"In the end, the entrepreneur always decides. But someone can help him in his thinking. That's where the interim manager comes into play, accompanying the entrepreneur or owner on the way to the final decision."
I'm a businessman? Am I a manager? Am I a leader? What are the differences between them? What should I do with my company at its turning point? To whom and how should I hand over the company to get some rest? Who can help me?
These questions resonate through my bubble right now. A lot of them I don't quite have the right answer to. So I decided to ask the more vocal ones. Jana Martinová, Managing Partner CZ/SK of Accord Group ECE, and Petr Ševčík, freelance interim change manager, answered the call and accepted the invitation to the podcast.
What else did we discuss?
🔸 At what stage of a company's life is it appropriate to hire an interim manager? 🔸 How can an interim manager help in handing over the company to the next generation? 🔸 Where are the most difficult obstacles to hiring an interim manager? 🔸 How to divide the responsibilities of the interim manager and the owner? 🔸 What do I as the owner need to have figured out?
HOW AN INTERIM MANAGER WILL HELP IN THE HANDOVER OF THE COMPANY (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. This one will be about interim management. Since about a year ago, my guest and I were discussing what interim management is and what it can be used for, quite theoretically, today we're going to look at interim management mainly from the practical side. I have invited two guests, Jana Martinová and Petr Ševčík. Hello.
Jana Martinová
Hello.
Petr Ševčík
Hello.
What's the most beautiful place they visited this year?
Martin Hurych
Jana is the Managing Partner of the Czech and Slovak Republics at Accord Group and Petr is a freelance Interim Change Manager. When I was looking at your preparation, it caught my eye that you both like cycling and mountains, so I thought I'd ask a bit of a cheesy question. Where did you combine those things this year and where were the highest and most beautiful places you went?
Jana Martinová
Now I came from Ruzyně to Modřany on my bicycle this morning and I rode through Prokopák and found out that I am not alone. The highest I've been was just under 3,000m above sea level this year in the Maritime Alps, where we have a family house a short distance away, and that gave my daughter and husband and I an elevation gain of about 2,000m, we covered 26km and then it hurt.
Martin Hurych
You have my admiration. Peter?
Petr Ševčík
That's a question for solar, because the highest I've been this year was probably in Italy on skis, but on the first day of my holiday I was hit by a skier on the slopes and I dislocated my shoulder. So I didn't enjoy the mountains very much and as a result the start of the cycling season was delayed, so I'm happy to cycle, but unfortunately less than usual this year.
Martin Hurych
Do you have mountain bikes or do you ride on the road?
Petr Ševčík
I'm looking for the optimum price/performance ratio in everything, so I have a so-called universal bike. It's a cross, neither road nor mountain.
Jana Martinová
I'm the same way.
How did they meet and what has been their journey of kinterim management?
Martin Hurych
Today is going to be about interim management, so come tell me how you came to be and what you enjoy about interim management.
Petr Ševčík
I would suggest that Jana start, because she is one of the founding mothers, one of the group of people who brought interim management to the Czech Republic.
Jana Martinová
I've been involved in management and managers for about 20 years and I've always tried to see a little bit ahead of what's going to happen next in that market. Sometime around 2008 I saw a phenomenon that for the first time in the Czech Republic there were more ready management capacities than there was actual supply. This was at a time when there was quite a big crisis and a lot of people who were sent out of the Czech Republic more to the east or west were withdrawing and coming back to that market. But suddenly they found that there was not the right challenge in those local corporations and local positions. On the other hand, there was a crisis and you could see that companies were pushing the problems that needed to be solved for a long time to the very edge of that time when it was almost too late. This created the ideal conditions for those prepared managers to act as interim managers and jump into situations that they had experienced before in their lives and were therefore able to deal with. Of course, I looked around, I looked in Benelux, where this form of cooperation between managers and companies already existed. I looked in France, where it was very limited, and yet it has developed a lot. I looked at Germany, where it worked in a slightly different form. I looked I also went to the UK where, as always, they had already made it quite an interesting transactional business. So we tried to formulate some assumptions under which it could work in the Czech Republic. At that time, there was still a lot of declining of the shvarcsystem, which was kind of a restraint on the part of managers, but it cleared up over time. I have to say that at the beginning I had such a purist and puritanical approach to who is an interim manager and who is not an interim manager. But as time goes on, I realise that it's the contribution that those people make to those companies and what they can do there that's more important than the form of that collaboration.
