INTERVIEW WITH SIMON C JONES
RICHARD BEESLEY
Qualified Executive Coach | Career, Leadership & Transition Coaching | Thinking Partner | Facilitator | Listener
In the latest in my series of interviews with business leaders, I'm exploring why someone might be attracted to being a "professional" Interim, and how to survive and adapt as such for over twenty years...
Simon Jones is an independent Business Change and Transformation Specialist with board-level interim and consulting experience and more than 20 successful engagements. He is a qualified Accountant (FCPA), who focuses on delivering business, finance, project and commercial results in time-sensitive, difficult and burning platform situations. Simon’s approach to clients often requires rapid discovery, assessment, stabilisation, recovery, turnaround, integration and performance improvement initiatives.
Clients are typically international blue-chip and mid-market family office, PE and VC owned businesses with ￡10M to >￡1B turnover.
Before moving to the UK in 1998, Simon’s corporate career was in Adelaide and Perth, in the mining, beverages, transport and manufacturing industries.
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Q Simon, 20 assignments in as many years – what attracted you to an Interim career, and what kept you there?
What initially attracted me to an interim career was the terrific and rapid experience and insight gained from challenging situations. My second client after government audit was a fifteen-month manufacturing turnaround led by a US turnaround guru. The difference between my first and second clients was a sharp contrast which clearly decided my career path.
What has sustained my interim and consulting career are the frequent opportunities to serve clients in difficult, unclear or burning platform situations with the now considerable insight from varied industries and prior clients in similar situations. I am personally drawn to challenge and rapid results, and have the capability from an external, independent view to see what clients are unable to see, being so close to their businesses, and then act on it.
Q Could you tell us about some of the roles? Highs and lows?
Every client presents a different situation ranging from cash strapped and in the insolvency zone through to struggling with disabling internal difficulties and adverse market challenges.
My finest roles have been leading and delivering turnarounds and business model transformations, rapid working capital improvements, successful stressed business sales, recapitalisation and refinancing, rescues of failed finance systems projects, supporting and mentoring directors and staff, with bottom line and balance sheet gains.
A personal achievement is the saving of 3,500 employees’ jobs to date.
Q. How do you approach new assignments?
The client’s remit for the assignment is key and vital to progress immediately e.g. dealing with cash constraints. I also listen for the issues that others in my clients’ employ may not see nor appreciate. The first few weeks of discovery usually brings new perspectives that optimise the value-add of my engagements. I then agree with sponsors an approach that may include further elements of assessment, stabilisation, recovery, turnaround, integration or performance improvement initiatives.
Q. I believe the use of psychology is important to you in your work. Why is that? How do you use it?
Soft skills are essential to the delivery of client solutions. Fast working relationships development, mentoring skills and team re-focusing are key to successful delivery of every assignment.
With external perspective I can also question cognitive bias e.g. ‘the way things are done around here’.
Q. How do see Interim Management developing in the years to come?
Interim management has evolved in the 20 years I have been undertaking interim executive and consulting assignments. The last ten years has seen a re-differentiation of senior business change interims and consultants from commoditised contractor job delivery. I see this approach gaining traction, to distinguish those leading client change and contracted process working.
Q. Any advice on the impending changes to IR35?
For clients, interim executives and interim providers, IR35 is a secondary priority and a distraction to delivering often rapid and highly beneficial business change.
What is important for all parties concerned is to get the right interim executive in place to assist with client business issues resolution.
Q. And any advice to anyone considering an Interim career?
If you are risk averse and like the consistency of a regular, predictable income stream: don’t!
This is not to say that you will not find this in an interim executive career, it just takes time to build credibility and client situations are not always readily available.
Many thanks to Simon for sharing his thoughts.
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The next in my series of interviews will follow shortly...
Richard Beesley is a Partner at Bailey Montagu Executive Search, specialising in Interim Solutions