By Andrew Macdonald
Veteran Halifax business leader Rick Emberley is meeting with tremendous success at his executive and corporate talent bank Seasoned Pros.
Originally founded in 2006 as Boomers Plus, the business model of Seasoned Pros is to collect resumes from corporate and professional toilers across the country, and then match these executives with third-party businesses.
As a simple example, Seasoned Pros might have a chartered accountant on its talent bank who is then hired by a business looking for temporary or part time accounting services.
The roster of leading companies who have hired from Emberley’s talent bank is long and includes Clearwater Seafoods, Shaw Group and MacLeod Group, a nursing chain, among other companies.
In a former life, Emberley, who summers on the South Shore, for three decades ran the ad agency Bristol Group. These days, when Google and Facebook gobble up so much advertising revenue, agency businesses in Halifax have struggled. The traditional agency model had been to generate revenues from placing newspaper, TV and radio spots, so Bristol Group is now defunct.
Rick Emberley is a highly successful serial entrepreneur and the founder of Seasoned Pros, a matchmaking service for corporations as his database consists of folk who retired from careers to now give advice as hired consultants to companies. (The Notebook photo).
So it is nice to see Rick Emberley’s latest business offering succeed.
National Talent Network
“Since our inception, thousands of professionals have joined our national talent network looking for opportunities to take advantage of their wisdom and expertise and contribute to their sense of purpose and community,” says the website for Seasoned Pros.
“To date, our seasoned professionals have helped hundreds of organizations – from small to large businesses and nonprofit and community organizations – overcome challenges and grow.”
Who Ever Retires Today?
In today’s society, a professional or corporate executive never fully retires, and that is where Seasoned Pros comes in. It seeks career-oriented types for its national talent bank, and then matches or pairs that individual to a third-party business operator, who might on a temporary basis, or part-time, require an expert, maybe a retired civil engineer, for instance, who could be hired by a small road builder.
Seasoned Pros bills itself as “on-demand business services” contracting out retired career professions to assist small to mid-size businesses, and also non-profits.
For this story, I talked to Emberley’s CEO of Seasoned Pros, Kevin MacIntyre.
As baby boomer professions retire, they might not want 100 per cent retirement, and Seasoned Pros wants to hear from that exec, who might want to work on temporary business files, or part-time gigs.
And, with baby boomers moving on from their careers, some entrepreneurs will need to execute succession planning – and those folk can tap the talent bank assembled by Seasoned Pros.
“We’re a much different business model than we were back in our founding year in 2016. I would frame this as Seasoned Pros being an on-demand business talent marketplace,” says MacIntyre.
“Organizations are starting to rethink” their business offerings. “They just do not have the budgets to hire full-time only, so there is a shift going on across the world, due to the world talent shortage, which is going to get worse. Organizations are starting to think how they need a full-time permanent workforce, but they also need a contingency workforce,” explains MacIntyre.
While larger companies have the capability to hire full-time, MacIntyre says a new trend is that a contingency workforce, the gig economy, “is a way for small companies, non-profits to hire the expertise to grow,” he adds.
“It might not be a permanent, full-time hire but might be someone hired a day a week, a month or six months. It is a way to access the expertise and talent you need to grow your organization.”
Seasoned Pros has been in business for eight years “and our intention is to grow this across the country”.
Headquartered in Halifax, Seasoned Pros is eying the 14 major cities across Canada. It has for hire professional clients across Atlantic Canada, as well as in Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, London and Calgary. “Our intent is to become the on-demand marketplace for Canada,” MacIntyre tells The Macdonald Notebook.
The Seasoned Pros website is the portal to hire clients from its database.
“No one on our database is retired. We have thousands of seasoned pros across the country in our database.”
Those for-hire executives are from management-level careers right up to former CEOs. Those clients tend not to want to work full-time, 95 per cent of them want to work on a project-by-project basis, toil part-time and do a temporary gig.
“The reason why they are in our database is they want to work on projects, do fractional work, interim work, or take on advisory roles as opposed to the traditional full-time,” explains MacIntyre.
The age group the exec talent bank has assembled, are folks over 40, folks who have transitioned out of a full-time career.
“There are folk who do not want to think of that ‘R’ word (retirement), who are thinking ‘I want to build the rest of my career on (temp work),” says MacIntyre. “Our role in that is if a client comes to us, we are built on speed and depth of experience. We can provide clients with two to four vetted candidates for them in 10 days or less.
“We have folks from CEO-level, finance, accounting, operations, sales, business development, marketing, communications, legal, human resources, project managers.”
There is no charge for a professional to join the database because Seasoned Pros make from placement fees. The small- to medium-sized company that hires a professional would pay a search fee to Seasoned Pros, and then negotiate payment with the individual being hired.
Succession planning
With so many baby boomer entrepreneurs looking to exit a business, a critical business aspect is executing a succession plan. That is where Seasoned Pros can hire out business advisors.
“That is a part of our advisory roles. We at Seasoned Pros have experience with succession planning and business transition. If an organization comes along and says, “I need help in that space’ then to us, that is another role that we can fill,” MacIntyre tells The Macdonald Notebook.
“It’s a growing area for us,” he says.
“We have huge challenges, particularly in smaller markets like Atlantic Canada, where a lot of companies will be transitioning or succession planning among family,” he adds. “We can help with that.”
MacIntyre says over 500 companies and organizations have hired out Seasoned Pros freelance professionals.
Seasoned Pros also puts on programs, such as how to execute succession plans, and over 100 companies have participated in those programs.
“A client comes to us, and says ‘Here is a hole or gap in the business expertise that we need; we do not have it today in the organization, or everybody is too busy’. Then they define the issue,” explains MacIntyre.
“One of the biggest issues out there today is business transition. ‘How do I position my business to be sold in the next two, three, five or 10 years?’ And, we have people that skill set so we can solve their problem.”
