How To Make A Success Of Interim Consulting

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How To

Make a Success of Interim Consulting

How can you maximise your chances of success if you make the leap to interim consulting?

is it the same?

Few interims get treated that differently
In my experience very few people get treated any differently day-to-day in interim consulting roles than “permanent” employees..the fact that you’re an interim consultant won’t be a big issue but the expectations of you as an interim consultant can sometimes be higher. You might be expected to be an expert on more things, and you’ll probably be expected to have a measurable impact — perhaps more quickly than a new full time employee would be. You could also get more latitude to challenge the orthodoxy, not be expected to navigate the company politics so carefully, and have your change agenda considered more dispassionately.

how do you make sure you’re a success

IN YOUR FIRST INTERIM CONSULTing ROLE?
The first (and maybe obvious) point is to choose the right role. Don’t set yourself up for failure by taking an interim consulting role with a team size, company culture or business model you’re not absolutely confident you can add real value to. Ultimately what you “sell” is your reputation and track record — don’t be tempted to risk it by taking on a role you’re not 100% right for. Once you have found the right role, and before you start, make sure you are very clear about the brief. Make sure you really understand what success will look like in the potential role.

know why they hired you

get the basics righT
Sometimes companies want a change agent, but sometimes they just want an interim consultant to “act like they got the job for real” and do their “sensible best”. Make sure you understand whether you will need to be a good cultural fit or being counter-cultural is one of the reasons why they want to hire you. When you start get the basics right..always arrive on time and dress similarly to the prevailing dress code in the team. At the early stages of any assignment make sure you don’t write cheques you can’t cash by promising un-achievable things. There is no surer way of destroying your credibility (and making enemies of other people) than by promising things that can’t be delivered. It’s a subtle situation though..you may have been brought in to increase urgency and delivery so any goals you agree need to be ambitious but achievable.

when you arrive

listen
Never make the mistake of joining with a “here’s the solution..now tell me about the problem” approach. In your first week interim consulting try and meet as many people in the team as possible. It’s important for you to get to know the team, and them to get to know you, so scheduling 30 minute interviews with each team member to ask the sort of questions below will very quickly create a picture of what you’re walking into.

Example

Interview Questions
1. Are you enjoying it here at the moment? 2. What are our key responsibilities as a team do you think? 3. As a team, what do we do well do you think? 4. What do we need to get better at? 5. Who are our stars? 6. Does anyone in the team need help to be more successful? 7. How could we get more customer outcome focused? 8. How could we move faster? 9. Would you recommend working here to a friend? 10. What three things would you do if you were me? 11. Anything else we should talk about?

week one

playback
After the interviews an interesting exercise is to allocate any team member mentioned as a “star” in question 5. a +1 and any struggling team member mentioned in 6. a -1. Adding up all the scores will give a quick but surprisingly accurate team talent map. Question 9. can also be used create a quick team “NPS” score. At GRO.TEAM we like to end the first week of a new interim consulting assignment with a “Week One Playback” with the person that sponsored the appointment. It’s a great opportunity to discuss the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) found so far and calibrate it against what the sponsor wants.

Be of value

Growth Services

add value

in any way you can
Remember to add value to your interim consulting client in any way you can as well. It’s not just about the goals. Doing things like sharing their job postings on LinkedIn, mentioning them in any interviews you do, retweeting their tweets, liking their Facebook page, and so on, all help. Don’t “penny pinch” the client either. What “goes around comes around” so if taking a phone call or sending a quick email in non-client chargeable time helps solve a problem or keep momentum up then do it. You’ll be judged on your impact at the end of the day.

We help you get the perfect interims...

We can help you engage the Interim talent you need…quickly…with no fuss…wherever you need them…

The last thing to remember is

…to know when to move on
You know when you’ve achieved your interim consulting goals or hit the diminishing returns point on the value curve. Don’t wait to be replaced. Proactively suggest a new way to add value to the client if one is appropriate, or move on to your next interim consulting challenge with another successful engagement under your belt.

be of value

so there you have it
To make s success of interim consulting you need to chose the right role, deliver as much value as you can, and then move on as soon as you’ve delivered the necessary business impact. We summarise it at GRO.TEAM with our motto of “Be Of Value”. If you do that at all times you will be successful. Interim consulting be for everyone but if you get your sense of accomplishment from delivering business impact and enjoy variety and challenge then maybe it’s for you?