Martin Hurych
So how did you two get together?
Petr Ševčík
It ties in because I was let go from a corporation some 13 years ago, which was not a pleasant experience. But when I swallowed that bitter pill, I started looking around the market and I thought that in my professional past at that time I was always dealing with some kind of change, crisis, corporate development. At that time, interim management as a concept appeared in the Czech Republic. The Interim Management Association had already been founded and I joined it as a green interim manager. That's where we met and AGIM, Accord Group Interim Management, was one of the first contacts I came to, knocked on the door and said I wanted to be an interim manager.
Jana Martinová
We founded the association because we wanted to create a kind of interim manager status, so that those people who want to do this have representation and can articulate what their contribution is. From the very beginning we chose the role of facilitator, not interim manager. I've acted as interim manager maybe once or twice in my area, which is HR. So there was a need to have an association that would give visibility to the individuals who are involved.
What do they enjoy about interim management?
Martin Hurych
Digging anything from nothing to light is a long-term job. We talked about it last time with Peter, when we talked about the history of interim management and how it is doing in the Czech Republic. What was it about interim management that got you so excited about it in the first place, besides the market that we talked about here, that you chose this discipline?
Petr Ševčík
It's the intersection of what it takes with personal setting and professional experience. Someone is of the mindset that they want to be in one company for 20 years, doing their job, getting better at it, and being an irreplaceable expert. Someone else likes to transfer experience from one company to another, from one industry to another, and an interim manager by definition has the personality setup to be that transferor of experience and skills. It appeals to me, it suits me, because I can't sit in one company for 20 years. Then the other important aspect is the subject matter focus. Far less, if at all, dealing with internal company administration or even politics and dealing with really substantive stuff, which also suits me.
Jana Martinová
I enjoy change, managing change and bringing solutions that enable change. In interim management there is such an opportunity and I think it brings together all the people who work around interim management because they believe they can make a positive change in an organisation.
At what stage of a company's life is it appropriate to hire an interim manager?
Martin Hurych
Sounds like interim managers don't like the easy life. Last time, Peter and I talked about what change brings out in people, how to manage it and so on. I said at the beginning in the introduction that I'd like to be a little bit practical about this today. Let's take the life cycle of an organization, I'm somewhere at the very beginning and I have a developed company that's been in the market for decades. During these different stages of development, where do you see the most common potential deployment of interim managers?
Petr Ševčík
If we start with startups, my favorite topic is the transformation of a punk company into a system- managed organization. I mentioned here last time that I used to play in a band a long time ago, and when we didn't know how to play yet, we started with punk. To me punk has three defining characteristics, lots of energy, strong message and relatively little craft. It used to be said that if you know three chords, go start a punk band. Punk companies usually have a very strong message, a product or service they believe in a lot, they have a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm, they grab a lot of things with that energy, but then they get to a stage where they start to overwhelm themselves. At some point that company needs to move to systems management. If we go further in the life cycle of the company, we have cases when a manager drops out for whatever reasons, quick departure, illness, dismissal and so on. At that point there is a so-called temporary replacement, where the interim manager is able to jump in very quickly and take over responsibility for that department. Then we have situations of change and, although we don't want them, also crisis situations where the company needs to go through a managed transformation. We already have a system-managed company, but it has reached the edge, the strategy is not working, or we have reached the stage where sales are not growing, we are losing customers, or on the contrary, the company has grown too fast and needs to complete the internal infrastructure. Here we are in a phase of systemic change where we need to move the company forward again. If we are in a crisis, then it is a job for a crisis manager, who typically works on an interim basis, because it is a very specific craft, a very specific situation.
