Story: Interim Executives SWAT Team

Pam Wasley shares the story of how one company built an interim executives SWAT team to save a dying company.

How One Company Used Interim Executives To Keep From Losing Money.

Kristen McAlister: Interim executives come in all shapes, background, roles and skills. They can work independently to get work done, with an interim team or with another interim executive. Coming up next, Pam will talk about how an interim executive SWAT team can make a big impact quickly.
Pam Wasley: So let me tell you a story about a client. This client was always profitable. He was always growing rapidly until one day he wasn’t. And he started to lose money. So it was like ‘I’ve got to figure out what’s going on.’ So he immediately went to his leadership team and he said, ‘Hey guys, so what’s going on? What are the issues? What are the weaknesses? How do we fix this?” He got blank stares all around. He thought, ‘Oh my gosh, these guys don’t have answers. I need an answer now.’ So he immediately came to us and he said I need a couple of people. I need an interim executive SWAT team. So that’s what he did. So the first one he brought in was an interim HR executive. And this HR executive came in to assess the people to find out whether or not he had people in the right places in his company. And the second person that he brought in was an interim COO. And this interim COO was to figure out where were the issues? Where were the weaknesses? How did they fix them and then put together a plan where everybody could work together to put this back on track. So they started and the cool thing was here were some of the results. You had the HR executive as she was assessing what was going on in the company, she found out that ‘OK, this person really has the skill sets to be over in this department because they didn’t like what they were doing. And they had this other person that really wasn’t every good at all. We had tried him in other positions, sot hat one one they moved out. And then they looked at a couple of other people and all that they needed was training. They needed to be held accountable. They needed goals. They needed to feel like they were a part of the culture. So this interim HR executive put things into place. At the same time, you had the interim COO going around again assessing what was going on. The weaknesses, the issues, some of the people in operations. The cool thing about what he found was again, he found out no goals, no accountability, nobody really knew what they were doing. I mean they kind of knew what the vision and the mission of the company was, but they didn’t really know. So all of a sudden, he got everyone together, and he put processes into place, he put goals into place. He held people accountable and they started to really feel like they were a part of the team driving towards bringing this company back to profitability. So the happy ending to this story was (by the way, this is only 4 months later), the company was now back inn the black and yes, they had to get rid of a couple of people, but most of the people they were able to keep. And they are on their way to profitability and to better revenues today. Just think where this company would’ve been or how long it would’ve taken them to find the fixes to what was going on in their company without this interim SWAT team.”
Kristen McAlister: “To get our free book, 101 Ways to Leverage an Interim Executive, click the link and I’ll see you in the next video.”

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