Hans Ploos van Amstel, then chief financial officer of the Adecco Group, discusses stakeholder value from the finance chair. His position is that growth will not last unless all stakeholders come with it, and that milking today’s business model does not build tomorrow’s.
The conversation was recorded during the early COVID period, and he opens on the human side of the crisis, arguing that companies will be remembered for how they treated people rather than for a single quarter.
Key findings
- Three years earlier Adecco rewrote its contract with shareholders, committing to perform while also transforming and innovating, and reinvesting three years of profit to build for the future.
- It was uncomfortable at first because short-term profit was being traded for long-term benefit, but two and a half years later the shareholders understood and were committed.
- He treats the budget as a guardrail rather than a guide, comparing it to sailing where the wind keeps changing and you have to course correct. In many companies the process is too rigid and gives a false sense of security.
- The real benchmark he proposes is competitive rather than internal: are we winning with our customers, and are we winning against competition.
- He checks three things every quarter: are we performing, did we deliver the relative growth we needed, and are we transforming and building the technology of tomorrow.
Take finance out of the spreadsheet
His first advice to marketers is physical. Take finance people away from their desks and into the world, because that builds a better relationship and makes the two functions speak the same language.
He describes his own training that way: taken to focus groups early in his career and made to sell detergent in a store on a Saturday, then going to the store at one employer and to the branch at another.
Where marketing can help finance most, in his view, is shaping a growth agenda that improves gross margin. His shorthand for it is value over volume.
The candidate app, and why a CFO smiles about it
He frames the recruiting business by its failure rate. If seven people come into a branch, one gets a job and the other six hear nothing back.
The new candidate app was built with net promoter score measurement for candidates, and lets people look for work anonymously without walking into a branch or explaining at home why they were turned down.
The placement ratio moved from one in seven toward one in six and then one in five, which means faster placement and fewer rejections, and he notes the commercial effect directly: costs came down and pricing power improved.
His broader point about transformation is that cost alone is not a strategy. Taking only cost out commoditizes the business and the pricing goes with it, so cost and value have to be worked on together.
What marketing leaders should learn next
The first item on his list is demystifying data. He hired a data scientist reporting directly to him, took him for pizza every four weeks to be taught the difference between data science and data analytics, and now has him training the team to code.
The second is thinking about where technology can be used in your own function, since the lines between the physical and technological worlds are blurring and that makes some businesses and some functions obsolete.
The third is the value chain. His instruction is not to think through a marketing lens but through the value creation of the business, and only then how you market it.
On data privacy, he notes his industry holds sensitive payroll and personal data, and that good encoding lets a company strip away what is private from the data it can use.
Generalists, specialists and who owns growth
He describes the senior role as a generalist surrounded by specialists, using the image of conducting an orchestra where the music comes from the specialists.
Asked whether he would hire a CMO or a chief growth officer, he chooses growth. No business wins without it, so he would appoint a growth officer with a growth agenda and specialists in marketing and digital underneath.
The requirement he attaches is ownership. Somebody must own the growth agenda and drive it in a transformative way, and cost can be managed by the CFO.
His closing advice is about learning. If you are not open to learning from everybody you will never learn, silos are killing, and building a new skill takes about as long as getting fit.
Scope and limitations
This is one executive’s account of his own company, recorded during the early months of the pandemic, and the operational results he cites are self-reported rather than independently verified.
Source
This page summarises Humanizing Growth Series: Hans Ploos van Amstel & Frank van den Driest in conversation, by Hans Ploos van Amstel, Frank van den Driest, April 2020.