GRO.TEAM Business Growth Agency Services Joined Up

GRO.TEAM Business Growth Agency
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Business Growth Agency
Bobby Growth Services
Give our friendly team  a shout for a non salesy chat about how we can get stuck into your challenges…asap

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Growth Hacking

IF THE GROWTH BENEFITS OF A GROWTH IDEA MASSIVELY OUT WEIGH THE COSTS AND/OR TIME TO IMPLEMENT IT THEN WE ARE GROWTH HACKING.

Engineering As Marketing

Agile approaches transformed software delivery so what would happen if we used them to create growth rather than software?

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Engineering As Marketing

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How to

Use Engineering As Marketing

By working closely and regularly with customers, delivering early, iterating ideas and working cross-functionally towards a common goal Agile software development transformed the business of creating software.

Agile development massively increased the value delivered by the typical software development project by favouring “individuals and interactions” over specification, “working software” over pretty much everything, “customer collaboration” over contract negotiations and “responding to change” over blindly following a plan…

What would happen if

we used these “Agile” principles to deliver Growth rather than Software?!?

We could favour “customer collaboration” and “individuals and interactions” by forming a cross functional Growth team including both “customers” and “suppliers”. We should include representatives from Product, Sales, Marketing, Technology, Operations, Finance and so on…

We could favour “working software” or Growth in our case by giving the team the single unifying purpose of growing a carefully chosen growth metric.

The Growth Team could be “responding to change” rather than a plan by delivering early and taking a measure-act-measure approach to ideas through “on ramp” to “live” stages.

The Growth Team could communicate and meet regularly, maybe a quick “stand up” at the same time and place every day would work really well.

We could work to a weekly or fortnightly rhythm with the cumulative affects of the growth activities on the Growth metric being publicly demonstrated (and hopefully celebrated) at the end of every cycle or “sprint”.

So we have created a cross-functional team meeting regularly with the unified common purpose of doing anything and everything necessary to measure-act-measure the impact of their ideas on a single carefully chosen growth metric. That’s cool but…

Maybe we could give This a name?

like Growth Hacking or something?

Yes Growth Hacking is the sort of term that means different things to different people but anyone familiar with Agile software development will be struck by the similarities between the approaches, rituals and rhythms typically used in both Growth Hacking and Agile Software Development.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

 “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Does it all work in the real world?


Yes. The same underlying principles that make Agile software development so effective also mean Growth Hacking can totally transform the effectiveness of a company’s growth activities.

in the real world

hometree

I recently spent a day with the talented team at a well backed UK based energy startup called Hometree who are creating a great brand by disrupting the domestic energy market customer experience.

We had a really productive workshop where we honestly examined the Strength Weakness Opportunities and Threats in their current growth landscape, discussed and then selected initial and ultimate growth metrics, collected growth ideas, created a growth board, reconstituted the growth team and set up the new team’s rituals and rhythms. 

tech
as
biz dev

Growth Services

Not bad for one day

Andreu Tobella Brunet the Co-Founder of Hometree UK commented

“As a start-up that is using an innovative way to sell online, we created a growth team from scratch but were having a few challenges to structure it well and have clear objectives and team alignment. This is where Rorie stepped in and helped us understand well all the roles, define our single metric and create a high performing growth team. The whole team was extremely pleased with the improvements, I would highly recommend him”.

growth hacking

Whether you call it Growth Hacking or something else

A very effective way of accelerating your growth is to learn from agile software development and to create a cross-functional team meeting regularly with the unified common purpose of doing anything and everything necessary to measure-act-measure the impact of their ideas on a single carefully chosen growth metric.

GRO.TEAM Business Growth Agency Services Joined Up

GRO.TEAM Business Growth Agency
GROW Coaching
Francesca
Business Growth Agency
Bobby Growth Services

Give our friendly team  a shout for a non salesy chat about how we can get stuck into your challenges…asap

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How To Create A Strategy That Is Agile

Business Growth Services Agency
Business Growth Services Agency

How to

Create A Strategy That Is Agile

The days of grandiose “Five Year Strategies” are over but does that mean we don’t need “Strategy” any more?

