Building organisational capability through Odgers Interim

Chris Jones, Principal, Industrial and Transportation, on how Odgers Interim has worked with a global real estate client for more than two decades to fill a host of vital roles across multiple disciplines.

The background

Real estate is a dynamic, fast paced and fiercely competitive industry. Companies in the sector continuously seek ways to differentiate themselves and provide the best experiences and services from their assets. A relentless focus on asset management to protect and maximise shareholder value requires real estate companies to build strong organisational capability behind those competencies.

Odgers Interim, a proud people partner of a leading hospitality-led, global real estate business, has consistently delivered a pipeline of exceptional professional interim talent across multiple disciplines since 2000, including Marketing, Finance, Operations, Supply Chain and Procurement, Security, and Programme Management Office. Placements have covered c-suite level roles and below, and each one has delivered exceptional results for a top-tier client.

At Odgers Interim, we understand the real estate industry, we care about client needs and we embrace their culture. We know each of our professional interims extremely well and are uniquely positioned to provide real estate organisations with a pipeline of credible, professional interim talent who are immediately available.

The problem

Our client is a privately owned business specialising exclusively in the creation and operation of luxury, hospitality-led real estate assets and widely known for the best performing shopping destinations in the world.

Since its creation, our client has achieved year-on-year double-digit sales growth, but some ‘back-office’ organisational capabilities did not develop at the same trajectory. Its unique organisational culture has been relevant since its beginnings and remains core to its success.

Our client’s continual top-line growth had outpaced its back-office capability in terms of its people, processes and technology to the point where it became a limiting factor to future growth, diluting organisational resilience and restricting scalability. Its technology infrastructure, supply chain capability, marketing content, compliance and people capabilities were overstretched.

The delta between rapid sales growth and lagging operational capability, combined with an increasing pace of change within the retail sector, created a perfect storm that required a new and agile approach to people resourcing. Our client was implementing new and improved back-office business competencies and needed industry experts with new skill sets, new diversified views, and scalability experience.

The solution

Our client turned to Odgers Interim to help source talent into new business-critical back-office roles and help further professionalise its people capabilities ahead-of-the-curve to transform its performance, mitigate critical business risks, and enhance corporate reputation.

Since 2015, our client has successfully deployed a ‘try before you buy’ hiring strategy when developing new business competencies and sourcing new/improved people skill sets. It has entrusted Odgers Interim to source professional interim executives across critical back-office disciplines.

Over a 24-month period, we placed professional interims into key roles including Chief Marketing Officer, Group Director of Supply Chain and Procurement, Director of Finance Transformation, Director of Operations, Security Director, and Finance Transformation Programme Director.

The outcome

We sourced talent from our network of immediately available professional interims. They were in-post and providing value within a lead time of two weeks from receiving our client’s brief. They hit the ground running and built immediate confidence and credibility.

As trusted sources of subject matter expertise and confidential sounding boards, all Odgers Interims delivered the brief and beyond, without fuss. It has not been uncommon for some of our interims to provide our client with continued advice, even after briefs have been concluded and they have moved onto their next challenge.

We have been our real estate client’s preferred provider of executive interims since 2000 and provided a seamless supply of professional interim capability, covering multiple disciplines at C-suite level and below, all immediately adding value from day one.

Supporting our clients ‘try before you buy’ hiring strategy for new business competencies has successfully enabled our client to:

• Achieve an immediate step-change in operational capability across multiple ‘back-office’ disciplines as each of our interims executed new functional strategies and delivered results at speed.
• Assess and modify in real time, our client’s evolving business requirements and necessary people skills and competencies required in the longer term.
• Continuously evaluate the cultural fit of key senior hires before making long-term resourcing commitments.
• Reduce the risk of potentially making wrong, costly, long-term hiring decisions.
• Proactively build a pipeline of senior management talent, where many of our professional interims transitioned to permanent positions, due to their exceptional achievements and cultural fit.
• Enabled our client to build a high-performing senior leadership team, future proofing the business for the longer term.

Why Odgers Interim

• We are a trusted provider of professional interims and people partner within real estate because we listen, we care, we act, and we work tirelessly to find the right people and right solutions for our clients. We always make a real difference.
• We are experts in providing exceptional interim talent for the real estate industry and have a proven track record of delivering exceptional talent and service for the best performing real estate shopping destination in the world.
• We are not just a solution to support our real estate clients in a crisis, but we are a true collaborator that proactively helps our clients build succession plans and seamlessly integrates resourcing solutions for our clients’ plans A, B and C.
• Odgers Interim are a trusted partner, safe pair of hands and provider of choice within real estate that can always be relied upon for providing exceptional professional interim talent, services, and solutions.

To find out more about how we can help, please get in touch.