My entire career has been in manufacturing. Everything from bulk chemical, specialty chemicals, semiconductor high purity chemicals to metal parts, electronic parts, assemblies, medical devices, up to multi-million dollar capital equipment. All kinds of Industries.

I started doing consulting work in 1998 and made the mistake of taking an full time interim CFO spot for a client. Now I will never take an interim assignment for more than 3 days per week. You need time to cultivate relationships for the next project! Taking that FT assignment definitely hurt my practice.

My clients are usually smaller private companies under $100 million sales that are looking to organize for growth. We offer a broad-based experience so clients get the one-stop shop. Everything from strategic planning to ISO implementation to product or process design and everything in between. Today, turnarounds are the most common situation. We help them set up plans, improve operational efficiencies, eliminate bottlenecks (grow capacity), obtain financing and/or partnerships, and develop new and/or improved products. We typically return 1,000 to 10,000% on our compensation in terms of increased EBITDA. And most of our projects are fixed price projects because we have excellent scope definition capabilities due to our extensive manufacturing background. This also sets us apart.

We offer free consults in the Northern NJ area. See the Focused Solutions Group site. When we take on projects that are too large for us, we bring in Associates with the specific skills we need, so I'm excited to MapMyTeam when that function is fully developed on this site. Meanwhile, we accept Associates on our site which now has quite powerful searching tools. Also no cost, I want to encourage my InterimCEO colleagues to Create an Account on our site, and add their profile.

I attended the NYC event last month and found it quite interesting. Thanks to interimCEO for putting this together! Welcome to my fellow interim Executives!

Tom Smith