Find the Top-Level Executives You Need on an As-Needed Basis

Ruby Tuesday Pick of the Week: Business Talent Group
Why It’s a Gem: This new piece of human capital infrastructure enables talent to have a different kind of professional life and companies to have the ultimate flexibility

With the business world undergoing a seismic shift, companies need to be nimble to adapt to the ever-changing forces at work. And nowhere is being nimble more important than in any business’ most valuable asset: its workforce.

By monitoring trends in her own career as an executive, Jody Miller identified a highly undeveloped niche – one that hinges on the unpredictable nature of human interactions and personalities – and showed that being flexible could turn unpredictability into profits.(This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Lynda Resnick: In this week’s Ruby Tuesday, we’re speaking with Jody Miller, Founder and CEO of Business Talent Group. For our readers, Jody, could you describe your business model and its unique selling proposition?

Jody Miller: We are a talent marketplace that is able to provide very senior-level talent for project-based work, consulting projects, and interim executive needs – immediately. Clients can call us and, within five days, we are able to [suggest candidates]. If you need someone to come in for a day and advise about an idea, or you need someone for 18 months to help launch a project, we can supply that kind of talent, and we do it quickly and in a totally customized and flexible way.

LR: How is this different from a placement agency or a consulting group, like McKinsey?

JM: We are a new kind of company. We view talent as our product. When you call McKinsey, they will look through their roster [of staff] and put a team together for you. They have a lot of experience in what kinds of teams they think are going to be most effective. What we have found is there are a lot of projects that require a different kind of team – maybe more operating experience, maybe a different configuration of junior people or senior people – and we look at all the independent professionals we know to find the best grouping for the client. It is a very different process. We are experts at finding the right people to do your job. We don’t keep thousands of people on staff. There really isn’t anyone who does exactly what we do. We sort of created the category in the U.S.

Jody Miller, Founder of Business Talent Group

LR: I see from your website that your candidates have MBAs and extensive experience. When candidates come to you, what are they basically looking for, more often than not?

JM: We have a number of types of talent interested in working with us. The group that we spend the most time with [are what] I would call “committed independent professionals.” These are folks who have decided that they like a project-based life. Either they’ve been in a consulting firm and enjoy deciding which projects they do or don’t do, or they’re serial executives who enjoy solving problems [at a company] and then moving on. These are people who are really committed to this life; they don’t want a traditional, permanent full-time job.

There’s a second group of people who enter and leave this lifestyle usually because they are pursuing some other objective – writing a book, starting a business – and they want to leave time for other things; they want to be an independent professional for some period of time.

Then there’s a group that truly does want a permanent job. We have a high bar for those folks. We don’t like to spend a lot of time with them, because we really want people for whom this lifestyle and this professional trajectory is what they’re passionate about.

LR: How did you realize the need for this service?

JM: When I was an executive, several times a year I would wake up and [realize] I needed somebody – somebody smart, somebody senior – and there was just no efficient way to find folks. When I went into venture capital, I found that even when you’re sitting around the table with the most connected people, when you needed board members, there was just no company who could reliably identify these folks. I thought about it from the client-side all throughout my career.

From a talent side, when I left Americast, people would call me [for] really interesting projects. I would build virtual teams, and clients would be happy, talent would be happy, and I was happy. But I wasn’t really a consultant.

So, I started thinking about it from both sides of the equation. I looked around the world and saw that Europe was quite a bit more advanced in outsourcing. [The European companies] were growing very quickly and clearly had found a market opportunity. So, I sought a venture capital firm. I spent several months looking at [my business plan] and determined there really was a market opportunity, particularly in the U.S., where no one had claimed this space.

We opened in New York and Los Angeles. We’re now also in San Francisco and Seattle, and we will open in several other cities in the next 12-18 months.

LR: How fabulous! And you’ve grown 47 percent since 2007?

JM: In 2007-2008, our growth rate was 47 percent. This quarter, Lynda, we’re not even through and we’re already up 70 percent. It’s extraordinary. I think it speaks to a need that we are filling. Because the talent is there, and more and more people are interested in controlling their professional lives as they become more senior.

LR: What is a bigger challenge: finding the talent or selling the talent?

JM: Great question. When I was researching this business, I asked a lot of people what they thought, and virtually everyone said to me, “Clients are going to be harder.” And that was my instinct, too. Only two people – two very senior executives from McKinsey – told me clients were going to be easy; talent was going to be hard.

LR: We have 4,500 employees at our family of companies. It is very hard to find great talent. One of the things I worry about with outside consultants is their ability to become integrated in the business. Although I must say, from a personal standpoint, what you do is very appealing to me. I’m going to tell all of my executives about it, because I think it’s something they should think about. But I know how hard it is to find great people. What a great way to run your career! If I didn’t have to work with my husband, I would give you my resume.

