Cerius Business Today

Today Pam and Kristen take you on a ride into the world of Advisory Boards. They help you answer essential questions like: 

1) Why your business needs an Advisory Board?

2) How will you benefit from one? 

3) How to make an advisory board for your business

Working with Private Equity

A large number of executives in our network have had longtime, successful relationships with private equity firms. They have worked with them in a number of ways, including:

Project-based: Due diligence, SME, first-100-day plan

Interim-based: A wide variety of work based on unique or pressing needs

Full-time: Stepping in as part of the new leadership team or supplementing the current one

Where most executives see private equity firms as a potential client or employer, we’d like to recommend a new perspective: taking another look at these firms as partners. To learn more about how you can partner with private equity and nurture your own private equity relationships, listen to our latest podcast, in which we talk with Mark Gartner of Clearlight Partners, and Steve Gast, a seasoned Interim CEO. Some of the topics we cover in the podcast are:

The current landscape of private equity

What do private equity firms look for in executive talent?

The pros and cons of working with a private equity firm as an interim executive

The rising need for experienced executive talent in private equity

How to identify the right private equity firms for you or your clients

Mark is always looking for great executives to partner with. For a further discussion, you can contact Mark directly: Mark Gartner.

Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I am joined today with Interim Operations Executive Felda Looper. Felda, welcome! Thank you for sharing your expertise with us.

Felda:   Thank you for inviting me.

Kristen: So Felda, I would like to begin. One of the top questions we get asked is who are these Interim executives? They seem like paratroopers that are sitting around waiting for that call to come in and help the CEO or business owner with their company for whatever amount of time and any given number of days a week. So one of the top questions we get asked is, “How did you end up as interim executive?”

Felda: Well a little bit of background about that is I have a very varied background and have done a very many things to include starting a retail business and making a profit the first year when I was in my twenties, and I have stood up with a team in the embassy in Iraq, organizing a company that’s growing at an exponential rate. So processes are very much a part of what I do. I’ve been doing this for thirty years and I really like organizing and processes, so it became very clear to me that being an interim would be an ideal situation for me at this point in my career.

Kristen: So a lot of CEOs here said, “Well do you have processes and procedures?” And it almost feels like a necessary evil of the books sitting on a shelf that every company needs. Describe some of the work that you do and the impact that it can have on an organization?

Felda: Well first of all, if you don't have organization processes in place your organization can’t be efficient. And I mean it’s just like anything else, you don't start to bake a cake without a recipe. And when you don’t [2:02] have at the top, if the leadership at the top realizes that there are problems or they don’t have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the organization, then there start to be fires that need to be put out. And you start to get chaos then you’re in trouble. And so I find that whenever basically the times that I'm called in, they’re generally over the hump of not having caught the problem in the first place and it’s now tumbling downhill and they need help.

Kristen: So if I’m a CEO and I find my company putting out fires right and left, sounds like Rome is burning. Clearly that’s the time I recognize I need help because the pain is extreme enough, but it makes a lot more sense to get the help before it gets to that point. The challenge is you don’t always recognize the symptoms until they get really bad. What are some early warning signs that you would advise to look for that might be an indication of you’re really missing some clarity in your company and you could use some outside perspective?

Felda: I would say that in my experience that… And usually when you’re in there that’s passed that time. But I found that, leadership, if they are listening to their managers and directors and there are signs that things are not being as efficient or things aren’t getting paid or whatever their processes are that are inefficient, if they’re not being paid attention to from the get-go, then that’s when they start to grow like wildfire out of control, and it's basically a matter of paying attention. Really paying attention.

Kristen: So just to that. Anyone who works in a company can say and be frustrated with, “there’s no accountability.” No one’s clear on what they have to do, we keep having issues and I wish that my team were more accountable. What are a couple of things that as a leader I could do to put up in place to maybe improve that accountability?

