Hans Ploos van Amstel is chief financial officer of a staffing group that has six hundred thousand people out on assignment on any given day. His starting position on the multi-stakeholder argument is that it has an economic proof rather than a moral one, and he treats profit as a reward for having done something rather than as the objective.
His most concrete move was to renegotiate what the company had promised its shareholder. Adecco committed publicly to reinvesting three years of profit improvement, and did it in a way the market could not immediately price against them.
Key findings
- He is unsentimental about why investors distrust a transformation plan, and puts the fault on management rather than on the market. Too many teams have promised transformative change and not delivered it.
- The tactic he describes for getting the plan through is a matter of timing. Announcing it at a capital markets day, released early in the morning, means the shareholders in the room cannot sell ahead of it, and the new expectation is priced in before they can act on the old one.
- His view of a budget is a guardrail rather than a truth, and he says outright that he has taken criticism from his own board for saying so.
- The real benchmark, in his account, is not the plan but the market: whether the company is winning with customers and against competitors. He runs three questions each quarter rather than a forecast, and Adecco gives no guidance at all.
- Asked what he protected through the crisis, his answer is a list of things he did not cut. No strategic investment was compromised in the quarter, on the reasoning that a postponed investment is only a deferred bill.
Take finance away from the desk
His first piece of advice to marketers is physical rather than analytical. At Procter he was taken to focus groups he had no interest in and made to sell detergent in a store on a Saturday. At Levi’s he went to the shops. At Adecco he goes to the branch.
The reason he gives is not sympathy but vocabulary. Marketing and finance speak different languages, and the shared experience is what makes a shared language possible.
The soup, and not the tomatoes
On marketing’s return on investment, his instruction is to stop measuring the wrong thing precisely. He is uninterested in the return of an individual advertisement and says so.
What he wants instead is three to five measures that matter, agreed jointly, and pursued without drift. His objection to optimizing everything is that a company gets lost in it while the world moves.
The interviewer’s summary of the problem the study found is worth keeping alongside it: marketers can talk about return, but often about channel or media efficiency rather than about what the spending did to the business.
Recruitment is rejection
The example that carries the whole argument is a statistic he found in his own business. Seven people come into a branch, one gets a job, and the other six hear nothing again.
The work started as customer experience research: interviews about why a candidate chooses one agency over another, touchpoint analysis, psychometrics. Adecco began measuring net promoter score with candidates rather than only with clients, and built a candidate app around what it found.
The application removes the part of the process people dread. You can look for work without presenting yourself, and without going home to explain that you did not get it.
The result is stated as a ratio rather than a sentiment. One in seven became one in six, heading for one in five, which means faster placement, fewer rejections, lower cost and better pricing power at the same time.
Elsewhere in the conversation he prices the same move. Moving the ratio is worth a hundred and fifty million, and he pairs the money with the people in the same breath.
Demystify the data before you buy any
His first recommendation for retooling is an admission. He did not know the difference between data science and data analytics, hired someone who did, and had him explain it over a pizza every four weeks.
The instruction that follows is that this cannot be delegated to one hire. The specialist trains the rest of the team to do it themselves, and the function has to become genuinely capable rather than served.
His second recommendation is aimed at his own function first. Daily reporting can be self-service, and he is content to say so in front of a board.
The third is to look past the function to the value chain, and to ask what the proposition itself becomes rather than only how it is marketed.
Privacy is an engineering problem with a manners problem attached
Asked about data protection, Ploos van Amstel treats it as solvable by separating what is private from what is usable, since his business holds payroll data.
The failure he actually complains about has nothing to do with regulation. His wife’s order did not arrive, and the company replied with a general notice rather than to her.
The economic case underneath humanized growth
Ploos van Amstel says he has written a paper on this for the European Central Bank, and reduces the argument to two variables. Growth requires more people at work at higher productivity, and nothing else does it.
Both variables are under pressure. Demographics shrink the workforce, so the participation rate has to be raised by retooling people already working and bringing in people who are not. Productivity is subdued.
The conclusion is why he treats bringing people along the technology agenda as an economic necessity rather than a preference, and he is blunt about what happens when capital forgets labor.
He also disposes of the assumption that technology destroys employment, with a comparison from his own industry’s history.
The shock absorber
Asked for a mistake, he gives a category rather than an incident: not bringing stakeholders with him, and specifically not bringing his own board along on the investment case early enough.
His image for the chief financial officer’s position is mechanical and unusually useful. The role sits between management, board and shareholder, absorbing shocks and sometimes delivering them, and its function is to keep the wheels on the road.
He is also direct that none of this was smooth, and pushes back on the interviewer’s suggestion that he makes it sound easy.
A hundred percent tax on this year’s bonuses
His view of what will be remembered is not the quarter. He repeats that a quarter is a small fraction of a company’s value, and that the question is what shape the business is in when the crisis ends.
The sharpest thing he says is a policy proposal about executive pay, made while governments were funding the survival of the companies paying it.
The warning he leaves marketers with is about the demand curve on the other side, which he expects to be lower for longer, and a customer who is not the same customer.
Who he would hire
Asked whether he would hire a chief marketing officer or a chief growth officer as a new chief executive, he takes the growth officer, and defines the role by the agenda rather than the discipline.
His model of a senior role is the conductor rather than the soloist, and he is explicit that the generalist is worthless without the specialists and the specialists are noise without the generalist.
Scope and limitations
This is one executive’s account of his own company, recorded in 2020. The savings figure, the placement ratios and the claim that no strategic investment was cut are his own statements rather than reported results, and the economic argument is offered as a conviction with a proof sketched rather than shown.
Source
This page summarises HGS #6: Hans Ploos (CFO, Amstel) talks about how marketers can partner with finance., by Frank van den Driest, 2020-09-30.