Jana Martinová
I might generalize. When the organization or the management needs a strong impulse from the outside, interim management comes in handy.
Petr Ševčík
If we build on this and go further through the life cycle of the company, we reach a stage where there is a generational change in family businesses, or the original founders reach a point where they want to exit. They want to sell the company and enjoy the fruits of their labor. When we talk about preparing a company for sale, this is a typical situation for an interim manager. A generational change is also a change like thunder, and that's where an interim manager can be very helpful.
Should I be looking for a generalist interim manager or a specialist?
Martin Hurych
We'll definitely get to that, because that's a big topic for me at the moment. As I was listening to the different phases and some of the specific points, another question came to mind. Should I be looking primarily interim manager as a profession, or should I look for a hybrid of interim manager and the expertise I need to change?
Jana Martinová
I would say something about that. Interim manager a priori for all uses does not exist. The essence of interim management is that you come into a building and you know where the elevator is, first floor, left, right. One or more crafts are absolutely essential for an interim manager to work. I couldn't send Peter to a factory to implement lean, that's nonsense. He knows sales, he knows marketing, he knows how to run a company, I know that about him and I will turn to him if I have a customer that has that exact need. Interim manager per se doesn't exist.
Petr Ševčík
Interim is a platform, it's a method of how you work, what your contractual relationship is, but it's not a specialization.
How can an interim manager help in handing over the company to the next generation?
Martin Hurych
That said, when we talked about temporarily losing a CEO, whether due to illness or whatever, I'm looking for an interim CEO at that point, not just an interim manager. So I need to know my terms of reference for the manager I'm hiring, as if I were hiring someone on a permanent basis. I treat the person in question the same way, it's just that the person is supposed to help me for a limited period of time. The topic of handing over family businesses to someone, I won't say who, resonated with me a lot. When you specified what you were dealing with in your preparation, I confess I couldn't help twitching my corners because that's my day-to-day reality at the moment. What I meet is a manager who has built a very successful company that has been in business for 20, 30 years, however, the manager in question is in a state of attrition and would like to indulge in the benefits of his years of work. However, there is no one in the company to whom the company could be handed over. The management is inactive and waiting for the owner's assignment, the family is either not yet at the stage to take over the company or does not want to take it over, and the person in question suffers from not knowing quite clearly which way to go. What do you offer him?
Petr Ševčík
I would go back to the term being a manager, because we were just having a debate about that the other day. Usually it's not a manager, it's an entrepreneur, and those are quite fundamentally different roles. Often when we're sitting in a boardroom meeting and the owner walks away having entered some creative ideas, my colleagues say what did he come up with again. I tell them he's an entrepreneur, he has the business and we have the mortgages, that's the difference. Entrepreneurs are creative, that's why they had the idea to begin with, they have courage, they have much less aversion to crisis and they go into things that a corporate manager won't go into. Because of that setup and because of hard work, they were able to build that company. A manager is someone who knows how to manage effectively, knows how to work with people, knows how to look at cost- benefit analysis and so on. It's ideal when you combine those, but usually the fathers, the founders are entrepreneurs but they are not managers and that's where a lot of misunderstandings come from.
Jana Martinová
I would loosely follow your description of the situation. It is evolutionary, every business that has been founded has to come to this point because we are all getting older, we are all evolving and we all have our limits. That is important to realise. Management is a method of management, and that's where the two
things that happen in the life of the company next and how any company should be run. In the end, the entrepreneur always decides, but someone can help him or her in making that decision. I think that's where the interim manager comes into play, accompanying that entrepreneur, that owner on that journey to some final decision. I think that that interim manager can help avoid a few pitfalls because our experience is that when the owner goes it alone, it's kind of trial and error and it hurts. It hurts the entrepreneur, it hurts his family, it hurts his colleagues at work when he goes down some dead end road and has to come back. That's where the temporary solution can be interesting and stimulating and hopefully lead to a more successful handover and at least a more conscious approach.
What do I need to think about before hiring an interim manager?