Felda: Well first of all whenever people make assumptions and you don’t have standard operating procedures, knowing exactly who is going to do what, then you’re going to be in a trouble. Because standard operating procedures in my professional opinion are paramount in having an organization that runs efficiently and effectively. That is sort of the big [4:42],

Kristen: Alright, Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with interim executive Don Labowsky. Don, thank you for joining us today. How are you?

Don: I’m doing very well. And yourself?

Kristen: Fantastic. What are some things you’ve found and were able to leverage the internal resources in order to make that a smooth transition? I understand that you met all of the timeline goals, all the budget goals and still got this entire transaction done. How is the impact with the internal team and being able to leverage that with your skill set? Because it’s never just one person.

Don: No, no it’s never just one person, and certainly I was just part of a team and I only had the supply chain piece; there were many other pieces to this successful transition. But I think that the big thing is communication; being open and honest with people and setting expectations and setting timelines, and saying this is what needs to be done in this amount of time and let people go do it. And I was very lucky that the team rose to the occasion and did all those things when they needed to be done in the correct order and were able to achieve all the goals that were given to us.

Kristen: Fantastic. What are the attributes of the company? You were really with a great team. What were some of the attributes that you think helped make it so successful?

Don: Well they had a very, very dynamic Chief Operating Officer/ CFO, the person that was in that role was incredibly engaged, incredibly detail-oriented; very, very positive. And they also had a CEO that they had brought in about a year ago who came up with this whole fibbit, had the experience, had been working with several different companies in both markets. And had the courage and strength to really suggest this and get board approval and to move forward with it. So they had a very, very strong visionary and the number two person was a very, very strong operator, and that’s what I think was key to that transition being so successful.

Kristen: Fantastic. I know it went about as well as any transition possibly could go. Looking at some of the others you mentioned you stepped into, what were some of the more challenging ones then, and what you did to turn them around?

Don: One was I was asked to take over as President of a company. It was about a 12 million dollar company, had been bought by a larger company and after the sale they realized that the books were cooked basically, and the owners of the company that was purchased were all fired. And there was roughly 300 customers that had to be informed that they had been overbilled for years, that had been informed that we would make it right and that we would want them to continue their business. So you had a very big challenge going after the customers and saying yes I realized I’m the new guy, I realize the company did not bill you properly, we’re going to make it right, but we’re also going to ask you to keep with us and continue to buy from us, services in this case. And you also had to deal with staff that felt like criminals because all were unwittingly part of this. They did not know what was going on. It was all kind of done by a very small group of people who modified information after it had been sent in by the individuals. So they all kinda felt like they were not worthy and they were part of the conspiracy as one might say. But ultimately what happened is we lost no customers through this process, and the staff was brought around and they eventually figured out that hey we’re not the source of the problem and they stayed on board. We were able to turn it around. That company was then again sold to another company in less than a year.

Kristen: Don I have to say when things are going wrong I want you on my side.

Don: [laughs] Well, I guess I like the adrenaline rush of walking into a firefight, you never know what you’re going to find.

Krsiten: We hear that a lot. We’re looking at CEO’s

Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today by Interim Operations Expert, James Stewart. How are you doing today, Jim?

James: I am doing very well. Thank you, Kristen.

Kristen: Fantastic. Taking all of these challenges into account, you’ve got a CEO who knows that things can be working better. They may not be falling apart, but knows that they could be working better. What are the top 3 pieces of advice you would give a CEO when it comes to distribution operations, supply chain management. What are the top 3 things they should look at?

James: Oh my goodness. I think one of the first pieces of advice and it seems kind of obvious, but it was really an aggravating factor in this particular situation, was the amount of initiatives that the company was trying to accomplish all at once. They had a primary manufacturing facility that was undergoing some very serious production issues at the same time they were rolling out and changing their executive staff. At the same time they were trying to integrate. They purchased another company on the east coast at the same time they tried to purchase other companies around the world at the same time they were trying to implement the ERP role over, and bring all of the entities up on that. And that’s just a math full of things for an organization to execute, so I think it was very difficult to adequate progress on all those. And that’s everybody that’s involved with that. So that’s my first advice and self-retrospection would be is it realistic to be doing all these things? Or should these be sequenced in an order? You know, get this part done and start that and save the math and take a little bit longer. Sometimes the slow way is the fast way and in this particular case, I think we tried to go very fast on quite a few topics and it was difficult to get them all done and we’ve had scheduled slips on some of those initiatives. They just unfolded as we had hoped and that’s just the reality of having too many things on your plate. You might not be able to get it all done.

