Rutherford Cross held its most recent Interim Roundtable over Teams this week with Michael Walker, Assistant Director of Craig Corporate leading the discussion.
Michael gave an overview of the work that Craig Corporate do and talked about there being a high number of requests to invest in growth businesses. As part of Craig Corporate’s service offering, the organisation provides due diligence of these potential investments. Often the operational focus of these growth businesses has been on revenue and sales headcount expansion.
When this scaling is achieved it can potentially leave the CFO and finance team stretched. The result is often a requirement to bring in skilled senior finance interims to help support. Michael talked about some interesting sources for tracking both Series A and Series B funding awards across the UK and left the group with a positive outlook on the level of future investments over the next 6-12 months.
Market Overview and Interim Insight
The discussion moved onto an overview of the current senior finance interim market in Scotland before discussing some recent shared experiences from our interims of being on assignment.
In order to hit the ground running in a new interim assignment the interims softer skills were highlighted as crucial in order to build rapport with the key people within the business. Identifying who the ‘movers and shakers’ are within the first 2-3 weeks of being in a new role and also who will be able to help you is key. You need to build trust very quickly and also in the first 2-3 weeks there is no such thing as a stupid question, this is how you are going to find out quickly how the business and department run.
Finally, we discussed the importance of managing the expectations of whoever it is that has hired you, getting a clear idea of what they want to be achieved over the duration of the contract. Where they are now, where they want to get to and how they are going to get there is a useful guide to use.
To finish there was a brief update on IR35 and the use of Ltd Companies within the current marketplace which at Rutherford Cross we are finding is in line with HMRC estimates of 75% of roles landing inside IR35 and 25% landing outside.
If you would like to discuss working as an interim through Rutherford Cross or have any question relating to the Senior Finance interim market in Scotland please get in touch with [email protected] or [email protected].
