What is Temporary Management?

Temporary management means entrusting the management of a company or project to highly trained and motivated managers, in order to guarantee the continuity of the organization, increasing the existing managerial skills and at the same time resolving the most critical aspects, whether negative (cuts, economic and financial restructuring) or positive (growth, development of new businesses).

Temporary management is becoming one of the preferred 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 by following the company hierarchy, but rather on the basis of increasingly ambitious projects for the companies that hire them: the "reorganization" of a business unit with a view to its sale, the management of a strategic change or a turnaround, the launch of new activities abroad, the management of transition periods, the development of 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 period of time and the company that adopts this solution knows exactly how much it has to spend, the implementation times of the project 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 no entrepreneur can renounce nowadays if they do not want to risk arriving late on market opportunities or when the games have already been played.

Who is the Temporary Manager?

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

In general, these are managers who can boast a pedigree of success that has led them to occupy positions of responsibility both at the level of company management 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 shows the 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: aside from the technical skills component, what makes the difference between a true temporary manager and someone who improvises as such is the personal, psychological and mental journey that has been taken.

To put it simply, the typical interim 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 of “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, accepts to operate in an "interim" manner and who will subsequently be able to either continue his career as a temporary 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 skills at accessible and certain costs (investments).

The TM is therefore an excellent opportunity for SMEs, which can have access to highly qualified professionals 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 for many years in companies of different sizes, developing considerable professionalism combined with high flexibility and adaptability to different business situations.

By resorting to temporary management, we help the entrepreneur to 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, with a review of processes, company procedures and internal regulations (to define "what must be done") as well as organizational charts, roles and job descriptions (to define "who must do"), supporting and training the staff.

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 generational transition; inadequate and undersized production site compared to company needs; lack of a real commercial structure.

Intervention: 12-month temporary management activity for the corporate reorganization from a managerial perspective, through training, empowerment and proactive involvement of human resources, with the definition of roles, tasks, procedures and company objectives; mitigation of 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 flow-shop lean production approach (by flows), to reduce semi-finished products (WIP) and material handling; creation of a sales office and strengthening of the sales network, with assistance in scouting and insertion of a new key account for the European market.

The Temporary CFO for listing on the Stock Exchange

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

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

Intervention: implementation of planning and control tools over a 24-month period, through: definition of Vision (what the company aspires to become in the future) and Company 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 strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors; external analysis of the macro-environment in which the company operates and of Porter's 5 forces (barriers to entry, bargaining power of customers, bargaining power of suppliers, existence of substitute products/services and as a final result, positioning and competitive push), from which opportunities or threats are generated = SWOT Analysis; economic/financial impact assessment of opportunities and threats; financial projections with impact of threats to obtain the adjusted baseline; definition of key challenges, which are generated by neutralizing threats and exploiting opportunities, leveraging strengths and minimizing weaknesses; choice of 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 strategic initiatives plan; definition of the levers from which strategic initiatives arise: growth lever (which focuses on the company's 7 degrees of freedom, 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 lever (to eliminate activities that do not create value, outsource processes by reducing their costs, rationalize production costs), organizational lever (to review the structure, organizational chart, job descriptions and company procedures), personnel lever (to involve collaborators); evaluation of the expected benefits from OKR and strategic initiatives, with updating financial projections; preparation of final output: strategic plan or 5-year business plan, accompanied by balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement; more detailed breakdown of the business plan in the annual budget (operational planning tool), whose short-term objectives are monitored through monthly financial reporting (which detects deviations for 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 system in favor of SAP B1, which made it possible to "split" the contribution margin of financial reporting into its various income-generating components, highlighting profitability by promotional operation, by customer, by product line, by brand and by key account. The treasury and operating cash flow were also analyzed, 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). The review of supply chain management activities finally led to the introduction of rotating inventories and the reduction of the rates applied by suppliers, with which the digital alignment of 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.