Leveraging an Expert Network with Thom McLeod | Episode 182

Greg Alexander:

Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander, founder of Collective 54 and host of the Pro Serve Podcast, which is what you’re listening to right now. If you’re not familiar with this show, it is for founders and leaders of boutique professional services firms who are trying to make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. On this episode, we’re going to talk about the expert network, which is a very innovative and creative way to scale a professional service in a relatively stress-free and flexible manner. I think it’s something that many of our members could leverage more, and they don’t. To help me explain the concept and share some in-depth knowledge on it is a member of Collective 54, Thom McLeod, who has built his entire firm on this unique concept of an expert network. I might even go so far as to say he is an expert network. So we’re going to tap into his knowledge and hopefully learn from him. With that, Thom, why don’t you introduce yourself to the community?

Thom McLeod:

Sure. Hi, everybody. It’s been great to be part of the community. I’ve gotten a lot of value from quite a few of these podcasts and sessions myself. So I’m really happy to be able to make a contribution back and hope that you all get some value out of it. I’m a co-founder with Bill Angelony of Tenzing Consulting, and we founded it about 22 years ago in a very practical way. We were just bootstrapping a boutique essentially. So we’re all boutique founders, most of us are. A very practical way to bootstrap our boutique was to use contractors, and at a very simple prosaic level, that’s what we started out doing. But what it’s evolved into is a much more elaborate, much more intentional talent strategy, taking advantage of the mobility, flexibility, and nature of the gig economy in the professional services space. So that’s kind of how we all got here.

Greg Alexander:

Tell us a little bit about the niche that your firm plays in, the types of clients you solve, the problems you solve, etc.

Thom McLeod:

Absolutely. So we built our network, which is now well over 1,000 experts worldwide that we’ve recruited. We curate that network, and these are folks we know and trust to deploy on engagements with our clients. Our main areas of specialty are procurement, supply chain, and manufacturing. So any companies, any clients, for example, that have physical supply chains, they may even be service companies or companies that we would focus on. Our clients range from large corporates, corporate clients in the tens of billions of revenue, to smaller, let’s say mid-cap or even small-cap companies, many of which are private equity-owned. Private equity firms really like the idea of experts to be able to go into their companies and operators who really know what they’re doing. So that’s kind of where our niche sits right now. I did mention that we are global. This network we built is about two-thirds in the US, but the other third is mostly in Europe and other parts of the world.

Greg Alexander:

Okay. So let’s start with the basics. Provide us a working definition of an expert network.

Thom McLeod:

Got it. Well, let’s start with a working explanation or a definition of an expert. What do we call an expert within the context of Tenzing? We’re looking at people with functional expertise in procurement, supply chain, and manufacturing. But also, there’s very often an intersection of that expertise with a particular industry. So procurement in aerospace is very different from procurement in food. A supply chain for a large automotive company doesn’t look anything like the supply chain for a chemical company. So expertise has both a functional and an industry dimension. When you intersect those two dimensions, you really have an expert who knows what they’re doing. The other thing we’re looking for is typically people with 15 to maybe 25 or 30 years of experience. We love it when they’ve worked for consulting firms because then they are good at consulting. But what we’re really looking for in an expert is an operator, someone who’s run the function, done the job. As we like to say to our clients, someone who’s sat in the chair, they really know what you do and know how you and your people do it. So they can be more effective as a consultant, advisor, and co-executor within their business. That’s what an expert is. Now, what’s a network? It’s a bunch of those, right? So rather than being random, we built the expert network kind of organically over time based on the demands of our clients. If they needed something we didn’t have, we went and recruited more of it. We built it very intentionally. I’d like to say strategically, but it wasn’t like we thought way ahead and recruited a lot of people we weren’t sure we would need. We were very responsive to the market. Building this network is not just scraping people off of LinkedIn. It’s not just a drawer full of resumes. We know what we’re looking for. Our recruiters really understand what an expert is, they know what qualifies as an expert, and we take them through a rigorous screening process, including technical interviews and so forth. By the time you add all that up, you have a network. Our network started with maybe 12 people we knew when we bootstrapped the company, and now it’s 1,400 experts around the world that our clients have come to trust.

Greg Alexander:

Wow. That’s an amazing story, it really is. I’m going to ask you some very basic questions, and of course, more detailed questions will come from the private member Q&A. So why would an expert enroll in your expert network? What do you provide them?

Thom McLeod:

Got it. Well, at its most basic level, it’s access to work. When we’re looking for experts, we’re mostly looking for people who have chosen to do this as a living. Occasionally, there are people who are trying consulting, maybe kind of passing through consulting, and they want to see what it’s like. But mostly, these are folks, this is what they do. This is how they’ve chosen to work. This is how they’ve chosen to take the vast experience they have and really put it to work and balance their own lives. They can work as much as they want or as little. Some work a lot, some work a little less. So we kind of have to meet all those experts on their own terms.