About the organization
Our customer is a division of a global company with more than 120 years of expertise. They deliver products and solutions in the market of electronic financial transactions. They are considered market leader in their industry. They add value to customers through training and consultancy, test and certification services, security evaluation services and (automated) test tools.
Our customer is formed after the acquisition of a payment technology organization in 2012. By means of both organic growth and through acquisitions, they are now a true global company, within the global parent company.
Since the acquisition in 2012, our customer has expanded from about 100 employees – mainly in the Netherlands – to 600 employees globally. With main hubs in the Netherlands, the United States of America, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Australia and offices in many other countries, our customer has a true global footprint.
For their Advisory & Educational Services Division, our customer seeks to hire a business leader with global P&L responsibility, residing in their Atlanta Office. The role can be characterized as Chief Consulting Services.
About the role
The Chief Consulting Services (further referred to as CCS) manages revenue-budget, cost-margin, people and processes critical to the delivery of Advisory & Educational Services and Project Management Organization (PMO). The CCS provides oversight for strategic consultancy programs, regionally or globally. Advisory services range from business strategy implementation towards the technical advisory for specific projects in scope of our customers’ clients. The strategy of our customer is to move up the value stream of clients, being involved in strategy development down to implementation and project execution. The CCS is responsible for transitioning the team from an internally focused and ‘billed-by-the-hour’ group of professionals, towards a high performing and customer focused team, acting as a trusted advisor, selling and implementing full solutions to customers against defined deliverables. The AES division is responsible for a turn-over of roughly 20 million USD. The average contract size is getting bigger and bigger. The growth target is significant (over 10% YoY). Where the AES division previously was build around geographies, it now is structured by product-offering. The current AES organization consists of roughly 80 people across different geographies organized around 3 main channels. The first channel – Solutions – is new to the division (and organization). The second channel consists of 3 verticals, being Payments, Transit and Government. The third channel consist of the Project Management Office (PMO). Solutions (around 10 people) is responsible for developing, maintaining and optimizing the solution offering for the entire organization. The three verticals (around 60) cover both Strategy and Implementation. The PMO (around 10 people) runs large contracts and strategic projects. As the AES division is moving from product to customer orientation, they have to partner with the global Sales team in the sales cycle. They need to stand in the shoes of the customers and create sound understanding of their challenges. Based on that understanding they develop new and state-of-art strategic solutions for the global organization and productize them. Execution of those solutions is organized by service line. Being an undisputed industry leader, the CCS acts as a spokesperson in the customer environment and industry forums and ensures that our customer is aligned according to the latest payment- and technology developments. He/she is responsible for strategic focus of the team, knowledge and expertise development within the market domain(s) of our customer. CCS is customer focused and can act as a trusted advisor towards customers. In short, the CCS oversees solution & offerings and develops them in collaboration with sales and business development. He/she oversees team operations to achieve people and operational goals and supports and collaborates with other services lines to ensure customer satisfaction and achievement of business objectives.
About you
You combine significant (15+ years) business leadership experience with a (technical) masters degree. You have extensive expertise combining great advisory leadership and payment technology knowledge with hands-on execution power. You have a proven track record in transitioning individuals and teams towards customer and operational excellence by creating an outside-in and result-oriented culture. You excel in teaching people how to truly identify and solve clients’ strategic problems.
You enjoy the challenge of working internationally and inter-functionally. You have bridged different organizational and regional cultures before. You are mainly residing in the Atlanta office and travel regularly to offices of both your team and your customers. You have fluency in speaking, reading and writing English. Other languages are considered an advantage. You have good understanding of Lean Sigma and Project Management principles and concepts enabling you to lead execution of complex projects in a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural environment.
You are considered an effective leader, focusing on communication, culture and competence in the people and teams who execute the work. Foremost however, you advocate and display a transparent and consistent leadership style and take a consequent accountability for performance.
Towards your team, you provide objective feedback and coaching on performance and progress and you establish trust, through loyalty to people and commitment and accountability to results. You create common cause through clear communication of needs, dependencies and expectations between teams and stakeholders.
Furthermore, people love working with you for your business sense, your drive to collaborate, your silo-breaking approach, your ability to get people work as a team and to get things done.
Next to all that – and above all – you are a transparent and humble leader.