JM: One of the really surprising things about this business is how viral it is. Clients become talent, and talent becomes client. And it happens over and over. We now run our business with a very eclectic group of incredible people who work hourly – some of them work 60 percent, some work 80 percent, some work 100 percent. It’s capacity management. When I have someone work for me 60-70 percent of the time, I get 100 percent of them 60-70 percent of the time. When I have someone work for me 100 percent, they have other things in their life.

LR: It’s outsourcing, but what I love about it is it’s outsourcing in America. We have real human capital here, great brains. How do you market yourself?

JM: From the beginning, we started with the premise that we were going to develop client relationships with the clients we most wanted, [our] key accounts. Initially we did it the old-fashioned way – knocking on doors, talking to executives. Now that we have a lot of customers and a reputation, it’s easier. We’re going to experiment with more cold calling, and we’re experimenting with a lot more marketing and different kinds of connections. But our core business was built the old-fashioned way.

LR: I’m sure you advertise for talent on Monster.com and places like that, right?

JM: Actually, we don’t. One of the reasons we don’t is we really wanted to control the quality of the talent that cut into our pool. You can’t just sign up to be a member of our talent pool, even today. You have to be invited. In the very early days, most of our talent came from referrals, even our clients. Once our clients understood what we are doing, we [started] getting several calls a week from different clients saying, “I know somebody really good you should look at.” Then when we’ve started to see demand for a certain kind of talent, a group of us will go out and look for the kind of talent we think we want. We tend not to post on something like Monster because it’s too broad. We were written up in the Wall Street Journal (PDF) about a year ago.

LR: Did you get a lot of response from that?

JM: We got five hundred resumes the next morning. I think we took about one percent of them. So, we look, but we do it in a much more targeted way.

LR: It’s a filtering process.

JM: Exactly.

LR: I think it’s absolutely fascinating. Your talent pool is comprised mainly of CEOs and high-level executives. Would you say they are Senior Vice Presidents and up, or are they lower than that?

JM: We like to have a mix of people. Our main focus is folks who can go in independently and have an impact. They are people who bring something to the table. They bring expertise.

LR: CEOs, CFOs or COOs.

JM: Right, or even heads of marketing. But we can also have someone go in and launch a new product, be it a product manager for a new launch or [someone to] come up with a strategy.

LR: Do your clients tend to be Fortune 500 companies, or are they more like startups?

JM: We have three categories of clients. The Fortune 500 is clearly a client of ours. We also work a lot with private equity firms, both helping them internally and with portfolio companies.
The third category just kind of evolved without us even focusing on it: major non-profits and foundations.

LR: How wonderful!

JM: We’ve done enormously satisfying work for these folks, because we find that a lot of the people in our talent pool, who have already been successful in business, have experience and interest in the non-profit world. And that kind of talent, as you know, is so valuable to those institutions. We’ve done everything from the interim CFO at MOCA in Los Angeles to the interim Head of Admissions at Harvard Law School. We’ve been incredibly gratified to be able to be both helpful to these institutions and to place talent that’s grateful for the opportunity [to work there].

LR: Do you have any particular success stories that you’re proud of?

JM: We have so many! Let me tell you one. We got a call from one of the top private financial advisory firms in the world, who has a portfolio company that’s a known brand name in consumer-packaged goods. They had hired a major recruiter to replace the CEO, and it was taking a long time, to the point where they just had to replace the person and it had to be done very quickly. They called us, and within five days we gave them the names of three available, interested people. That’s the difference [with our service]: We are not searching and plucking someone who is sitting at another job. Our people are ready to go. [In five days, we were able to suggest] three available, interested people, any one of whom we believed could have stepped in and been CEO of a significant company.

They looked at our three people. They thought all three were better than the people they had been seeing [from the] permanent search firm. They selected one of them. They kept the permanent search going – and we understood that. Two months in, they decided [our candidate] was better than anybody they’ve seen, so they’re going to make him permanent.

This happens a lot with us. People get in, they try each other and all of the sudden…

LR: They fall in love.

JM: They fall in love! What we’re seeing over and over again is partially because clients trust our judgment and, because it’s not permanent, they’re willing to take a little more risk. We also see it [with availability]. Sometimes clients will say they have a full-time need, but the right talent is available only three days a week. They client likes them so much they take them, and then they discover that three days a week is enough.

My secret mission is to create a new piece of human capital infrastructure that enables talent to have a different kind of professional life while enabling companies to broaden the ways in which they use talent.

LR: I love what you’re doing. I think it’s just fresh and brilliant, and there’s really a need.

JM: I really appreciate your interest in the company.

LR: You’re welcome. I hope you don’t get a lot of unnecessary mail from candidates.

JM: Don’t worry about that. That would be a good problem to have.