Kristen: I hear that a lot. Prioritize the initiative. Any time you try and get too much done, you end up getting nothing done.

James: Yeah, so if later the organization assumes precision and execution, I mean these people aren’t out to be CEOs because they’re not smart. They’re smart, high-performance people. They’ve been recognized for their contribution and they may not just be a winning manager for this. Surrounded by people it’s hard and its hard working and it’s insightful and intuitive and clever and efficient as they are. So they might say “well if everyone, is like me I’d get all this done.” Everybody is not like you. And it’s a lot more complicated when you get down 2 layers in the organization and it takes time to sort through this stuff. And add a little bit of bandwidth and time flexibility, so that you can make sustainable effective changes as opposed to “hey, we implemented the system but now it doesn’t work because we forgot to do some stuff.

Kristen: Jim that’s tremendous advice. We see that quite a bit from that perspective. Any other last-minute tips that you’d like to offer our audience?

James: Last minute tips. Well I guess the one that I would throw out there and I’ve been self-serving for Cerius and people like me, is that you’re going an interim executive route is a very easy way to get some high-level of expertise in an area of problem and do it a really low risk patch. So my particular assignment lasted a year, or almost a year, and it could’ve lasted 3 months and been shut off just as easily, and so anybody who’s been thinking about getting some expert help here, it’s easier to go and put it in place and see what the path forward leads to that it is to, you know, have to make a huge commitment like you would with a permanent hire. So don’t hesitate, go out and get some help on board, see where it goes and then you know just set expecta

Kristen: Alright, Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with interim executive Don Labowsky. Don, thank you for joining us today. How are you?

Don: I’m doing very well. And yourself?

Kristen: Fantastic. We’re going to start off with some easy questions here. Probably one of the questions we get the most from CEO’s, they have a tough time imagining that these couple of executives are available whenever they are needed. Who are they? How did they become an interim executive? Can you give us a little background on you and how you ended up doing interim executive work?

Don: Ah sure, and it’s kind of a funny story. I was actually helping, trying to help somebody else get a job with a particular company. I took the CFO of a local manufacturing company out to a job to see if he had a spot open for my friend who was a marketing person and he said he did not. But what they had was an opening for an interim product manager, they had their product manager leave on a very important project six months before it was due to be introduced and it needed to have the engineering finished, prototyping done, FDA approval done, and get it set up at the trade show all within six months. All when their project manager left to go to a competitive and they were really stuck. And so I said that well I can do that, and I went in took charge, and got hired by them obviously took charge, and got the engineering done, got the prototyping done, got the FDA approval introduced to that trade show in New Orleans and that product went on to be a core product for them for 14 years.

Kristen: Well that’s jumping into the deep end.

Don: Yup [laughs].

Kristen: Do you typically get brought in for similar types of challenges? Let’s see the range that you’ve seen in interim executives?

Don: The challenges are all over, and I think it’s again these are situations where the company is in some type of a transition. In that they have a high urgency need, they have limited time, sometimes limited cash, sometimes there’s legal issues involved, sometimes somebody left who was very important to the process and I think that they have a very high urgency need but it’s only a temporary need. And they expect to be able to, once they get through this transition period they expect to be OK. That’s where I think interim executive shine.

Kristen: One of the questions we get is how’s an interim executive going to be accepted by the interim team. How does that transition both coming in and out? Especially when there’s a very strong family-oriented culture in the [2:28] company. How do you trust them when you start there as well as when you’re leaving?

