Future Proof: John Kelly, IndEx Partners

The effect of the economic collapse on Irish companies has been well documented. As the money that seemed to flow so freely during the boom years dried up, many businesses were forced to shut down.

Many others who found themselves on the brink required restructuring plans to survive. But they needed the right kind of people to deliver these drastic programmes of change. Enter IndEx Partners, a subsidiary of executive headhunting firm Merc, which specialises in parachuting temporary executives into companies.

"Fundamentally our clients are looking for practical and high-impact support to help them improve results in their business," says general manager John Kelly. "We respond to this need by quickly inserting into a client organisation an independent executive to assist them execute change . . . that could be a merger or acquisition, integration, it could be a restructuring of a businesses or a division of a business unit."

IndEx’s intervention comes in at the “doing phase”, says Kelly. Meaning, when a client approaches them they will usually have a plan, drawn up by an advisory or consultancy firm, of what they need to follow to get out of trouble. It’s down to IndEx then to figure out a way of implementing that plan. “It’s a senior level, high-impact, hands-on resource that rolls up the sleeves and executes . . . these programmes,” according to Kelly.

Corporate careers
He says the company, which previously traded as InterIM Executives, has a network of thousands of "subject matter experts" across Ireland and the UK. They are former chief executives, chief commercial officers, HR directors, chief financial officers and the like. "They've had their corporate careers and they've made positive decisions that they want to operate independently and do this kind of high-impact interim/project work," Kelly explains.

“I think the key ingredient is they’ve been there, done it and in terms of calibre they’re right up at the upper quartile . . . They have to be capable of being parachuted in quickly, making an impact very quickly, leaving a positive sustainable legacy and moving on. That’s not for everybody.” Kelly adds that the company looks for the type of corporate executives who get bored with business as usual and prefer “highly challenging, charged situations”.

Kelly has been with the firm for over a decade and he’s seen the business model shift in that time. Merc launched it in 1998 as the country’s first dedicated interim management service provider.

“The core for the first nine, 10 years of the business was different to what we do now,” Kelly says. Back then they focused on providing rapid access to short-term managers to plug gaps created by, say, maternity leave or a secondment. “It was putting the kind of super temps into a slot in the permanent structure that was temporarily vacated. That was the core business and the dynamic in the economy at the time was totally different to now.”

Managerial gaps
Amid rapid growth, companies faced a lack of managerial talent. But when growth slowed down and the recession started to bite, businesses became less willing to shell out on external executives to plug senior managerial gaps and looked for internal solutions instead.

IndEx knew it had to change focus. The recession brought new considerations for businesses that found themselves struggling and, according to Kelly, they found themselves asking: “How do we restructure the business, how do we improve results and performance in light of the challenging new realities that we are now dealing with?” So IndEx decided to target those businesses that were restructuring.

Now clients “are approaching us not so much as they would have been pre-recession for someone to slot into a business as usual type of environment, they’re approaching us because [they] need to get somebody into a particular [role] because the business is going through considerable change”.

Index’s change of focus was good for parent company Merc, which had been hit by the recession. Beefing up IndEx “has certainly helped in terms of the overall group and overall group performance”, says Kelly. The company is now looking at a turnover of €2 million with three-year projections of €4 million.

Looking to the future, Kelly says he sees the company enjoying continued growth, partly because, in terms of restructuring, “there’s a hell of a lot more that needs to happen that just hasn’t been happening”.