The Portfolio Executives

On the back of a long history in the sales arena and doing sales enablement and then rolling out of a project at the U.S. Bank, I wanted to bring some of that big corporate 1000 knowledge into the smaller space to give me a little bit more flexibility. I was typically the guy that the executives would call when they would get stuck and so I would just end up running a lot of performance improvement initiatives inside these organisations so I understand how to put systems and processes together. Flexibility and diversity was a real motivator for me becoming a Portfolo Executive. One of the challenges when just doing an interim role versus a fractional role is the interim, you are full time in there for 12 months, which is very good, it’s very exciting, but I also like the flexibility of being able to work in different organisations simultaneously, because I’m always borrowing concepts and ideas and energies from those other groups. I’m a little bit of an entrepreneur and it seemed like a good fit. I was just going to buy a business and run it but a colleague of mine told me about this space and I explored it and thought this is a really good way to help people and really leverage a lot of my knowledge and skills and passions and talents. My fiirst client in Evergreen was E Oceans, a consultant company with about eight engineers. They do workflow automation and they build applications that integrate those workflow automations. We have been focussing on how different the customer thinks to the how the organisation thinks and how to address this. Along the way i’ve learnt to be very specific about communication, to be very clear about the outcomes and always make sure you’re regularly aligning to the agreed upon outcomes. We will frequently start a project because a sales leader or a CEO thinks it’s one thing and then, as we get into it, it’s really another and we need to make sure that we are really clear that we are going to pivot and why we are going to pivot and make sure everybody’s okay with that. The flexibility and the fact that I don’t have to do as much travelling as I did before is really working for me currently. In the future i would like to be working with a team of like-minded individuals where we could pass work off to one another. Furthermore, some of the signing on reselling agreements, just to see some of the sales methodologies and processes that we use and licensed to sell, to be able to sell those more passively to create work for other consultants and trainers and just make a passive income off of that.