How Interim Management Can Help Your Business
Interim Management is one of the fastest growing sectors of employment, but it’s still poorly understood overall, with many business owners not seeing how it can help them. This problem is especially pronounced for small businesses and start-ups, who find it hard to justify the extra investment necessary to bring Interim skills into their business without a clear understanding of how that investment will pay off.
There are two main reasons to bring Interim talent into your business: firstly if your business is in trouble, and needs turning around and secondly if you’re trying to achieve a specific, clearly defined goal and need additional skills to get it done.
I’m going to leave the ‘business in trouble’ reason to one side for now and focus on the ‘specific goal’ aspect to Interim Management, as this is key to the early days of many small businesses, and it’s where they can see the most value from a relationship with an Interim Recruiter.
All small businesses face challenges in their early weeks and months: it’s part of the nature of running a small business that you have to be both a specialist and a generalist. You have to specialise in the unique USP of the product or service that you’re selling, and also keep every other aspect of the business running, from coordinating employees sick time, and holiday to making sure you have enough office supplies.
One of the most important things about Interim Management is that they introduce skills and systems into your business and those stay behind, enriching your employees and improving your business long after the interim contract has come to an end.
If you’re just starting out and beginning to grow your team, for example, getting an Interim HR Manager to work with you could make your life a great deal easier over the initial years of your business: they can help with your hiring process, ensuring you take in your first tranche of employees on a firm footing, bringing their experience of interviews and employment contracts to the table – something you may well lack if this is your first business, and establishing systems to regulate sickness, holiday and overtime that are tried and tested rather than improvised by a business owner with seventeen other priorities.
This is only one example of how Interim talent can contribute to a young and growing business. It’s worth thinking today about how Interim can help you.