What is Temporary Management

By temporary management we mean entrusting the management of a company or a project to highly trained and motivated managers, in order to guarantee continuity to the organization, increasing the already existing managerial skills and at the same time solving the most critical aspects, whether they are negative (cuts, economic and financial readjustment) or positive (growth, new business development).

Interim management is taking root as one of the privileged models for managing the acceleration of change and innovation in companies. The protagonists of this growing trend are senior project managers, former executives or top managers who have decided to continue their careers not so much following the corporate hierarchical process, but on the basis of increasingly ambitious projects for the companies that hire them: the "accommodation" of a business unit with a view to its sale, the conduct of a strategic change or a turnaround, the launch of new activities abroad, the management of transition periods, the development of permanent managers are examples familiar with the services we offer.

The fundamental characteristic of this type of intervention is that it is always set up for a fixed term and the company that adopts this solution knows exactly how much it has to spend, the project implementation times and that the Temporary Manager (TM) leaves the company. , at the end of the project, without any unexpected costs for management.

Flexibility is a "magic" word that, by now, no entrepreneur can give up if he does not want to risk arriving late on market opportunities or when the games have already been made.

Who is the Temporary Manager

The primary requirement is to have gained considerable experience in senior roles within the private or even the public sector.

In general, therefore, these are managers who can boast a successful pedigree that has led them to occupy positions of responsibility both at the level of company management and at the level of first functional reports.

However, all this is not enough: the interim manager results from the combination of a professional profile which clearly shows his ability to solve problems, rather than to fill a position, and a particular personal and motivational profile.

Becoming a temporary manager is essentially a mental journey: without prejudice to the component of technical skills, what makes the difference between a real temporary manager and those who improvise themselves as such is the personal, psychological and mental journey that has been made.

Simplifying, the typical interim manager can be defined as a person who:

is between the ages of 45 and 55; has gone through at least 5 company changes with up to 10 different roles covered throughout his career; has over 20 years as a permanent manager; is aware of "selling" know-how; he is no longer interested in a career in the traditional sense and has therefore passed from a logic of status to a logic of contribution to the client.

However, there is progressively a distinct scenario, namely that of the youngest manager, aged 35-45 who, in the face of well-defined and particularly interesting projects, agrees to operate on an "interim" basis and who can subsequently continue his career as a temporary one, is to return to a more traditional perspective of permanent management.

Why contact our TMs

The TM is not a consultant: the consultant advises and others perform; TM manages and executes and represents a way to acquire management support resources alongside the existing management, becoming a way for SMEs to "bring home" high-level skills at accessible and certain costs (investments).

The TM is therefore an excellent opportunity for SMEs, which can have considerable professionalism for the necessary time, adopting a much more flexible and less expensive solution than a manager hired on a permanent basis.

The temporary manager is a senior resource with know-how and experience, having worked successfully and for many years in companies of different sizes, gaining considerable professionalism combined with high flexibility and adaptability to different business situations.

With the use of temporary management, we help the entrepreneur manage the generational transition, the lack of high-profile figures or the need for a super partes manager, ranging from general management to administrative management, from information technology to project management.

How to manage the handover

Client: mold construction and rubber-plastic molding company for the production of technical components for the medical and automotive sectors; turnover of 3.5 million euros.

Problems: difficult management of the generational handover; production site inadequate and undersized with respect to business needs; lack of a real commercial structure.

Intervention: temporary management activities lasting 12 months for corporate reorganization from a managerial point of view, through the training, accountability and proactive involvement of human resources, with the definition of roles, tasks, procedures and corporate objectives; attenuation of the generational conflict and gradual handover from father to son; assistance in the design of the new industrial warehouse, with definition of the layout according to a lean production approach of the flow-shop type (by flows), to reduce semi-finished products (wip) and the handling of materials; creation of a sales office and strengthening of the sales network, with scouting assistance and insertion of a new key account for the European market.

The Temporary CFO to go public

Client: commercial and marketing company that carries out promotional campaigns, in the retail and pharmaceutical sector, for customer loyalty; turnover of 40 million euros.

Problems: absence of structured processes of strategic, operational planning and management control; contribution margin not recorded for individual orders but only at an aggregate level, based on the general accounting, not very useful as a support to the decision-making process; inefficient management of logistics, outsourced for the purposes of storage, deliveries and returns relating to products subject to promotional campaigns.

Intervention: implementation of planning and control tools over a period of 24 months, through: definition of Vision (what the company aims to become in the future) and corporate Mission (why the company exists and what its purpose is) with relative translation into long-term measurable values (KPIs); estimate of 5-year baseline projections, without considering corrective actions; internal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors; external analysis of the macro-environment in which the company operates and of Porter's 5 forces (entry barriers, customers 'bargaining power, suppliers' bargaining power, existence of replacement products / services and as a final result, positioning and competitive drive), from which opportunities or threats are generated = Swot Analysis; economic / financial impact assessment of opportunities and threats; financial projections with the impact of threats to obtain the adjusted baseline; definition of the key challenges, which arise from neutralizing threats and exploiting opportunities, leveraging on strengths and minimizing weaknesses; choice of the key challenges and definition of the action plan to achieve the Vision, divided into a continuous improvement plan (which leverages the OKR system, with the definition of a few key short-term objectives, which are clear, measurable and shared throughout the company, the achievement of which does not require additional investments) and subsequent plan of strategic initiatives; definition of the levers from which strategic initiatives arise: growth lever (which focuses on the 7 degrees of freedom of the company, increasing sales first with existing customers, then with new customers and gradually with new products / services, with new channels, with geographical expansion, with new acquisitions and with new businesses or vertical integrations), cost reduction leverage (to eliminate activities that do not create value, outsource processes by reducing costs, rationalize production costs), organizational leverage ( to review the structure, organization chart, job descriptions and company procedures), staff leverage (to involve collaborators); assessment of the expected benefits from OKR and strategic initiatives, with updating of financial projections; final output preparation: 5-year strategic plan or business plan, accompanied by balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement; declination of the business plan in more detail in the annual budget (operational planning tool), whose short-term objectives are subject to control through the monthly financial reporting (which detects the deviations for the appropriate corrective actions), to then be re-projected at the end of the year with the rolling forecast. At the same time as the planning process, analytical accounting was also introduced, replacing the Zucchetti management software in favor of SAP B1, which made it possible to "split" the contribution margin of financial reporting into its various income generation components, highlighting profitability by promotional operation, by customer, by product line, by brand and by key account. We also proceeded to analyze the treasury and operating cash flow, with a view to making financial commitments consistent and sustainable with the actual performance of the business, with the adoption of structured finance instruments (basket bond, fully subscribed by Banca Intesa). Finally, the review of supply chain management activities led to the introduction of rotating inventories and the reduction of the tariffs applied by the suppliers, with whom the digital alignment of the information systems was carried out. Thanks to the activity carried out, the company was able to undertake the listing process on the Italian Stock Exchange, AIM segment.