Alium's interim vision

2-Apr-2008

 

A couple of bars, a restaurant and a church — all buildings of character — make up the quaint surroundings seen from a cobblestone courtyard outside Nick Robeson’s offices. It’s one of the more charming views in the City of London, and its aesthetics are one of the reasons Robeson chose this particular set of offices at 20 Abchurch Lane last year for the new home of Boyden Interim Management, where he is chief executive.

Now another major change of view is underway: the company is shedding the Boyden name and assuming a new identity, five years after Robeson led a management buy-out of the interim management division from its US parent company, Boyden World Corporation. From this week, the first week of April, Robeson’s interim management firm will be known as Alium Partners.

“We felt we wanted to own our own brand,” Robeson explains, animatedly. “While the Boyden brand has huge energy, and is of significant value, actually we didn’t own it. It wasn’t ours.

“I was one of a number of individuals around the world who owned it [the brand], and if you are ever going to sell a business — and,” he offers in an aside, “God forbid in five years’ time, someone comes along and offers us lots of money because we have created a very successful business — one of the issues is ownership of the brand.

“So we decided that now is probably the best time, when we had what I perceived to be the best team in terms of capability and credibility, and that it is the right time with the momentum we’ve got, to take that decision. We may well find that it is a little bit more difficult on the other side,” he acknowledges, “but equally, it might be the bush fire that we’ve been needing to light for some time.”

‘Alium’ isn’t one of the easiest words for which to find a definition. One of the few web references finds it used in a Latin homily, ‘qui facit per alium facit per se’, which translates as ‘he who does (something) through another does it through himself’. Robeson offers “another person” as the meaning intended for ‘alium’ by himself and his colleagues.

“We all sat in here,” he says, gesturing to the board room in which our early March interview is taking place, against the backdrop of Abchurch Lane, “and went through a process to find a new name — we wanted something that was succinct, meant something, and that everyone loved.

“We have a group of people who are totally fired up, and can’t wait to get into April!”

With the new company name comes a new non-executive board chairman, too: Anthony Saxton, co-founder of executive search firm Saxton Bampfylde Hever, which became part of The Amrop Hever Group, one of the world’s largest headhunting organisations. He was elected co-chairman of that group, which operates in more than 50 countries.

“We have a plan, we have a vision and we have a strategy behind that vision, but… the one thing that I wanted to have was somebody I could trust in that chairman role to ensure we are actually going down the right route,” says Robeson.

Saxton is no less a fan of Robeson and his team. “I think he’s absolutely mustard,” Saxton enthuses of Robeson. “Very refreshing — he’s very direct and straightforward. And he’s wonderful for bringing people on board.”

In addition to his involvement in the executive search world, Saxton’s CV also includes the intriguing responsibility of chairing Kormet, a venture appointed by the North Korean government as its strategic partner for the development, financing and marketing of the country’s iron and steel industry.

Saxton’s decision to come on board emerged from previously rewarding experiences as a client of both Robeson and Alium director Peter Sanderson, as well as from a growing realisation that the “the way the employment market is going, the interim market is going to get bigger and bigger”, Saxton told Recruiter.

He admits that at one time he had subscribed to the view of interim managers as senior veterans of the workplace who took on temporary jobs to make a living until permanent positions came along. However, he is now in step with the understanding that not only do interims have crucial roles to play in modern, agile organisations but “I found there were actually people who enjoyed living like that”, he says. Further, he adds, research by Alium director Anton Fishman has revealed “there are people who are naturally good at being interim managers”.

At Alium, Saxton says he has “a lot of work to do. My job is to help them, support them and catalyse them”. Saxton is particularly interested in helping the Alium team with client development and developing the firm’s international expansion strategy. Perhaps a Beijing office, he suggests?

International expansion is very much on Robeson’s mind. He wants to build a e100m (£78m) business within five years, representing a significant increase from the £12m his firm will have turned over by the end of the current financial year, and the £9.7m turnover of 2006/2007. Currently, an estimated 15% of the company’s business is overseas, but he looks to building future growth by capitalising on what he lightly calls “management trafficking”. “Not the most politically correct term,” he acknowledges, “but nowadays there is a significant amount of management movement.”

The tradition of moving management around the world has been rooted in placing expatriates to take up permanent positions wherever their firms had offices abroad. A rising trend is to employ local professionals for those roles instead, achieving the dual ends of saving heavy relocation and expatriate costs associated with importing senior managers, and creating a sophisticated local management workforce.

However, Robeson sees that the latter scenario could still create high demand for Alium’s services. “You can look at the old ‘silk route’ of Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, where there is constant movement of senior executives who could go in on six-month, nine-month or 18-month assignments to do certain pieces of work, and that fits very neatly into the product we offer,” he says.

“My plan at the moment,” he says, “is that we will actually have physical presence in the likes of France and Germany, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.”

He adds: “Now these things take time. It’s not about ‘big bang’ implementation; it’s about identifying the right people… It is not just about finding somebody and having a plaque up in Paris, and a plaque up in Frankfurt saying we do business transformation and interim management. It is actually about people who share our vision, I guess, and share our vision to build the first truly international interim management business.

“The mission has always been to build a very successful, very ‘high touch’ interim management business that is European/international — that has always been our intention,” Robeson says.

Even the dreaded credit crunch will probably fail to keep Robeson’s business down, he predicts. “The interim management industry should be counter cyclical. Why? Well, when organisations are going through pain and stress and crisis, the last thing they tend to look to is bringing people in on a permanent basis. So they tend to look to the interim executive community to bring in to fire fight,” he says.

“In fact, our business is showing that at the moment, we are seeing an increase in business transformation opportunities than some of the more mainstream ‘stop gap’ roles that we might do,” he adds.

“Of course,” he says, “if there is an horrendous recession — which I don’t think there is going to be — but if there is, we will find like everybody else in the marketplace that it is harder to do business. I think you just need to change the capabilities and the skills that we have as an organisation.”

Asked if the shift to the Alium name represents a cosmetic change or a philosophical one, Robeson says: “Oh, a philosophical change definitely. We don’t want to be there on 2 April, and say, ‘Well, that was great, wasn’t it, now we’re called something different’. It is because we are genuinely doing something different. I’m not particularly hung up on wanting to be the biggest — I genuinely want to be the best.”



NICK ROBESON: A SNAPSHOT

2004: Became chairman of the Interim Management Association.

2003: Led the management buy-out of Boyden Interim Management.

2000: Joined Boyden in London to revive its interim management business as managing director, and take on directorship of Boyden International (Executive Search).

1994-2000: Harvey Nash Group; roles included head of major accounts, Harvey Nash Search & Selection, and director, Interim Management in IT.

1992-1994: Sales executive, Computing Magazine, VNU Business Publications.

Education includes: British International School, Jakarta, Indonesia; St Columba’s College, Dublin; Dauntsey’s School, Devizes.

Born: Dublin, but “I see myself as British. The test is, who do you support at rugby? The rest of my family all support Ireland but I support England. I’ll support Ireland against anyone else other than England. My view is that I’ve earned my living here, I’ve spent a significant amount of my schooling here, my family is here.”