Commonly Outsourced C-Suite Roles
When building your business from the ground up, it’s important to understand your own strengths and weaknesses as well as your own interests and what you have time to accomplish. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should be doing something. Think of every act as a cost-benefit analysis. You must analyze the value of the action versus what other actions you could be taking. If paying your accounts payable is taking time away from fulfilling an order, you may consider hiring someone to pay those bills. For actions like copywriting or building a website, we love sites like Fiverr or Upwork. Sites like these give you easy access to reasonably priced contractors.
Taking this to a higher level, your C-Suite can be built out with contractors as well. This works particularly well when you are a small, growing business and can’t afford full-time, top talent. Oftentimes, new businesses hire someone who is not really qualified for the role. They’re given a bigger title for lower dollar amounts. We expect them to learn on the job. This works in some cases, but not in others. Only you can tell what is right for your business. So let’s look at common roles in the C-Suite that are outsourced so that you can figure out what may be right for you. Outsourcing these roles can be called many things, outsourced, fractional, part-time, interim, but for our purposes, what we’re talking about is someone who is not full-time with your business.
Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
The CFO is one of the more common outsourced roles for a growing business. Bringing in someone who understands your needs can be critical, but also unique to this role is that industry experience is less important for CFOs. Here you need someone that can analyze your growth strategy, solidify your finances, and structure accounting practices to support your growth needs. Meaning, if you’re a growing tech firm and your scaling will happen pre-revenue or with minimal revenues, you want someone who is going to be able to build your case for a Series A venture round. If you are a manufacturing company, you may need someone to work with your bank on a line of credit or factoring. It is not only critical to know how and who to talk to, but also to know when. An experienced CFO can help with all three.
Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO)
While not often needed early on in a business, as you begin to scale, someone who understands proper hiring practices, where to find qualified candidates within your industry, and how to manage a growing staff can be incredibly valuable. As your company is evolving, finding someone to come in and oversee this for you one or two days a week can be a great solution to growing your business. Depending on your needs, primarily how technical is the work and the staff you’re bringing on, industry-specific may not be of the utmost importance. Of course, it could be important as well. For example, someone who has always been in HR in a professional services environment may not be the best at hiring high-level scientists because the hiring practice is different. Assess how your business’s hiring process may differ before deciding on how technical your CHRO needs to be.
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
Another commonly outsourced role, your CMO can set the vision and tone for your business. Oftentimes we see small businesses being more reactive than proactive with social media, traditional media, and speaking opportunities which means you’re not being thoughtful or strategic with how the public or your customers views you. A strong CMO can both set a content calendar to follow as well as analyze how new opportunities align or do not align with your plans and strategy. They’ll also go beyond this to ensure your messaging is on point, which is critical in everything you do. Depending on your specific needs, alignment to your industry can be more or less important. If you have a need to build a rapport with industry media, finding someone that already has these connections can be important. Similarly, if you have a very complex and technical product or service finding someone who can speak the language can be very important. Whereas if your needs are more basic, you may find more of a generalist to your liking. They can bring fresh ideas to a variety of different industries.
Chief Operating Officer (COO)
Maybe a bit less common than a CFO or a CMO because operations are more day-to-day and someone coming in and out may need more catch up to where this relationship doesn’t make sense. This can still work when you, or your company, have a strong CEO in place. These people oftentimes have strong networks that can help build out your operations quickly. Finding the right person here requires someone with a good understanding of your industry and how to scale your business.
Chief Sales Officer or Chief Revenue Officer (CSO/CRO)
Similar to the COO, the CSO/CRO is perhaps a bit less common to an outsourced role than others because sales and revenue drive your growth. However, there are times where this still makes sense. Finding a similar company that is a non-competitor and sharing an accomplished leader of sales can be a good solution, but also when you have a young, strong sales force simply making sure the guidance is on point for them is critical. Again, similar to the COO, being from within the industry is often critical. If you’re in need of someone who knows how to sell to hospitals, bringing in someone who has a B2B background may not be specific enough to understand the proper sales channels.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Outsourcing the CTO role can be a great option, but similar to the COO role, you need to understand the value proposition. If you’re a tech startup about to go seek your Series A, you probably should not have an outsourced CTO. In the simplest rule of thumb, is your technology your product? If it is, having that leadership as an internal feature is critical. If, however, your technology is not your product but instead, it supports what you do, this could be of value to you. Someone that can lead the vision of your technology and ensure that it is both aligned and correct, especially if this isn’t your background, is key in scaling your business. A good example of this may be a consulting firm that wants to add one or more SaaS platforms to support its consulting services. If this work is being outsourced, you want to make sure that the work is being done both well and correct to work for your clients.
You may have noticed one C-Suite role that was intentionally left off, your CEO. This is a hard one to consider bringing on as an outsourced role. If the leader of your company is not there daily leading the strategy and vision, can you really ensure that you’re moving in that direction? It doesn’t mean it can’t work, there are examples of successful shared CEO’s, look at Jack Dorsey with Twitter and Square. If you are considering going down this path, ask why and ensure it’s the right decision.
As mentioned previously, in January we’re going to look at the outsourced C-Suite and the benefits. What better way to kick that off than beginning by learning what positions are best suited for interim/outsourced c-suite work.
Interested in learning more about how interim c-suite roles can help your business specifically? We offer 30+ years of c-suite experience and expert insights to all of our clients. Reach out to NMBL Strategies at info@nmblstrategies.com or visit our website for more resources on interim/outsourced c-suite roles.
