Recruitment & Organizational Design Solutions For The Coatings & Chemicals Industry
Download Case Study on how re-aligning one department helped to meet critical short-term and strategic business goals.
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.