Over the past few years I keep seeing one pattern play out more and more often in practice: a company has a technically excellent product, loyal customers, and honest work behind it — but sales just aren’t working. Revenue gets stuck at a number that covers costs but won’t fund expansion. The founder knows the product is good, because customers tell them so. What they don’t know is how to turn it into a business that grows.
Why Venture Capital Isn’t the Answer to Everything
The classic advice is: find an investor. But venture capital looks at completely different criteria than product quality or customer satisfaction. Investors care about growth rate, scalability, and a story that can be sold onward. A business built on honest B2B sales, long-term relationships, and gradually building a partner network often strikes them as slow, boring, not sexy enough. So the founder ends up stuck between two chairs — they have the product, they can’t raise capital, and they don’t have time to figure it out themselves while running full-time operations.
This is exactly where I see room for interim management. Not every company needs an investment round and dilution of ownership. Often, for a limited time — say six to twelve months — an experienced manager who has been through a similar transformation several times before is enough. Their job isn’t to invent a new product, but to build a working sales engine around it: defining target segments, setting up a partner network or direct sales, bringing discipline to lead handling and reporting, and above all setting up processes so the company can grow from its own cash, not someone else’s money. If it works, the owner comes out of the mandate without being in debt to investors or diluted in the cap table. What they’re left with is a company that knows how to sell.
When an Interim Solution Makes Sense
Deploying an interim manager typically makes sense in three situations. The first is exactly the scenario described above — a good product with weak sales, where what’s missing is discipline and structure rather than ideas. The second is a phase of rapid growth, when the owner is running operations single-handedly and has no capacity to build a commercial function systematically. The third, and perhaps the most sensitive, is the moment a company realizes its internal team can handle operations, but no one inside has experience with scaling — and hiring someone full-time for a one-off task is expensive and needlessly rigid. In all three cases, the value of an interim manager lies in arriving with a ready-made methodology and no emotional attachment to past decisions, so they can quickly name what’s actually not working in the company.
The mandate often also involves working with the people around the executive team — typically an interim CFO who brings order to the numbers, or an interim HR manager who helps build the team for the new growth phase. Interim managers don’t work in isolation. The strongest results come when the individual roles within a mandate work closely together, much as a permanent interim CEO would work with their own leadership team.
A Leader’s Maturity Shows in the Shift From Numbers to People
Over the years I’ve spent around executives, I’ve noticed one shift that I see more and more often in the best of them: they start out purely business-focused — revenue, margins, processes — and gradually add emphasis on the people who deliver those numbers. A manager who can handle both isn’t just able to rescue or launch a company — they can hand it off in a condition where further growth continues even without them.
The question I find myself asking more and more often is: how many companies around you — clients, partners, former colleagues — are sitting on a great product right now, waiting for someone to help with the rest?
