Getting By With Less May Cost You More

July 22, 2009 - PRLog -- Here are three facts about the economy and filling key leadership positions in your company:

1) Even during this tough economic period, it is still difficult to find the right individual for your company to fill that key leadership role or one-of-a-kind position.

2) No matter what estimates economists are giving in regards to when this recession will end, your business can gain a big advantage over your competition now and in the coming recovery with only a single leadership addition or change.

3) As the economy shows signs of recovery, the attraction and identification of talented individuals to fill your key positions will become even more difficult.
   
In response to the downturn in the economy many businesses have been making cuts to expenditures, programs and even, people. Very few of these businesses are prepared to reverse this trend and instead make new hires in the anticipation of a recovery, even when most have at least one critical need which can be filled by hiring, or replacing, a key leadership position.

In some cases this leadership void became apparent when times got tougher. In other cases, the void was spotted during more favorable times, but the company was simply not prepared or unable to find the right person for the role. A frequent statement at your company may have included "If only we could find someone with ___________ experience, we could do _____________."

How did you fill in the blanks? Did you seek more or better sales capability, operational or technical expertise, how about financial acumen, or possibly the right person to lead a new initiative or territory? The need varied from one company to another but the bottom line result was the company was limited in reaching their full potential because they could not find or attract the right person for a key role, or they delayed the decision to upgrade a B player to an A player.

Carl J. Taylor & Co. was recently approached by a company that bucked this trend. The company President and Vice President of Sales wanted Carl J. Taylor & Co. to help them add several new Sales Directors for new territories they were adding. They also identified one territory in which they needed to upgrade the quality of the Sales Director.

The company had to do a lot of cost cutting during the recession, and they knew that the recruiting and compensation of these new sales people would have a significant negative impact on the company’s short term cash flow. Nevertheless, they moved forward with the hire of these new Sales Directors.      

The VP of Sales had this to say about the decision to work with Carl J. Taylor & Co. to add these new hires during these difficult times:

"These are difficult roles to fill, and we did a thorough search in each market to find the right person for our organization. We have added some outstanding people that we may not have been able to entice at another time.

We have taken full advantage of this difficult time to let these people learn our sophisticated products and services and to integrate them into our company and culture.

The new Directors are developing important relationships with our current customers, and they are identifying and contacting a large number of new customer targets.

The visibility of our competition is noticeably reduced, or absent, in some of these markets, and customers recognize our presence is increasing.

Sales are hard to close, but we are selling more during this time because of these new people.

We are ideally positioned to take advantage of the recovery, and we won't lose sales or market share because we have to delay our efforts to find the right people."

When the economy is slow the addition of any new hires (especially for key leadership positions) can create a strain on the company budget, but it's crucial to keep in mind that delaying those key hires or upgrades can cost you far more in terms of lost sales, negative customer relations, delayed initiatives, reduced market share and/or missed opportunities to improve operations.  

You must also think about what your competition is doing (or planning to do). Are they investing in the top people now to take advantage of the current environment and to position themselves for the recovery?

The economy will recover and as it does your competition and numerous other companies will realize their leadership needs and seek people to fill these key positions. The problem is at that stage it will be even harder to find and attract the best people and as a result many companies will make hasty decisions which will lead to bad hires.

And, no company can afford to make a bad hire no matter what the state of the economy.

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Carl J. Taylor & Co. is an executive search firm based in Dallas. For over 20 years, the firm has successfully completed challenging search assignments for clients of all sizes in Texas and around the country.

If you would like more information about this or other executive search related topics, please call Carl Taylor at 972 490-7697 or email him at ctaylor@carltaylorco.com. The company website is http://www.carltaylorco.com.