Martin Hurych
Since we've defined manager and entrepreneur here, I see entrepreneurs quite often acting in such a way that they have an idea and immediately go to work on it. I have an idea to hire an interim manager, I'm going to go do it. I don't think that's the way it should be in order to get to a successful end. So what should I, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, get straight in my head before I decide to go the interim manager route?
Jana Martinová
I think the most important thing is to always tell myself in some way what roles I'm fulfilling in this life and what roles the business is fulfilling for me and how that relates to my other roles in life. When an entrepreneur comes to that point, their personal life, some family life and work life always come together. I think the first step is to realize that and sit down with somebody and say what are the expectations of each role. Because sometimes it's too difficult to get it right, so it's good to talk it through with stakeholders, family and colleagues. Everyone may look at it differently, so it's good to formulate some common terms of reference, which of course the decision-maker has to agree with in the first place. But at the same time it has to be acceptable to the people around him or her, so that it doesn't trigger a whole other series of carambola.
Petr Ševčík
Then we get to the next milestone, which is the goal, which is the right path. Do I have the balance sheet already, do I want to hand it off within the family or to professional management, or do I want to sell the company, if I want to sell, do I have a buyer already, do I not have a buyer, should it be a strategic investor, a financial investor? That's the next junction where I have to figure out if I need someone to advise me on that decision. Because then I'm looking for someone who has already dealt with it and who is able to give me the advantages, disadvantages, or recommend other partners. If I already know which way to go, then I take it one step further and have another specification where I wonder how it will go. If the scenario is a handover within the family, then I have to be aware of where my offspring are in terms of experience, skills and mental setup. Are they ready or not, will I need a transition period or will it go faster? If I'm handing over to professional management, again, I have to figure out whether or not I have the people to do it. If we go step by step from the very highest level, which Jana named very nicely, I get to other junctions, which again clarify the assignment of who I actually want.
Martin Hurych
Can the interim manager help with this clarification?
Jana Martinová
I think that's where some specialization comes into it. You asked earlier about the interim manager per se and I said there is no interim manager. I think there may be people who work in the interims business who are focused on family businesses, they've been there and they've been burned once. That path is a failure given and it helps to get together with someone. You need to take that techie approach with a little bit of a psychologizing approach because both have their place there and look at it from an oblique point of view. Another thing I would like to say is that sometimes in the beginning you don't know. I know one big organization that has prepared an IPO three or four times and never went through with the IPO. It had to take a lot of steps on the way to that IPO before and those steps were good for the organization, more transparency, clearer processes and so on. I think an IPO is a big deal, but I think it's kind of similar in the family business. In order to make that change, there are a lot of steps that have to be taken beforehand and those steps are already a big task for the interim manager to enable that ultimate change. Whether it's left or right at the end of that street is not really important, it's the journey that's important.
Where are the most difficult obstacles to hiring an interim manager?
Martin Hurych
Obviously this isn't the first time you've dealt with this, you've had experience. Where do these processes usually hit? Now if I decided to take Peter here to convert my one man show to someone where I might run into the most difficult obstacles?
Petr Ševčík
You'll see the biggest obstacle when you look in the mirror. There I have a favourite quote by the Egyptologist Miroslav Barta, that civilisations die by the same principles that brought them to the top. That change in the role of the father, the founder, or the mother, the founding mother, requires that he or she change his or her way of functioning, and at the moment when you've been functioning somehow for 20 years, it's not exactly easy. That's where the biggest hurdle, at least in my experience, is that there may be good intentions, but then the reality is different, that formally the handover may take place, but in reality it looks very different. I see this as quite a fundamental thing and it is a really difficult step in life, I do not want to make light of it at all, but it is a fundamental point that has to be taken into account.
