The manager is fractional
Are you a small and medium-sized Italian company? Let’s say, turnover between 30 and 50 million euros, “willing” to make investments, follow market trends, digitize models? Well, skills are needed. Skills that, at least in the initial phase, do not go hand in hand with the need to expand the workforce with a CFO, a manager of human resources, marketing or tech processes on a permanent basis. But you need those skills to make a piece of the road together (the quotation for example), to take a step, then we’ll see. Here, there are those who offer you tailor-made managers for an ad hoc objective and a defined time period with the guarantee of a selection process and a more than ten-year trademark.
With this idea, certainly innovative and in some ways revolutionary, YourGroup is born, the creature of Andrea Pietrini (former CFO of a multinational company) which for years has been pursuing a slogan which is also the heart of its business model: the manager’s future is fractional, a manager who “splits up” his working time and distributes it to one or more companies, in each of which he has a shared and defined goal. Started in 2011 with very few managers specialized in corporate finance management, YourGroup today has just under 250 “consultants” who are divided into eight areas of expertise. Finance (Cfo in fact) remains the most requested, but demand is also growing for human resources managers, digital managers, CEOs and communication managers, marketing, legal and logistics. YourGroup supports 500 companies, but the growth rates since 2011 are very strong.
Pandemic effect
Incredible to say, but in some respects Covid acted as an accelerator. “Today – Pietrini points out – we find it hard to keep up with all the requests we receive. Paradoxically, the greatest difficulty is finding the professional figures. As if Covid had pushed small and medium-sized Italian companies to take a step forward in the organization and management of processes, steps forward that require ad hoc skills”. Il supply chain – the supply chain which includes the passage of raw materials from suppliers to producers up to delivery to the end user -, also due to the war in Ukraine, has become central, somewhat surprisingly, however, the most requested managers are those of human resources.
“The demand has increased – continues Pietrini – for digital managers specialized in logistics and marketing, but from a certain point of view, Covid has made our small and medium-sized enterprises rediscover the importance of the role of human resources manager. There is smart working to manage, there are many workers who have decided to reconvert or completely change direction after the pandemic and there are new figures to look for and train. In the last three years we have gone from 20 to 40 “HR consultants” employed. The point is that more would be needed.”
The bottom line is that managers are missing, not work. Only in the last month YourGroup has strengthened the team with 10 new partners, but the demand is so strong that it is not possible to cover all the requests of the companies. “We are now growing continuously – explains the founder – at a rate of 30-40%, ours is a now recognized business model, but if we were able to find all the managers that the market asks of us we could do even more”.
Objective Piazza Affari?
To the point of thinking about the Stock Exchange and abroad? “We have a three-year plan and at the end of these three years we will draw conclusions. It has been talked about. It must be said that ours is a business model that does not require the capital of the Stock Exchange, certain that the listing would give us great visibility and even more recognisability”.
Yourgroup has an important presence in Switzerland, a branch in Paris and before the pandemic it had opened a subsidiary in London. “Of course we are thinking of exporting our model, but it must be said that in Italy we were the first to have this idea and above all that the widespread presence of small and medium-sized family-run businesses – where the demand for fractional managers it is potentially infinite – it is somewhat unique in our country”.