So, you’ve decided to stop pursuing your career as a salaried employee. You want to be your own boss and make all your professional choices yourself. Starting as a freelance interim manager seems ideal: you decide where and when you work, for whom, and what assignments you take.
A world of possibilities opens up to you. You start with a business plan. You discuss this with an accountant-tax specialist, visit a social secretary, and get your banker involved. But then what? Those who enter the market unprepared may be overwhelmed by the wide range of service providers.
A growing market
The interim management market has really taken off in the past 10-15 years. The number of freelance interim managers and firms has increased sharply. Where once only a handful of agencies were active, there may now be dozens to hundreds!
Unlike the Temporary Labour market, for example, interim management is not regulated by specific legislation. If a company decides to enter the interim management market, they don’t need to apply for accreditation to start an office. There are no certificates to be obtained, nor is there any specific supervision. The threshold is quite low, which explains why the market was able to expand so quickly.
New players in the market are often initiatives by existing companies such as staffing agencies, recruitment agencies, consultancy firms, and even accounting firms. Naturally, all this led to a vibrant but also highly competitive market. To stand out in such a landscape, the most logical choice was to specialise in something.
An abundance of choice
It must be great to enter such a dynamic market as a candidate: plenty of channels to choose from to get the assignments you want. It is. But are these opportunities all equal and of equal quality?
As is the case with everything in life: it depends on your own standards and expectations as to whether a particular service is good or not. Want maximum exposure? Then online platforms like LinkedIn are a good option. If you want to focus specifically on certain sectors or fields, you can turn to specialised firms.
Even when you have taken that step, you don’t necessarily end up with those firms to whom you want to entrust your (near) professional future. It is important that you end up with a firm that treats you as an person and not as a walking CV.
Luckily it is not a daily phenomenon, but unfortunately, you still hear the kind of stories that do the industry no good. Candidates being called by an office saying that they can “start at client x on Monday” when that person had not even been informed about the assignment or consulted about their interest. Candidates with 20 years of experience as a CFO getting calls to check if they want to work as accountants “because I see you have an accounting degree”.
That’s why it is essential to explore the market and choose offices that suit you. As modern consumers, we are used to seeing our very individual preferences answered with a suitable offer, so why should anyone be satisfied with less when it comes to their career?
So be critical and dare to ask questions when you engage with an office. Understand their business model, the market they are targeting, and how you fit into their story. There is nothing wrong with asking about the margin charged by the firm. Anyone who provides a decent service to clients and candidates should be properly and fairly compensated for it.
Leadership as a Service
At BDO, we have made clear choices. We focus on long-term relationships with both our clients and candidates. We get to know each candidate personally through an interview – preferably face-to-face. We want to get to know the person behind the CV. Therein lies the key to a successful assignment; only then can you achieve very targeted matches.
Another choice we made is to focus on experienced profiles, regardless of the sector: from the interim CFO for a large company to the director of mobility in a local authority, from the supply chain manager in a retail company to the HR manager in a scale-up. The reason why we did that is because we are really good at working with people of that level. So, we made it our tagline: Leadership as a Service. That holds a promise not only to our clients, but equally to the candidates who come to us.
There is no such thing as one size fits all in our market. That is the message to new – and not-so-new – candidate interim managers trying to orient themselves: each candidate is unique, as are the firms. Choose to work with offices that suit you.