Don: Well I think the staff always has a feeling that something is going on despite the fact that management may try to downplay or even sometimes hide the need for these transitions. Whether they’re in trouble or whether somebody left, or other situations. I think the staff often knows. I’ve found the staff to be very receptive to having somebody from the outside come in, and actually they’re very, very willing to talk about what they think needs to be done, which is always one of my rules is to engage people from the top to the bottom in whatever the solution is needed because everybody’s got their own idea. They’re been watching it for years, they knew that something was going to go wrong, or they knew that something needed to be done and I found them to be very receptive.

Kristen: Fantastic. We tend to get the same feedback is they’re waiting and willing to bring someone in with open arms. That’s not on. When you go in, I know you’ve got a very strong engineering background, very strong project management as general manager, when companies bring you in and projects have a short timeline, there’s a high potential for error. And they’re typically off-course and off-track when you walk in. What are some of the common things that you see them not doing right and you’re able to

Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with Interim HR Executive Scott Coolidge. Scott, thank you for joining us today.

Scott: You bet, happy to be here.

Kristen: Fantastic. Scott looking at from your perspective of what companies are most challenged with and the improvements that they can make, even if it’s just the little things, what are 3 pieces of advice you would give a CEO?

Scott: Well you know I have to say this Kristen, I mean having them associated with, and this won’t be a surprise to any CEO, having been associated with the world of HR, big companies, small companies – it’s all around leadership. You know, who you select to put into leadership roles really at all levels of the organization. I don’t care if they’re supervisors, mid-level managers, directors, or executives. So often the default position is to take the person who’s your best technician, best technically who has grown up through the organization and, you know, selected them into these leadership roles. And often they’re simply not well-suited for management or leadership roles. That’s not to say they can’t be developed into that, but often times it’s a situation where they’re just not effective leaders and building out the selection process in order to identify and put people into leadership roles at all levels, I would say is the most critical thing that any CEO and management team could do. So that’s number 1, and I’ve seen that over and over and over again. Number 2 I would say that it’s around the, I’m going to call it the performance management framework right, and what I mean by that is really from two perspectives. What are you focused on in terms of overall business performance, what are the metrics? And how does that translate into the performance management process that you used for employees in order to get people to focus on the right things and have them working that optimal levels in order to achieve their personal objectives and those of the organization and building alignment between business objectives and people objectives. And to me that goes right back to the leadership issue because the most significant issue, I don’t care what kind of a performance management framework you have, if you don’t have managers who are capable of providing feedback on a regular basis. Look we all know business particularly in this environment changes almost every day and therefore the performance that you’re expecting from people at all levels is going to change constantly. You have to have people in place who are effective at providing feedback, both positive and negative, and getting people to change direction and encouraging them and having the right mechanisms in place to reward them. And that’s the third part of it. The third thing is taking a look at your reward and recognition programs. So many businesses, big and small, particularly small ones that are trying to grow to that next level. Taking a look at how you pay people: base compensation, bonus compensation, and equally important I would argue are recognition problems that you have in place because everyone knows that people want to be recognized and paid for doing a really solid job. And so having the programs and practices in place that allow your effective leaders to pay and recognize employees is absolutely critical. So those are probably the top 3. Although as you touched on just a minute ago, the other thing is communication and I can’t tell you how often I’ll walk into situations where I would just say employee communications are just not that effective. They aren’t clear, they aren’t consistent and they aren’t regular enough. So oftentimes I’ll find myself working with a CEO or a leadership team or a HR person to kind of clarify and effectively execute a solid communications stretch. Does that make sense?

Kristen: Absolutely. I’m sure that anyone listening is nodding their head and saying yes I completely underst

Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with Interim HR Executive Scott Coolidge. Scott, thank you for joining us today.

Scott: You bet, happy to be here.

Kristen: Fantastic, that’s a good one. You mention the word change a couple of times, especially that retention of employees. Now you recently did an assignment where the CEO was looking to shift the organization in order to remain competitive realizing they needed to get more products and services, but in order to deliver that to clients they needed to adjust the organizational structure of the team, and kind of needed some help with change management, and working through that and communicating it to the organization in order to enable that. Can you give us some highlights of what the situation was and how you were able to help impact some successful results?

