To address shifts in the market, companies must pivot quickly. Examples include automating routine tasks in order to downsize staff, investing heavily in new product innovation while maintaining legacy solutions with minimal investment, and synergizing similar positions during an M&A.

As a result of necessary pivots, reduction-in-force activity is inevitable in today’s business environment. Even so, most managers dread selecting individuals to layoff. Gone are the days when a reduction-in-force culled poor talent out of the organization. Often, today’s managers must select high-performing employees in a layoff due to position elimination.

Additionally, managers are human beings who have emotions. Layoffs are gut-wrenching, emotional ordeals. As such, many managers make mistakes when delivering downsizing messages, which could result in legal action taken by employees against the company. Therefore, it is essential managers are trained on implementing a layoff compassionately with minimal liability.

The aftermath of a layoff affects remaining employees. Often, a surge of resumes flood the market after a company does a layoff. Remaining employees feel they are on shaky ground.

And once a course correction occurs, businesses often want to entice former employees back. To be able to do that, layoffs must be conducted respectfully and compassionately.

Employers can maintain goodwill with employees by providing affected employees with outplacement services. Doing so benefits both the employer, separated employees and remaining employees.

Wayfinder consultants have extensive business and technology acumen, along with an M&A background that uniquely positions us to coach executives to their full protentional, accelerating their time to value with the investors.

The owner of the acquired company, who used to be accountable only to himself/herself, is now accountable to a board of directors and investors. Continued growth and improved EBITDA are expected as well.

Seldom does the PE firm invest in coaching these new executives to grow small-sized business operators into sophisticated C-level executives.

When uncoached, the tenure of the acquired executives can be less than 2 years in the new company, with the PE firm then embarking on an expensive executive search.

In the new company, the culture has changed. Revenue targets have changed. Employee engagement has changed. Current customers must be retained, and new customers added. Investor reports must be compiled, including sales and customer retention forecasts.

Many of these industry best practices are foreign to the previous owner, who operated via spreadsheets and QuickBooks for small businesses.

The newly appointed leader must pivot from a private owner of a small company to the CEO of a larger company. He/she must adapt. Coaching and training can accelerate the time to acquire new skills as well as increase the productivity of this evolving leader.

Career Planning

We help executives in their career journey by:

• Aligning business and/or technical acumen with corporate strategy, board management, analyst relations and investor management.
• Articulating succinct and impactful results, such as revenue and market growth, EBITDA performance, customer success metrics and employee enablement programs.
• Demonstrating innovative thinking by emphasizing new market and product/services growth strategies.
• Turning around negative company performance, especially if recruited to be a Turnaround CEO.
• Conducting fund-raising, private placement offerings and strategic sale of companies.
• Underscoring M&A experience that generates inorganic growth. Accentuating achievement of deal synergies. Seamlessly transitioning platform companies and add-ons into a healthy corporate culture.
• Highlighting board positions, speaking engagements and professional affiliations.