Recruitment & Organizational Design Solutions For The Coatings & Chemicals Industry
Over more than 15 years, we've crafted many unique solutions for situations as diverse as the industry itself! From the needle-in-the-hastack technical expert, to the change agent leader to take the business to a new level, to helping a company with its global expansion by locating regional and country heads all over the world in a niche market, to staffing key service roles across the country here at home in the US. The common factors have been a deep knowledge of the industry combined with the ability to translate technical requirements into non-technical language, and communicate effectively with widely different stakeholders.
Below are a few of the many interesting success stories and happy outcomes from our past projects. We'd love to hear from you about how we can help create one for you.
Download Case Study on how re-aligning one department helped to meet critical short-term and strategic business goals.
Mid-sized closely-held specialty finishing company needed PhD-level talent for its paint R&D, to develop entirely new products for its most creative advanced technology initiative. Flying "under the radar" in its market, with unusually sophisticated and innovative processes, the company had very limited experience recruiting senior or highly-technical positions. Internal HR was not equipped to conduct a nationwide search that included a relocation to a cold climate in a state with a depressed economy. In addition, it was very difficult for the non-technical HR group to properly qualify highly technical talent - especially when the individual was being hired to do something nobody had done before, so a typical technical track record would not be an adequate guide to capability.
We conducted a thorough national search and spent time at the R&D center to better understand the environment the person would be coming into. Working with all parties across the R&D group and HR, we crafted a true position profile and ideal candidate experience that would be likely indicators of the right sort of personality as well as specific technical/chemical knowledge. By staying engaged through the process including compensaiton negotiation and relocation discussions, we were able to successfully land a highly-qualified individual who had a particular reason to want ot relocate to the area and had an ideal skillset. Being able to speak the language of both the technical and the non-technical parties was critical to a successful outcome.
The National Service Manager of an equipment manufacturer had to fill 24 field service positions without HR or admin backup. We developed a repeatable system that enabled him to hire quickly, and control the timing of the hires to fit with internal training program needs. Read the full story here.
During the economic downturn, the CEO of a mid-sized privately-held specialty chemical manufacturing & distribution company wondered if the major players' cutbacks in a key market niche might be to his advantage. Without a lot of up-front investment he wanted to find out if the potential really existed to build this business and source strategic talent away from the big companies while they were facing the difficulties of the global recession.
Starting with just one target company, working by the hour we gathered corporate intelligence on market opportunities and available players, expanding to multiple products, value chains and companies. We discovered a global network of available talent in several niches; investigated and uncovered key market and human capital dynamics; and provided critical, highly sensitive, in-depth market information to our client through access to top individuals. Several were willing to take consulting roles initially with the object of building a significant business together in the future. There are now multiple individuals on consulting contracts and several permanent hires in the process of negotiation, in North America, South America, Europe and several locations in Asia.
Some of this business is in geographic regions previously completely outside our client's reach. Better yet, a significant volume is almost immediately available, through the connection to a sales consultant seeking supply for accounts ready and waiting to buy!
Over the next 5 years this, will develop into a full infrastructure division with an additional $5-10M in ebitda - all based on our ability to find the team members and the critical business information inexpensively, and the CEO's ability to build the team. The consulting fees from our hourly work in the first few months of the project are deducted from later placement fees - so our client has attained an incredible ROI without significant up-front risk.
We went into a closely-held architectural & roof coatings manufacturing company that had a history of losing money in its US operations, worked with the President to redefine the top business development role, found and placed a new leader, followed his progress, encouraged and supported his further leadership development - and saw a $1M loss turn into a $31k profit in the first 18 months.
A family-owned distributor was experiencing uncertainty and fear of change as the President of 32 years approached retirement and 2 other key long-term employees were leaving. We conducted a complete review of the company's strengths and weaknesses, operational and infrastructure needs; developed a roadmap for the new President incorporating both the owners' future vision for the company's growth and the capabilities profile of the existing team; created unity between differing stakeholders; built managment and staff engagement and confidence in the process and outcome; and recruited the new President with unanimous agreement of decisionmakers and support of staff.
We worked between the US and UK with the senior leadership team of a division of a public film coating producer recruiting a variety of leadership roles, during a period of post-acquisition integration and relocation of all manufacturing and distribution operations. The same company had great difficulty filling what was believed to be a critical engineering role. The position had been empty for almost a year. We reviewed the way manufacturing and production resources were allocated and discovered that it was possible to completely re-think the job and make it much easier to fill; at the same time solving other people-allocation problems and bottlenecks that were feeding a firefighting mentality. This led to a fundamental change in senior management priorities in operations as well as significant cost savings.