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Entrepreneur-led Small and Medium Businesses have always had unique challenges – the ambition to grow has to be matched with the resources available to scale-up. One of the most critical resources to drive growth – is professional expert talent.  Fortunately, a recent emerging trend – the Shared CXO model is now available to SMEs –  as an agile and cost-effective strategy for growth.

Post-pandemic, many businesses, irrespective of their scale, had to divert their focus on cost-cutting and revisiting traditional ways of working. Small businesses have always had to grapple with the challenge of the right time and method to engage senior professionals at leadership levels. However, with the current new normal, they found the model of leveraging gig and interim C-suite professionals to be an effective way to deliver critical mission-based projects and enabling major process and system enhancements.

The need for change is especially prevalent in the startup ecosystem with young companies looking to streamline functions and to put in place processes that help them scale up cost-effectively. To address these needs, a shared C-suite talent hiring model across functions of HR, Finance, Strategy, IT, Marketing and Operations, is showing a lot of promise. Young organisations and SMEs are adopting this model for various reasons:

1. Addressing Strategic growth needs: Early and growth stage businesses have business and function needs for which they could benefit from external expertise – whether it is to enter new markets, set-up new distribution channels, invest in branding, optimize processes to enable higher business volumes, set-up stronger HR practices or financial controls or adopt new digital technology. Hiring a full time senior leader for such defined needs can be cost-prohibitive. This need gap can be fulfilled by an Interim or Shared CXO.
2. Optimizing Costs: Young firms in most scenarios do not possess the resources to fuel every aspect of their business in their setting-up phase. Such enterprises get to leverage the experience that interim CXOs bring at an optimal cost, as they are working independently and can deploy their time across multiple organisations. The time needed from an Interim-CXO can also be defined based on need – rather than always having to onboard an executive full-time at 100% capacity.
3. Setting up processes to help effective scale-up: Most C-level independent talent with their depth of expertise bring with them methodologies and processes that have successfully worked for them in past roles and engagements, and provide the SME business with a map to sustain themselves at a higher scale of business.

To highlight a recent example, enabled by an Expert network platform, IndusGuru (a finance expert with 14 years of diversified experience) engaged with a leading Pharma Contract Research SME firm as a Shared CFO. The need was to help achieve several objectives in the span of one year, starting from chartering the growth path, connecting with finance institutions for fundraising, helping with PE/IPO and finalizing a 5- year financial plan for the young firm. The shared CFO successfully achieved the objectives and helped the firm with streamlining accounts function and restructuring the businesses as well. He also set up financial planning, budgeting and analysis practice with all stakeholders, while connecting the client with bankers and investors for fund raising.

Similarly, a mid-sized IT services firm, part of the ASCENT network – took on board “Shared COO” for streamlining business delivery processes and enabled capacity building. And a leading SME in Textile Manufacturing – engaged a seasoned marketing expert – as a “Shared CMO” to enable Product Branding for all sub-brands within the company

Today SME businesses can engage expert network platforms such as IndusGuru –  where such independent expert professionals are empaneled based on a strong process of curation and selection. Professional gig-hiring of Shared CXO’s is likely to become a norm and for SMEs – it is the need of the hour.

– Authored by Archana Bhati and Inku Khanal (Business Development Team) IndusGuru Network Partners