No – what we need now is a strategic framework that informs and embraces change and actually makes tactical execution more effective…

OUR HOW

Our strategy is our HOW

Leadership is about change and a simple analogy is that leaders take their organisation on a journey from the present location to a different (and hopefully better) place

The strategy is a how not a what and although it (and the route we choose) can and should change at any time a well communicated strategy will help everyone know what they should be trying to do at every point in time

Empower your Teams

What does that mean?

Creating and communicating an effective strategy allows leaders to trust and empower their teams and removes any need to micro-manage them

When making the micro-decisions we all make every day if we know the Strategy then picking the optimum path to get to the Objective most quickly becomes much more straightforward

MOST

Mission Objectives Strategies Tactics

In his excellent book Winners And How They Succeed Alastair Campbell talks about OST which is an acronym for Objective Strategy and Tactics

If we add Mission to the front of the acronym to make it MOST I think we have a framework really helps maximise execution effectiveness.

Why we need to make the journey

The Mission

The Mission is why we want/need to make the journey

At GRO.TEAM our Mission is to make the world a more successful place…person by person…company by company. (We really do think that the more people we help to be successful the more successful we will become…)

MOST

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what we want to achieve

The Objective

is what we want to achieve in the next 12 months


Our objective at GRO.TEAM is to double our social engagement this year.

How we're going to do it

The Strategy

is how we are going to achieve our Mission and Objective


At GRO.TEAM our Strategy is to increase the number of people we talk to.

5-10 things we will do

The Tactics

The Tactics are the things we think we need to do now to deliver our Objective.

At GRO.TEAM we set 5-10 quarterly tactics and review their effectiveness and START/STOP/DO MORE/DO LESS every 3 months

Setting more than 5-10 tactics becomes counterproductive as it effectively says we’re going to do everything we can think of…

agile efficient effective

The MOST Framework

We really do find that if you put your strategy in a MOST framework, and communicate it well, it very much becomes part of the solution not problem and helps ensure your execution is as agile, efficient and effective as possible.

GRO.TEAM Business Growth Agency Services Joined Up

GRO.TEAM Business Growth Agency
GROW Coaching
Muhammad
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Give our friendly team  a shout for a non salesy chat about how we can get stuck into your challenges…asap

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How To Use Lottie Animations

Growth Services Droplets

How To Use Lottie Animations

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LOTTIE

How To use lottie Animations
The animated Elementor logo above is done with a new technology called Lottie and if you hover your cursor over the GRO.TEAM logo in the top left of this page or the contact icons at the bottom of the page you might notice some subtle animations. You’ll need to press them if you’re reading this on a phone of course…

A New Approach

recently open sourced by aiRbnb design
Lottie is an iOS, Android and React Native library that renders Adobe After Effects animations in real time. Lottie uses animation data exported as JSON files from an open-source After Effects extension called Bodymovin. The extension is bundled with a JavaScript player that can render the animations on the web. Elementor have have added a Lottie widget to their Elementor Pro product to make the technology available to all WordPress site creators.

Using Elementor's Lottie Widget

Elementot Lottie Widget
Elementor Adding Lottie Options

why use Lottie?

Lottie animations are easier to create and more flexible to use
The use of scalable graphics means that Lottie animations can be used seamlessly in any context and the lightweight lazy-loaded (after the site is interactive) pay load means a Lottie animation doesn’t impair overall user experience….

We Make Growth Hacking Accessible To Everyone​

ON SITE OR REMOTE

By forming an onsite or remote virtual team with one of GRO.TEAM’s Growth Experts we can put a rocket under your growth much more quickly and cost effectively than you might imagine.

Our Growth Expert will run virtual daily standups with your cross-functional team and Measure –> Act –> Measure ideas to move the needle for your business. Physical location is no barrier…we have growth hacked “in” 11 countries so far…give us a shout to find out more.

Quicker

By using scalable graphics and json
Complex scalable animations can be rendered with JSON payloads as low as 30-50KB. They can also be lazy loaded to avoid blocking the rendering of the site/app.

making
Ux
better

Growth Services

better

using lottie means no
Bulky image files for each screen size or having to write a thousand lines of brittle, hard-to-maintain code…

cheaper

No code
By making the use of animation possible without coding the ROI on using animation suddenly looks much better.

Loving Our Videos?!?

