FOUNDING TEAM MEMBER RORIE DEVINE RECALLS
The more people we are helping to be successful the more successful we are becoming...
The GRO.TEAM story started at Betfair…the online betting exchange that went on to IPO for more than $2 billion…
GRO.TEAM Founder Rorie Devine recalls…
I had been headhunted into a leadership role and it became clear that some members of the team I had inherited were part of the problem – not the solution.
I thought “wouldn’t it be great if there was somewhere I could go to bring in genuine experts to take accountability for X leaving me to focus on Y” and so on.
Unfortunately nothing like that existed.
The “management consultancy” model was (and still is) broken. It works by overcharging clients premium rates for smart but inexperienced and inexpensive people. Some management consultancy contracts are so long and complicated that by the time a client realises that they’re not getting the value for money or effectiveness they need it is difficult/impossible to end the relationship.
The news that Hertz is suing Accenture for $32m for a failed web site implementation (a product and design that apparently didn’t do half of what was specified and wasn’t finished) is one of the few failed projects that come to light publicly…most of the time companies quietly move on…wiser but poorer…
I had been headhunted into a leadership role and it became clear that some members of the team I had inherited were part of the problem – not the solution.
I thought “wouldn’t it be great if there was somewhere I could go to bring in genuine experts to take accountability for X leaving me to focus on Y” and so on.
Unfortunately nothing like that existed.
The “management consultancy” model was (and still is) broken. It works by overcharging clients premium rates for smart but inexperienced and inexpensive people. Some management consultancy contracts are so long and complicated that by the time a client realises that they’re not getting the value for money or effectiveness they need it is difficult/impossible to end the relationship.
The news that Hertz is suing Accenture for $32m for a failed web site implementation (a product and design that apparently didn’t do half of what was specified and wasn’t finished) is one of the few failed projects that come to light publicly…most of the time companies quietly move on…wiser but poorer…
I resolved to form a company to meet the need for genuine expertise where people need it, when people need it and only for as long as they need it and TeamCXO.com was born.
Unfortunately few people knew what CXO meant (it’s a generic term for CTO, CEO, CFO etc) so we changed the name to interim.team and off we went…
We were growing very rapidly (revenue went up more than 5,000% in 3 years) and people loved our relentless customer success focus but clients kept asking us “we need some permanent people as well…do you do that?” and “can you help us grow as well?”
Unfortunately few people knew what CXO meant (it’s a generic term for CTO, CEO, CFO etc) so we changed the name to interim.team and off we went…
We were growing very rapidly (revenue went up more than 5,000% in 3 years) and people loved our relentless customer success focus but clients kept asking us “we need some permanent people as well…do you do that?” and “can you help us grow as well?”
Eventually we decided to give clients what they wanted and relaunched GRO.TEAM as a Business Growth Agency to work with people to grow themselves via Coaching and Mentoring, grow their teams with Interim or Permanent talent and grow their businesses via Growth Marketing and Growth Hacking.
The real a-ha moment though was realising that as a self-selecting network of more than 200 high impact, high credential people if we’re serious about adding more value than we extract (and making people, teams and more companies more successful) then we should include free coaching and mentoring as part of all of our interim and permanent engagements.
We are definitely finding that access to free coaching and mentoring genuinely seems to make a difference to outcomes…no matter how good you are you can always get better and it seems that the more successful people are the more they benefit from coaching and mentoring…anyway… It’s early days but it has been great to see the reaction of the people we’re working with…we’re having a lot of fun and a lot of business growth is being delivered…
The real a-ha moment though was realising that as a self-selecting network of more than 200 high impact, high credential people if we’re serious about adding more value than we extract (and making people, teams and more companies more successful) then we should include free coaching and mentoring as part of all of our interim and permanent engagements.
We are definitely finding that access to free coaching and mentoring genuinely seems to make a difference to outcomes…no matter how good you are you can always get better and it seems that the more successful people are the more they benefit from coaching and mentoring…anyway… It’s early days but it has been great to see the reaction of the people we’re working with…we’re having a lot of fun and a lot of business growth is being delivered…
Our current phase is all about global expansion as we take our ruthless focus on client cost effective business growth around the world. We have worked with clients in 11 countries so far with Brazil as the latest addition to the list…contact us for a piece of the action…