Jana Martinová
I think this can be avoided by some flexibility of approach. Clever managers often have the idea that a few steps will get them a result. I've seen a couple of times here in this handover that a step has been taken on a journey and suddenly the owner is not buying it anymore, suddenly he finds some obstacle in himself that he doesn't want to go there anymore. There is quite a danger that the manager who knows that this is the way it has to be and that this is the way the model has to work, pushes it further and the entrepreneur, the owner puts a stop to it and the interim manager is out. Those are such weak signals and in doing that you have to look to see if you've missed something, something quite fundamental, and then you have to say so and you have to go back to the beginning and try another way. It doesn't have to be incompetence on the part of the interim manager, it just has to be communicated by both parties that together they didn't take something seriously enough. It may be something relational, or some risk that the entrepreneur is no longer willing to take, or some person who has been in the shadows so far but has quite a lot of influence. I think the most important thing is to look at every step to see if I still have those three solid points, or if I'm just hanging on by one hand anymore.
How to divide the responsibilities of the interim manager and the owner?
Martin Hurych
So even here, I am constantly mapping the map within the organization where I am the interim manager. You've just beautifully recorded a question for me. What I see a lot of times in those companies is that the owner, even though they have good intentions, but because it's a really big change, they don't allow themselves to give the new people a piece of their mind. So how do I, as an interim manager, set the stage to minimize what you just talked about? How do you, for example, divide up responsibilities right at the beginning, what do I do, what do you do, what's expected of me, what's expected of you, how do you prevent those failures along the way?
Petr Ševčík
I'm a case of the matter-of-fact technician manager that Jana refers to, I always try to name these things at the beginning, describe them and put them into a codified form. Where are the boundaries, what are the rules of the game between the owner and the management, what are the core business functions and processes and who is the guarantor, who is the owner, who is responsible for what and then go to the level of individual processes. That's often the case, by the way, in these fast- growing companies, that we kind of all do everything and we all say it, but when you ask who's the guarantor, it's actually everybody and nobody. So I try to name these things and then refer to them. But at the same time, it's good and advisable for that owner, the transferor, the entrepreneur to bring a guide, a coach who accompanies them on that journey and can discuss with them. It's not just about the substance, it's also about the other parameters of the transformation.
Jana Martinová
I think the worst case, and the most common case, is that the owner is exhausted, disappears for a while for a long vacation that he deserved and always wanted, and then he comes back and everything is different. I think one of those assumptions, if the interim manager wants it, is that he's not going to let him down, that he's going to make them meet regularly and talk regularly, even if he's in the Caribbean. That regularity of that exchange and that awareness I think is a prerequisite and that's one of the rules that the interim manager should enforce. It's not like he's going to be quiet and work for 6 months and then the person in question comes back and comes in and wipes everything off the table. That is where the mistake was made in that he was not brought into those individual steps and I would make that a condition that he would know about it on an ongoing basis.
Should the interim manager control the future of the person who hired him?
Martin Hurych
This brings me back to our first episode with Peter, when we had a change curve. An interim manager has to manage the change from entrepreneur to retiree?
Petr Ševčík
He's not necessarily a pensioner. I've heard a very nice term recently, place to land, the place where that person should land. It can also be a new business, that the founder is tired of the original company because maybe it's too big, there's too much paperwork involved, and he wants to go back to his roots, find something new, and realize himself there.
Jana Martinová
But if it's someone like that, then it's not the one who's angry. If someone has closed it behind them, they won't interfere. It's the one who's lost his mission in life who's going to interfere.
As an owner, what do I need to have figured out?
Martin Hurych
When we were talking here about what the entrepreneur's assignment should be for the interim manager, you, Jana, said that it's largely not important to know how it's really going to end up, it's important to know that way. So what is actually expected of an owner, what do I really need to have figured out in order to take on an interim manager and be able to hand the project over to them? I understand that if I have kids in my family who are plus or minus the same age and I haven't figured out who I'm going to give it to, it pretty much doesn't matter what happens on that road for a long time. On the other hand, if it's clear to me that the kids don't want to go into the company and I have to hand it over to professional management or I have to transform the company in other ways, that's a different assignment for an interim manager. So what do I need to know crystal clear at the very beginning before I agree with the interim manager on the change?
