This is typically an expensive and “leveraged” approach where the work is done by young professionals who are marked up heavily to support the consultancy infrastructure and there is limited knowledge transfer to your internal employees.
- Go It Alone with Your Current Team which often takes more time and effort and often leads to less-than-successful initiatives that end up being the costliest approach.
In today’s environment there is a more effective approach – Add a targeted professional to your team that has “been there and done that”. The number of experienced and knowledgeable professionals working in the “Gig Economy” is increasing dramatically, enabling smart companies to think differently about how to get access to the expertise they need. They’re insourcing targeted “freelancers” to be part of their teams and adding knowledge affordably, just-in-time and on a flexible-as-needed basis. M&A Executive Search & Consulting has helped many companies build this approach as a systematic part of their resource model to plug knowledge gaps and gain a distinct advantage over their competitors.
- A candy manufacturer needing to double capacity brought in a life-long candy mogul expert who spent two weeks evaluating the process and equipment and provided a list of 29 improvement needs and put the company on the right track. – Two week project; One day per quarter follow-up.
- A glass manufacturer building a new plant feared getting taken advantage of by the construction industry. They brought in a plant construction industry veteran to project manage the project and keep costs in line – an 18-month interim role.
- An insurance company investing in an emerging software business brought in a software technology serial entrepreneur to evaluate the business and help the owner with key necessary pivots to get the business into a viable position– a six-month project.
