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Small and Medium sized Companies

Don’t Get Caught in the Rat Race

As a (often family-owned) small or medium-sized enterprise, you represent the backbone of our economy, and you are used to handling things a bit differently from your larger counterparts – less bureaucratic, more pragmatic.

Your flexibility allows you to innovate, while family ties (or other personal relationships) serve as motivation to work especially hard, as you don’t want to let anyone down.

Being forced to wear many hats at once makes work versatile and even more interesting. We know this from own experience, as our local offices constitute small and medium-sized entities too.

However, along with the benefit of greater independence also comes the danger of being left on your own when distressed, when you need to scale or when the whole world around you is pulling the rug out from under your feet.

Usually, there is no safety net for you, and business challenges can quickly turn into crises – many times realised too late due to a lack of objectivity.

What’s worse, it’s not easy for you to get help from outside, as it takes time until external professionals are integrated in your strong culture to gain enough trust and authority to exercise the necessary changes.

The familiar stranger

Perhaps counterintuitively, interim management represents an excellent tool in such situations, as it is way easier for all parties to welcome the stranger who is clearly going to leave again on a fixed date, stays within a predefined role, who is like-minded due to a similar background, and does not show any interest in any kind of shared ownership.

This special guest role allows the interim manager to be more objective, less suspicious to conflicts of interest, franker and more challenging.

At EIM, we are specialised in such cases, and prepare our interim managers accordingly, by first including all relevant stakeholders and seeking a clear mandate for the interim manager.

The familiar stranger

Perhaps counterintuitively, interim management represents an excellent tool in such situations, as it is way easier for all parties to welcome the stranger who is clearly going to leave again on a fixed date, stays within a predefined role, who is like-minded due to a similar background, and does not show any interest in any kind of shared ownership.

This special guest role allows the interim manager to be more objective, less suspicious to conflicts of interest, franker and more challenging.

At EIM, we are specialised in such cases, and prepare our interim managers accordingly, by first including all relevant stakeholders and seeking a clear mandate for the interim manager.

Let’s look at some typical SME scenarios, for which we offer proven interim management solutions:

Let’s look at some typical SME scenarios, for which we offer proven interim management solutions:

Keep up with an ever-changing economy

Fundamental, disruptive changes range from globalisation to digital transformation. It’s easy to be left behind.

Your advantage is your flexibility, whereas your disadvantage is a lack of resources to either reach the scale of production needed to enter a new market or make the necessary personnel allocation, while your current managers might not be willing to leave their home base (be it geographically or in terms of know-how).

This is not a failure but simply the result of a naturally strong connection between personal and corporate history and traditions.

It all comes full circle, when you consider that SMEs have considerably better chances to survive the globalisation.

This is done by providing technologically advanced and digital products, as the latter are easier to export, there’s less competition, quality is more important than quantity, and unique innovations allow for higher pricing.

Click here to explore how EIM Interim Managers can improve your digital maturity (and thereby, competitiveness).

Grow beyond the capacities of your personnel

It’s the same old song of business that the status quo cannot simply be preserved forever. The market doesn’t care about whether you are happy with how things are at the moment. Either you are not big enough to survive the next crisis, or you are doing too well and can’t serve the demand with your current staff, while simply hiring more people would make your growth less profitable.

Often, the bottleneck is to be found on the management floor. Burn-outs are not unheard of there as well.

SMEs often feature the best work ethos. They sometimes struggle with changing the modus operandi, though, when really the answer should be smarter, more efficient processes, instead of a simple “work harder” approach.

In such cases, we recommend assigning an EIM interim manager who can transfer skills from running a bigger business and thus, knows exactly what to do differently to be more efficient.

For more information, learn more about our Performance Improvement solution.

How interim management helps to achieve turnarounds

Without brave entrepreneurs who take the risk of trying to find a solution, we’d never make any progress.

Every failed experiment inherits a valuable lesson. However, not every crisis means that your solution doesn’t work or isn’t sought after. In fact, a restructuring case can even arise from growing too fast.

Or maybe your offering just needs some adjustments to fit into a changed environment?

EIM solution for small-medium enterprises

Together with our interim managers, we’ve already successfully helped many clients in situations of distress over the course of the last 30+ years. Interim management is the perfect tool for turnarounds.

Consultancy won’t be able to help you when your employees already know what’s going wrong, but when the problem lies in the execution. The most expensive advice becomes worthless.

Similarly, there must be a reason why your employees couldn’t solve the problems on their own – obviously, you do need help from outside – ideally an objective business expert.

Then again, you don’t have the time for hiring the right top executive through a search, which can take months. As opposed to this, within days, we can provide you with an independent top manager who has already successfully resolved the same kind of crisis before.

Without being a part of internal conflicts, employees will be more likely to trust and cooperate with this person. Additionally, this manager can draw from the vast know-how and experience of the international EIM community of top executives to combine the best of both worlds; consultancy and executive search.

Get in touch with us

Together we can find the solution you are looking for.