Scott: Sure, I’d be happy to Kristen. And this was my latest interim assignment, and this was one that I had some of the most fun with. Basically, this situation was a new CEO stepped in, had a situation where they had had a significant crisis in their business within an 18-month period for coming on board. And they had righted the ship for most part, but found themselves in a situation, she found herself in a situation where she knew that the competitive environment had changed dramatically and knew that she had to reposition the organization in such a way to allow them to be more competitive on a going-forward basis, and she needed to structure in such a way that allowed her more freedom to get out in the market, work with her customer base, build potential technology alliances, and so she needed to have a structure that was more efficient in order to allow her to do that. I helped her conduct an organizational… she brought in a consulting firm to do the organizational study, but my primary role was working with her from a change perspective to determine what needed to be done from a structural standpoint and then most importantly to help her figure out what needed to be done in terms of communications to the organization and communications to the executives that were involved in this change in order to retain them and produce this effective structure on a going-forward basis. So specifically I helped her finalize the organizational structure, it had a concerning impact on a number of the existing executives, so I worked through with her how the very specific conversations she needed to have with the impact of executives and helped her get through that in an effective way, so at the end of the day she didn’t lose a single executive, repositioned the business for success in the future, and helped her as well with a communications to all the employees in the organization so that they understood why she was doing what she was doing, what the impact was going to be on them as employees, and what the future would hold for the organization. And I’m very happy to say that through all of this, I’m going to keep my fingers crossed as is she, that so far, knock on wood, she hasn’t lost a single person in the organization and it looks like we positioned them well for the future.

Kristen: That is tremendous. Especially in the current environment that we’ve had with recruiting and retention as you mention that’s a challenge for so many companies, and I think you hit on the sticking point is communication, and when any type of transition, any type of change going on in the company, communication is priority number one to make such a big impact. Well thank you so much Scott. I appreciate your time and sharing your time and expertise and experiences with us today, and joining us. For those listening, feel free to join us for our next episode at Cerius Business Today and have a great day.

Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with Interim HR Executive Scott Coolidge. Scott, thank you for joining us today.

Scott: You bet, happy to be here.

Kristen: Fantastic. One of the questions we get most often from CEO’s and business owners is how is it that someone of this caliber is sitting around waiting to help me with my company. They don’t quite understand the makeup of interim executives and how they’re available and when they jump in and out of companies. If you don’t mind giving us a little bit of your background and how is it that you ended up becoming an interim executive and why?

Scott: Oh great question Kristen. It’s pretty simple from my vantage point. I’ve had a 35-plus year career, almost exclusively in Human Resources. About half of that I was with large consulting firms, Towers Perrin and Hey Management Consultants, and the other half was in corporate roles in HR and various capacities. The latest of which was the head of Human Resources at Freddie Mac. And I got to a point in my career where I wanted to shift and change priorities in terms of life and career and so I left Freddie Mac and launched a career that basically allows me a lot more flexibility to manage my priorities, and what I look for and what I’ve found so exciting about interim opportunities is I look for interesting business situations, I look for client situations where they have significant human resources issues and where I can add some value, and so far I’ve found that these interim roles really fit that bill very nicely.

Kristen: It’s a good thing that you shifted to that. I know you’ve helped a lot of companies. Looking at the type of companies that you step in and lend you years of experience to, human capital is often the most important part and most overwhelming part of the organization. What are some of the common situations that you get brought into, especially looking at a small to mid-size business?

