My CEO Life

Over the last little while i have written about how the REA Group expanded its business internationally in a series called Going Global.  I have so far explored organic and acquisition based growth as well as the structure we put in place to manage a global Group.  This posting looks at how we used an internal productivity team to help drive knowledge sharing across the Group and at the same time to operate as a hit team when issues arise.

The internal consulting team was called the GPT – Global Productivity Team and reported into the Corporate function.  The team consisted of around 6 people who, in general, had long experience with the company and had earned their stripes through having operated in the field. 
The types of roles we had were consumer marketing, agent sales and marketing (classified sales), developer and third party sales (display sales), and editorial skills. 

Each country had a similar organisation structure and therefore the GPT structure mirrored the country structures.  Now the consumer marketing people in each country reported into the local CEO and not into the GPT and the role of the GPT was to work with the appropriate roles in each country to help solve problems and to help improve the overall performance.

A good example of this is how the GPT worked closely with th Italian business, casa.it, to increase the overall number of UB’s to the site and to also restructure the sales team to drive greater productivity.

However, there are always challenges with having an internal consulting team and a reader, Alain, has raised the following questions.

1) How do you effectively prioritize the consultant’s work? What missions/countries does he treat first?

2) How do you adjust prioritization in a rapidly changing environment?

3) Does it make sense to have an australian centric consultant when his mission is to take care of everything but australia? Wouldn’t a team of local consultants be better ?

These are good questions and not simply answered.  Firstly, prioritisation is always hard as either many people want the help of the consultant and sometimes those that need the most help dont want it.  The reality in prioritisation was that overall each country had a priority in the Group with Australia, the UK and Italy being at the top purely because of size of the business and the size of the opportunity.  Then within each of those, we looked at how far of best practice they were operating and then allocated the time accordingly.

Prioritisation can always be adjusted in a rapidly moving environment and that works best when everyone knows the role of the internal consultants and values their efforts.  We always worked on the theory that we would not impose the internal consulting team on a business that didnt value the consultant’s time. 

I think the quesiton about where the consultants reside is a very important one.  I am less concerned about where a consultant lives and more focused on having the best people in the role.  Sometimes this means that the consultants have to travel.  Having a team of local consultants only works if those consultants have the greatest knowledge and experience in delivering the results.  In practice, this is rarely the case as a country needing the help of internal consultants is often one that is not the best performing or is one that is at an early stage of development. 

Overall having an internal consulting team like the GPT enabled the Group to acheive a better balance between local operations and being part of an overall Group.

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