What is Temporary Management?

Interim management refers to entrusting the management of a business or project to highly trained and motivated managers. This ensures the organization's continuity, enhancing existing managerial skills while addressing its most critical issues, whether negative (cuts, economic and financial restructuring) or positive (growth, new business development).

Interim management is becoming a preferred model for managing the acceleration of change and innovation in companies. Key players in this growing trend are senior project managers, former executives, or top managers who have decided to advance their careers not so much through the corporate hierarchy, but through increasingly ambitious projects for the companies that hire them: restructuring a business unit with a view to its sale, leading a strategic change or turnaround, launching new businesses abroad, managing transition periods, and developing permanent managers are practical examples of the services we offer.

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

Flexibility is a "magic" word that no entrepreneur can renounce these days if they don't want to risk being late to market opportunities or when the game has already been played.

Who is the Temporary Manager?

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

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

But all this is not enough: the temporary manager is the result of the combination of a professional profile that clearly demonstrates the ability to solve problems, rather than fill a position, and a specific personal and motivational profile.

Becoming an interim manager is essentially a mental journey: aside from the technical skills component, what makes the difference between a true interim manager and someone who improvises is the personal, psychological, and mental journey that has been undertaken.

Simply put, the typical temporary manager can be defined as a person who:

• is between 45 and 55 years old;
• has gone through at least 5 company changes with up to 10 different roles held throughout his career;
• has matured over 20 years as a permanent manager;
• he is aware that he is “selling” know-how;
• he is no longer interested in a career in the traditional sense and has therefore moved from a logic of status to a logic of contribution to the customer.

However, a different scenario is gradually emerging: that of the younger manager, aged 35-45, who, faced with well-defined and particularly interesting projects, agrees to work on an "interim" basis and who can subsequently either continue his career as a temp or return to a more traditional perspective of permanent management.

Why contact our TMs?

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

TM is therefore an excellent opportunity for SMEs, which can draw on highly qualified professionals for the necessary length of time, adopting a much more flexible and less expensive solution than a permanent manager.

The interim manager is a senior resource with expertise and experience, having worked successfully for many years in companies of various sizes, developing considerable professionalism combined with a high level of flexibility and adaptability to different business situations.

Through temporary management, we help entrepreneurs manage generational transitions, the lack of high-profile figures, or the need for a nonpartisan manager. Our services range from general management to administrative management, from information technology to project management. We review processes, company procedures, and internal regulations (to define "what needs to be done"), as well as organizational charts, roles, and job descriptions (to define "who should do it"), and provide support and training to staff.

How to manage the handover

Client: Mold manufacturing and rubber-plastic molding company producing technical components for the medical and automotive sectors; turnover of €3.5 million.

Problems: difficult management of generational transition; inadequate and undersized production site compared to the company's needs; lack of a real sales structure.

Project scope: 12-month interim management activities for the corporate reorganization from a managerial perspective, through training, empowerment, and proactive engagement of human resources, with the definition of roles, duties, procedures, and corporate objectives; mitigation of generational conflict and gradual handover from father to son; assistance in the design of the new industrial warehouse, including layout definition based on a flow-shop lean manufacturing approach to reduce WIP and material handling; creation of a sales office and strengthening of the sales network, with scouting assistance and the addition of a new key account for the European market.

The Temporary CFO for going public

Client: Sales and marketing company that runs promotional campaigns in the retail and pharmaceutical sectors to build customer loyalty; turnover of €40 million.

Issues: Lack of structured strategic and operational planning and management control processes; contribution margin not recorded for individual orders but only at the aggregate level, based on general accounting, which is of little use in supporting decision-making; inefficient logistics management, outsourced for storage, deliveries, and returns of products covered by promotional campaigns.

Intervention: Implementation of planning and control tools over a 24-month period, through: definition of the company's Vision (what the company aspires to become in the future) and Mission (why the company exists and what its purpose is) and their translation into long-term measurable values (KPIs); estimate of 5-year baseline projections, without considering corrective actions; internal analysis of strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors; external analysis of the macro-environment in which the company operates and of Porter's Five Forces (barriers to entry, customer bargaining power, supplier bargaining power, existence of substitute products/services and as a final result, positioning and competitive pressure), which generate opportunities or threats = SWOT Analysis; assessment of the economic/financial impact of opportunities and threats; financial projections with the impact of threats to obtain the adjusted baseline; definition of key challenges, which arise from neutralizing threats and exploiting opportunities, leveraging strengths and minimizing weaknesses; Identifying key challenges and defining an action plan to achieve the Vision, divided into a continuous improvement plan (leveraging the OKR system, with the definition of a few key short-term objectives that are clear, measurable, and shared across the company, and whose achievement does not require additional investment) and a subsequent strategic initiatives plan; defining the levers that drive strategic initiatives: growth lever (which focuses on the company's seven degrees of freedom, increasing sales first with existing customers, then with new customers, and gradually with new products/services, new channels, geographic expansion, new acquisitions, and new businesses or vertical integrations); cost reduction lever (to eliminate non-value-adding activities, outsource processes while reducing costs, and streamline production costs); organizational lever (to review company structure, organizational chart, job descriptions, and procedures); and personnel lever (to engage employees); assessing the expected benefits of OKRs and strategic initiatives, including updating financial projections; Preparation of final output: five-year strategic plan or business plan, including balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement; more detailed breakdown of the business plan in the annual budget (an operational planning tool). Short-term objectives are monitored through monthly financial reporting (which identifies deviations for appropriate corrective action), and then re-projected at year-end with the rolling forecast. Concurrent with the planning process, cost accounting was also introduced, replacing the Zucchetti management software with SAP B1. This allowed the financial reporting contribution margin to be broken down into its various revenue-generating components, highlighting profitability by promotional operation, customer, product line, brand, and key account. Treasury and operating cash flow were also analyzed, with a view to aligning financial commitments with actual business performance and sustainability, through the adoption of structured finance instruments (basket bonds, fully underwritten by Banca Intesa). Finally, a review of supply chain management activities led to the introduction of rotating inventories and a reduction in supplier fees, which also led to the digital alignment of information systems. Thanks to these efforts, the company has been able to begin the process of listing on the Italian Stock Exchange, AIM segment.