A month where senior commercial hires have been in vogue…
A large proportion of our client base is made up of smaller businesses and scale-ups in various locations. As their R&D and Product Development activities progress, we’ve been on hand to help these businesses with recruitment for an array of scientists, technologists, engineers, product specialists and more.
Eventually the time to ‘go commercial’ comes around, and hiring needs often jump onto a different course at this point. The Sales tap is turned on and revenue generation becomes the name of the game… ramping up demand for senior level commercial & operational folk, sales executives, and various other customer facing posts.
March has seen us deliver on a spate of such roles, in particular helping some of our start-up clients – in areas ranging from livestock tech to horti-science – to identify those crucial first senior hires dedicated to their commercial and sales activities.
It’s no secret in the world of agri-innovation that, for all the promising tech & scientific developments taking place, it’s still proving difficult for start-ups to break through the commercialisation barrier… in other words to progress from having developed a product, to actually generating real revenue and making strides towards profitability.
Seeing more of our clients make moves to break through this ceiling can therefore only be seen as a positive development. The hard work of course is still to come… getting together a high calibre commercial team is one thing, but whether or not the product will actually fly is another question.
It will be interesting to see if these roles keep coming through our door, perhaps indicating a general swing in the market from product development to commercialisation… or if it’s simply coincidence that we’ve seen a number of these roles arise within a short period of time.
For those clients that we’ve placed senior commercial folk of a high calibre (even if we do say so ourselves!) into, it will be fascinating to see what the next year or two holds – we are keeping our fingers crossed for success!
