Interview with
Vane Clayton, President,
ZOLL Data Systems

Q. Why hire an interim marketing executive?

A. It was the best way to jump-start our marketing activities with someone who had the skills and experience to be productive immediately. It also bought us the time to search for the most qualified candidate for the permanent marketing position.

It was low risk. We had a lot of flexibility, because it was not an employee hire. As it turned out, we kept Judy on assignment six months after our permanent hire came on board, to help our new marketing executive set up a solid structure.

Q. Wasn't it expensive?

A. No, it was a great investment. Without Judy's help we could not have supported our sales team during the six-month search for our permanent hire. Also, we learned best marketing practices from a true expert, without the continuing payroll expense.

In the rebranding activity alone, we would have paid an outside agency at least three times as much for the expertise we received from Judy Key Johnson and her team.

Services: Interim Marketing Executive

Key Marketing Group's interim marketing executives provide temporary leadership while a company searches for a full-time executive employee, embed best practices in an organization, and provide leadership for strategic or tactical initiatives where expertise is lacking in an organization.  “Rent” the best and learn from them. 

In the News

More Companies Hire Temporary Executives

By all accounts the use of interim executives is growing, with some placement firms seeing 50% increases in business in 2004 over 2003. Staffing Industry Analysts Inc. says that the market has become a $750 million-a-year industry in the U.S.

The sense of becoming truly integral to a company without making a long-term commitment is one of the attractions to executives who begin lendi ngthemselvesouttemporarily.JudyJohnson, for example, had spent 25 years as a marketing executive with IBM and a software company before going on her own in 2003… "This job really hit my sweet spot,” says the 54-year-old Ms. Johnson. "I enjoyed producing tangible results."

Interim Executives also tend to be motivated by fresh challenge and want to develop the breadth of their experience or the depth of their expertise, Korn/Ferry surveys of temporary execs show... Or, as Ms. Johnson puts it, "You have to be both unflappable and collaborative."

— Wall Street Journal Online Career Journal, October 10, 2004

Temps at the top

While still considered a niche industry, interim-executive staffing is becoming increasingly common for companies seeking new tools to spur change and to achieve rapid results. Top-level temps can cost as much as $77,000 a month, but experts say they can save them millions in the long run, but also can sometimes make the difference in a company's surviving a crisis period intact.

. . . Trimming high-level staff down to bare bones to conserve cash often robs a company of the exact expertise and experience it needs to weather difficult times. So more and more companies — usually when they are caught in a sticky situation — are turning to interim leadership for salvation because these guns for hire can deliver experience and knowledge virtually risk free.

— "Workforce Management," August 2004