Strengthen The Integrator Role
Ken Paskins - CEO of GCE Strategic Consulting
What is a Fractional Integrator/ What Does an Integrator Do?
Fractional Integrators are leaders who take up a part-time position in your C-suite of employees - such as CEO's and CFO's. Most of the time, fractional C-level executives have experience with major firms and bring different skills and expertise to the role.
Often, Fractional Integrators may only work part-time or in a freelance capacity but can have the same kind of impact on your business as many of your full-time staff. Not only do fractional executives bring their skills to your business, but they may lend a certain amount of credibility to your business too.
An integrator comes into your organization in a fractional or full-time capacity as an EOS® expert on a day-to-day basis. Integrators bring experience and knowledge to help execute EOS® practices correctly, ensuring your business gets the most out of using the tools EOS® has to offer, guiding you to success and growth.
Have an Integrator that needs additional coaching?
Looking for a qualified Integrator and need help?
Need a Fractional Integrator with EOS® knowledge?
No matter what stage of the process you’re in, finding the ultimate Integrator for your team is essential to your company’s success. GCE can work alongside you and your executives to find the ideal candidate, train an existing Integrator, or even supply a Fractional Integrator until we find you a permanent replacement.
What are the Benefits of Having a Fractional Integrator?
There are many benefits of your company hiring a Fractional Integrator: Looking for strong leadership? Being a great leader doesn't come naturally to many people; however, a Fractional Integrator has already been where you are and was able to help lead their business to success by working alongside visionary leaders.
While your business doesn't need to have bad leadership to justify bringing on a fractional executive, if appropriately filled, the role can bring it to a whole new level.
Another benefit is a Fractional Integrator's ability to scale and know when to scale your business. Many Fractional Integrators would be more capable of knowing when you should scale. They would also have a more precise input on how fast your business should scale.
After all, business isn't a one size fits all scenario. A Fractional Integrator will bring a level of experience to help you make the right decision and increase the efficiency of your business.
A Fractional Integrator can also coach and mentor both the business owner themselves and the employees in the business. With that in mind, they'll be able to help your business right from the start and leave a positive impact on your employees.
Setting Clear Goals, Objectives, And Rocks
When hiring any contractor, whether it's a sales role or a Fractional Integrator, you need to sit down with them on day one and set clear goals, objectives, and rocks. Using GOST (Goals, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics), you want to establish your goals, implement measurable objectives and get a picture of what strategies the Integrator will use to execute.
Metrics To Track ROI for a Fractional Integrator
Every company will require slightly different metrics, but here are the measure categories of improvements that we've observed work best:
Reducing Cost
Many small businesses struggle to keep costs under control, impacting the organization's profit and margins. As your new Fractional Integrator comes into the business, they should reduce costs across the organization. Possible actions might include finding better pricing for software materials or negotiating a lower price with vendors. Another area may be fixed cost variables (Capex to Opex). Your Fractional Integrator should also work with your CFO (Fractional, Agency or FTE) for better tax strategies to save your business money.
Increase Revenue
Your Fractional Integrator may or may not be a strong sales leader or even active in marketing, but they should work closely with your marketing and sales leadership to look for ways to improve revenue. Several areas to focus on include optimizing your pricing structure, discounting programs, opportunities to reengage past customers, improve your margins, and drive new sales.
Employee Satisfaction and Retention
This is an essential metric that every organization should measure month-to-month, and your Fractional Integrator can have an immediate impact. Today your accountability chart may be vague, leaving your team to run blind. Many Fractional Integrators have worked with organizations with little to no organization around their accountabilities. This leads to low employee satisfaction and higher-than-expected turnover. Your Fractional Integrator should immediately evaluate every employee, schedule 1:1 with each team member, and implement a way to track employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction scores and retention should be measured regularly and used to improve your organization as a whole
Organizational Check-up
One EOS® specific metric is a quarterly meeting score. In some cases of past GCE clients, they had a low initial organizational check-up, and once one of our Fractional Integrators came in, our check-up scores improved quarter-over-quarter. This is a metric aligned to EOS® and shows how your entire leadership team sees the performance and health of the organization.
Team Mentoring
Your Fractional Integrator is likely to mentor and improve members of your leadership team and junior staff members. This may be a primary driver for hiring a fractional integrator. Many small organizations struggle to mentor and grow junior leaders. A Fractional Integrator can help identify mentorship opportunities and people within your organization with the potential of promotion and leadership. How do you measure mentoring? You can look at mentoring from a cost perspective. How much would it cost to send your leaders to leadership training, or the cost of higher education or industry courses? Your Fractional Integrator may be able to mentor an existing employee to be the future full-time Integrator.
Is Your Company Ready For a Fractional Integrator?
Your company can benefit in many ways from hiring a Fraction Integrator, and GCE can help find the right person for the role. If you want to start the conversation, click below to get started.