I love that most places don’t even bother with the minimum of a courtesy email saying thanks but no thanks.
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What type of job do you do?
Currently I run the UK, Irish and Nordic operations for a specialist Print media company based in Belgium. Basically a fancy Account Manager for a very specialised product.
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Are you Dwight Schrute???
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Board meeting was today. Role and equity approved. Yiew!
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Congrats mate……also lend us a tenner will ya 
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After I’ve invested in the kittens future, beers for all!
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My boss is currently looking at splitting of our lab arm from the main company and wants to make me Managing Director. Understanding that it’s more stressful but with potentially way better pay and freedom, but what are people’s thoughts on the risk?
But you’d be a subsidiary of the main firm?
What is the management structure? You go into your current boss or the board?
I’d say go for it!
I’d report to a board which is the same board in the current company and we’d be split off, however with a private agreement with the parent company to cover any insolvency risk.
What’s holding me back is i’ve got zero experience as a Director, or even an MBA. I know i’ve been groomed to eventually take over, but definitely thought it would be after an MBA at the least.
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I have no MBA, and very limited leadership experience before moving to my current role (APAC Sales Director). Not as high level as yours but responsible for my P&L (zero experience) and carrying a sizeable chunk of the company number which has grown and is growing as we acquire more companies…
My advice? Find a good mentor (Possibly your current boss) and be open to learning and you’ll be sweet. Most importantly is to believe in yourself, you are in the position for a reason so have confidence.
And don’t listen to the constant imposter syndrome voice in the back of your head when you have to make a decision.
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Whats the structure like below you? Will you have Ops Managers, a finance manager, etc reporting to you?
Do you need to overpay an extremely well qualified WFH nurse?
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So the structure currently will be a bit random. We’d be using a bit of the HR, Finance resources of the current company and essentially paying the parent company for their usage. I already have an Ops manager reporting to me and we’re running BD ourselves. Safety is managed internally and we’re a lab so our IMS is dictated by ISO 17025.
The reason for the split is that my parent company is a Consultancy. When I joined, I’ve done a big push to diversify our income streams by looking at a whole bunch of companies that need lab services without consultancy services, as well as small consultancies that the parent company doesn’t compete with. The problem with that approach, is that they generally don’t individually generate a large amount of income. Our aim is to target mid-level consultants, but they don’t want to do business with us, based on the fact that the parent company competes. The boss is aiming to divest himself and essentially put us in a blind trust so we sever commercial ties with the parent company to target competitors.
If that makes sense?
Yeah, the company I’m a director of is doing something similar-ish - we are splitting a part of the business off to a new company to satisfy some requirements of our biggest funder.
Thinking about some of things we’ve done at a Board level for our CEO’s over the last couple of years, this is what I’ve come up with that may be of some use.
Sounds like you could easily get away without having done a full MBA or anything like that. If possible, you might be better selecting specific modules out of an MBA and potentially AICD (company directors qualifications) program to improve any areas you feel you’re weaker on or don’t understand as much as you’d like.
Work on improving your financial literacy to start with - the finance manager can get you started with that - because often the numbers are the first thing people want to know about. You won’t need to know all the ins and outs of the accounting software, but being able to read, understand and convey the messaging of your profit and loss, budgets, etc with your treasurer and to the rest of the board is important.
Get a good understanding of governance procedures. What decisions you are authorised to make, what needs to go to your board, etc.
You’ve clearly got the industry/business knowledge and you mentioned an ops manager reporting to you, so probably just working with them to make sure they’re giving you the information you need to make decisions, and report up to the board. Methods to monitor, manage and respond to risks, etc.
The biggest issue our CEO had as we grew was having to step back more and more from the day to day operations of the organisations. Trusting the staff below you to do their job and look more at things from a higher level, incorporating all the things I mentioned above. There were times I could see that she just wanted to get in and get her hands dirty and would have preferred someone else to take over the CEO role, but ultimately she was the perfect person for the CEO role.
Good luck!
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Go do a course at the Australian Institute of Management if you feel you need some insights. Ive done a couple of their courses and they’re very good IMO. Or you could just entrust your decision-making to the SFCU hive-mind.
I’ve been a Director 3 or 4 times and never really found much difference from senior management roles I’ve done in the past beyond the legal obligations.
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Also recommend AIM courses, I’ve done a few and haven’t had a dud yet.
Cheers all! Just found out that one of our directors actually teaches courses for Managing Directors, so looks like i’ll be getting a whole load of lessons through that
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Yep, same. They also have a “Mini-MBA” course, which is nothing like a real MBA, and not recognised as an accreditation, but it does cover a broad range of business topics and only requires about 25 hours of online learning plus 2 days on campus.
Going through the hiring process in our Melbourne lab again. The ops manager is on leave so it’s up to me to filter through results. It’s amazing at just how bad some of the resumes are. I have one resume that’s 6 pages long, another that’s half a page and then multiple others that have some solid grammatical/spelling mistakes.
In saying that though, is there any real need of a cover letter these days? About 50% of the resumes ive seen don’t have one and I honestly rarely even read them. All the info I get is through Turbo Recruit and I check the resume to make sure the minimum bare is had, after which I’ll get someone secondary to screen the resumes and call each applicant that passes.