Jana Martinová
I don't think anything at all. The first discussion should be with those family members. If I'm on that path, I should be prepared to bring those people around the table and find out how they view the matter. I can't make a decision about the son taking over the company in 5 years if the son doesn't want to. It's important to realize that there's going to be a period of time where I'm not going to be in control. If I'm not ready for that, the only option is to sell the company.
Petr Ševčík
My personal experience is that the assignment is relatively vague at the beginning. I have a problem, something is burning me, and the exact assignment crystallizes during the first phase of collaboration, the so-called diagnostic or business review. The interim manager does an analytics of the company, looks at the state of the company, comes back to the owner and very often tells the owner things that he himself cannot see from his position. At that moment, in a mutual dialogue, the task of what the transformation should actually lead to crystallizes. This is my repeated experience that this is how it goes, at the end of the diagnosis we say what the expectations are.
How to work with the original team when handing over the company?
Martin Hurych
You took notes during the interview. Are we forgetting something, Peter?
Petr Ševčík
I would mention one terribly important thing that we haven't talked about yet, and that is the people inside the company. In these companies with that father, the founder, who started in a garage somewhere from scratch and then built a company with dozens, hundreds of employees, there was usually some style of leadership. I call it the charismatic leader style, and that style has some consequences. Usually there are people who are very loyal to that leader, but at the same time they're used to that leader bringing ideas, telling them what to do and really leading them. If you want to transform that company to where there are 5 leaders, that's a pretty challenging step. When you have a group of heartthrobs who have grown up with the company, love it, are very loyal, but are usually limited in their management skills, you either help them catch up with that expertise or you find the right role for them for the future. That's a theme that I come across repeatedly that you need to take that into account and particularly with new companies there's the issue of new people fitting in. Because the organism of a family business is very specific, it's very different to a corporation and when you have an outsider coming in, you need to make sure that they fit in culturally with the environment that they're coming into. Because when someone comes in who has spent their whole professional life in corporations, it usually either doesn't work or it's a bit scratchy at the beginning. These are very important points to consider, work with and pay attention to.
Jana Martinová
I'm not quite sure if the interim manager will step in to change the company culture, because that's what we're actually talking about here. I think he can describe it, somehow perceive it, but if I were to now kind of took a biblical analogy, he's kind of like John the Baptist. He's the one who sets it up and can tell along the way who it would work with over the long haul. Changing the corporate culture seems like an overreach to me.
Petr Ševčík
As an interim manager, you can initiate it, you can put the spark and the direction in there, but you have to have it in your head and discuss with those key stakeholders what the culture should look like in the future and start working on it already. It's a fact that culture takes a long time to build, it's not over an interim contract.
Martin Hurych
I was just wondering, since I've been through something similar, shouldn't it be a matter of the permanent solution, whether it's a daughter, a son, or a permanent CEO, to build a company pretty much in their own image?
Petr Ševčík
Yes, but I think that the interim manager should be the one to open up the topic, name it and start addressing it.
What do you find in the bonus?
Martin Hurych
I understand that. You have prepared a bonus, so tell us in one sentence what we will find in the attachment to this podcast.
Petr Ševčík
First of all, our tribute to the entrepreneurs is in the annex, because we appreciate them immensely. We meet people who started 20, 30 years ago and built those companies that give work and that create value. For us, they are heroes, really builders. So there's a tribute to entrepreneurs and then there's a set of questions, if they're considering handing over the business, what should they be thinking about.
Jana Martinová
It's part of the evolution of the company. Every company has to deal with it and every company has to deal with it, so it's not some sign of weakness or anything like that. It's an evolutionary stage of the company and it's normal to seek advice.
Martin Hurych
I couldn't have come up with a better conclusion. Thank you both so much for being here.
Petr Ševčík
Thank you for the invitation.
Jana Martinová
Thank you.
Martin Hurych
That was another episode on interim management. If we've planted a few thoughts in your mind, if you may not know where to go next with your company, and maybe we've at least hinted at where to spark your marches, we've done our job well. In that case, like, share, comment as your platform, where you're listening or watching us right now, allows. Be sure to download the bonus mentioned where we have some questions for your consideration, which you can find at www.martinhurych.com/zazeh,