Choose
how to
trigger
it

interactive experience
A Lottie animation can triggered based on a variety of behaviours that trigger animations, such as viewport, scroll, hover and click…

open source and free

there are plenty of sites now offering free lottie json downloads
LottieFile and useAnimations are excellent libraries of free Lottie animations…

have fun

anything that makes apps and sites more dynamic and interactive has to be a good thing…
Why not try Lottie out and see what you think?

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Talk TO A HUMAN

Give our friendly team  a shout for a non salesy chat about how we can get stuck into your challenges…asap
gro.team
gro.team
19 Google reviews
chris airey
chris airey
2020-11-15
gro.team and Rory are very focussed and sharp in terms of that art of matching solution to need. Commercial, positive, pacy - a great experience.
Martin Wright
Martin Wright
2020-10-29
As a candidate for a C-Level role, I can highly recommend Gro.Team, who manage to be both highly professional and friendly and engaging. With a level of technical expertise that many candidates can only dream about, unlike some recruiters Rorie not only knows his stuff inside-out but also understands what you're looking for, and is genuinely motivated to find a match that suits both business and candidate equally.
Artur Grabowski
Artur Grabowski
2020-09-22
Can't recommend gro.team enough. Very professional and modern approach to the problem of business and team building in very difficult times. Rorie's perfect combination of experience and skills allowed us to unlock the full potential.
Stuart Nelmes
Stuart Nelmes
2020-09-07
Having worked with the team across various projects and assignments, it's always reassuring to know that the results are alway going to be delivered. Loana is great to work with, ensuring that the the projects are always given the right candidates to ensure success.
Nic Hutchins
Nic Hutchins
2020-09-04
Every now and again, if you’re lucky, you will come across a business that delights you. This is what you’ll find with Rorie and the team. Excellent in their chosen fields, easy to engage with and genuinely excited about getting you the result you desire.
Daniel Carter
Daniel Carter
2020-09-02
We used GRO.TEAM to iron out internal issues with CTOs, they also helped us to revise our way of working and helped us with a very successful growth hacking campaign. They took us through a full consultation assessing what was and wasn't working internally - they also helped with internal mentoring for some of our staff. Overall - exceptionally good service and a fantastic business to work with.
derry oneill
derry oneill
2020-09-02
Focussed, sharp, incisive bunch of people - breath of fresh air . Be prepared to be challenged - supportively.
Simon Teppett
Simon Teppett
2020-09-02
Everything about gro.team is extremely well run - and Rorie is abosutely top flight. He knows his onions !!
Stuart Prestedge
Stuart Prestedge
2020-09-02
Rorie & Loana @ GRO.TEAM are extremely friendly, professional and effective. They take pride in ensuring that candidates are ideal for the roles which is a win-win for both sides. Highly recommended!
N Cohen
N Cohen
2020-09-02
Love the interaction with Rorie, Loana, and the team. Committed, professional, yet fun and engaging! the perfect blend for a successful 21st-cent tech business. Looking forward to working with you again soon :-)

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Virtual Project Teams

Growth Hacking

Like The GRO.TEAM Website?

Growth Hacking

A VIRTUAL PROJECT TEAMS APPROACH

 worked out quicker, better, cheaper for us…
At GRO.TEAM we haven’t had entirely satisfactory experiences the last few times we have commissioned Website/App builds through the traditional routes so we decided to “eat our own dog food” for this Summer’s website relaunch and asked an Interim CPTO to stand up a virtual project team to get our new web site built and launched.

Hand picked experts

from all over the world
The Interim CPTO assembled a hand-picked virtual project team comprising of UX/UI (Cyprus) Front End (Pakistan) Back End (UK) and DevOps (India) in late May and off they went.

Overall we have been very pleased with the results from using a virtual project teams approach…why not contact us to find out more?

quicker
better
cheaper

Growth Services

Less than half the cost

And less than a third of the time
By using variable capacity world class resources like this the CPTO was able to bring the project in for less than half of the cost of our previous web site, and in about a third of the time as well. We’re still iterating the user experience but overall we’re very pleased with the results so far.
Our organic SEO impressions have increased by 350% and the organic clicks have increased by 750%!

SEO Improvements

Since launching our new site in June 2020 we have grown our own organic SEO
Impressions X 3.5

Clicks X 7 .5

SEO Agency Results

GRO.TEAM Business Growth Agency Services Joined Up

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Anna
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Give our friendly team  a shout for a non salesy chat about how we can get stuck into your challenges…asap
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