Scott: That’s another great question Kristen, and what I’ve seen so far is that typically even though my background has been with Fortune 500 types of companies, as I’ve stepped into these interim roles, it tends to be small to medium-sized businesses. Usually they’ll have a human resources person there, but that person tends to be more administrative than executional with respect to the programs that they already have in place. And typically what I have found is that the organization is in a situation where they’re trying to grow or have grown, and the number and complexity of human resources issues has grown dramatically. And what they’re looking for is somebody who’s been there and done that before, and then exposed to situations that their current staff just simply hasn’t been associated with. So they’re looking for an advisor to help them think about the situations they find themselves in, retention of staff, engagement of staff. They might have some pro-dramatic issues around leadership development or performance management or change management. And so they’re looking for somebody to tap who’s been there, done that and can give them some advice around what to do, when to do it, where to invest their time, and what the implications are of doing that to their business operations, and frankly to their bottom line. And that’s what’s been so interesting for me.

Kristen: As a business owner, CEO it’s hard to know when you need to bring in that external help. Often you don’t do it until, not that it’s too late, but it’s past the point when you should have or when it would’ve been most helpful and productive. What are some of the symptoms I should be looking for as a business owner in my organization to raise my head and say “wait we really need some outside assistance here.”

Scott: Well that is typically what I’ve found to be the situation. Quite honestly you’re exactly right. Hindsight being 20/20, I think a number of CEO’s that I’ve worked with or leadership t

Kristen: Hello and welcome to Cerius Business Today. This is Kristen McAlister and I’m joined today with Interim Operations Expert, James Stewart. How are you doing today, Jim?

James: I am doing very well. Thank you, Kristen.

Kristen: Fantastic. It’s not an easy situation to walk into. Not only has the company been acquired but now they’ve got someone who’s stepping in on an interim bases. What were a couple of things you were able to do kind of quickly to make an impact there and let them know that you are there to help?

James: So I have talked about our successes on the inventory front which is something we can look back at and say we have significantly moved and needled there. What should I say? This team had three warehouses of product all in the local vicinity and the decision had been made prior to my arrival to buy all inventory required for 2016 and 2015 to make sure there wasn’t any shortfall in inventory which wasn’t issued a year before. As a result the inventory processes were very aggregated. They weren’t used to running so many remote locations. They weren’t used to having that amount of inventory and it became really evident in just inventory integrity ability to know where a product was and able to do things fundamental, things like cycle counting. So when it became obvious that there was a big problem and in which as we started [1:29] it was, we basically had to throw that recipe out and come up with some significant and customized tools to address the inventory. So what I contributed to that was literally to sit down, look at my skill set on Excel and problem solving ability and just say ”okay, lets step through a problem solving process,” which wasn’t a normal thing for the people that were working there. Let’s define what we are trying to accomplish, let’s define parameters, let’s do some testing, lets develop some hypotheses, lets test those. And basically came up with a whole set of inventory management tools that allowed us to ultimately improve the quality of the inventory understanding and reporting to, the last I think we got it a 100 percent compliant over the course of the year. So that was a significant improvement from where they were.

Kristen: I’ve been hearing that a lot from company CEOs lately on they’re are growing quickly, lots of people are in that decision making process and their inventory is misaligned and the problem just keeps growing and growing each quarter. What are some of the things that contribute to inventory issues that are kind of the first things that a CEO can take a look at if they see that problem growing?

James: Sure that’s a great question. In this particular case there were some real roles and responsibilities issues that were unclear. Meaning that in the beginning when this West Coast company was a wholly-owned entity, all the decisions regarding purchasing and supply management, were all made by a small team of people that sat in the same building. When the company was purchased, they started for efficiency’s sake moving some of their core functions back to the headquarters with the idea that there would be [3:27] there and they would be able to get better performance over time. But those roles and responsibilities were never really rewired to where everybody knew what was going on. So there was confusion on, you know, things like who ordered how many, what and when and when are they supposed to arrive, there is a confusion on how to manage the receipts and what warehouses they should go into and this confusion on who was doing the physical receipts, who had the receipts and the quick books as a ERP kind of system and they had a receipt in the overall ERP system as well. So you know there were these processes that has come apart and weren’t defined and torn apart. They were spread across job descriptions and so it got to be a comedy of errors on who owns what. I don’t think that’s identical. Meaning if you are getting similar observations from other organi