Eight Roles, One Blind Spot: What a Season of Interim Portraits Actually Taught Us

by Nicolas Henckes, Founder & CEO

Over the past weeks, we spent time thinking through eight C-suite functions, one at a time: CMO, CHRO, COO, CFO, a Sales or Revenue lead, CIO or CDO, a Legal Officer, and a Transformation or Restructuring Officer. The starting question was simple enough: what does an interim executive actually bring to each of these roles, and when should a growing Luxembourg SME think about bringing one in on a temporary basis?

We did not set out to find a common thread. But working through the eight, one after another, made something visible that no single one of them would have shown on its own.

The pattern behind the eight functions

In almost every situation we looked at, the company was not missing a skill on a given Tuesday morning. It already had a competent marketer, a diligent accountant, a capable salesperson, a lawyer on call when something needed a signature. What it was missing was a structure around that skill, one that had never been rebuilt since the day the business was founded, because nobody inside the company had the time, the distance, or the mandate to question it.

An interim executive, in the large majority of these situations, is not there to replace a person. They are there to replace a structure that has quietly stopped fitting the business it was built for, and to put the existing skill-holder back on solid ground.

That distinction matters for how a founder or a board should think about the decision to bring someone in. It is not "our marketing person isn't good enough." It is closer to "our marketing function was built for a company half this size, three years ago, and nobody has looked at it since." The two situations call for entirely different conversations, and confusing them is the fastest way to bring in the wrong profile for the wrong reason.

Eight functions, eight versions of the same gap

CMO - visibility rebuilt once growth outpaces reach. A company that grew through word of mouth and a founder's personal network eventually needs a marketing function that no longer depends on that one person being in the room. The interim CMO's first job is rarely a new campaign; it is building the structure (positioning, channels, a repeatable process) that the business never had time to put in place while it was busy growing. In practice: one executive in our network built a mobility-services company from the ground up, then stepped into a marketing role to lead a corporate rebrand and construct the function underneath it for an international group's Luxembourg unit.

CHRO - people decisions given structure, not improvised. Hiring, onboarding, and difficult conversations that used to happen informally around a coffee machine stop scaling once headcount crosses a certain threshold, and the absence of a real HR structure starts showing up as turnover, inconsistent decisions, and legal exposure nobody flagged in time. In practice: one profile in our network built an HR function from scratch and translated a parent company's policy into locally compliant practice across six jurisdictions at once.

COO - an operational backbone the business outgrew. Somewhere between fifteen and fifty employees, the informal way decisions used to get made stops working: the founder still approves every supplier order, and deliveries slip not for lack of resources but because nobody redesigned who decides what. In practice: one executive led an eighteen-month transformation programme for a Luxembourg institution, redesigning the governance model until decisions were made at the right level without them in the room.

CFO - questioning assumptions the numbers stopped testing. A good accountant makes sure the numbers are accurate. A CFO asks whether the story those numbers tell is still true, whether a "strategic" client is still worth what it costs to keep, or whether a pricing decision made three years ago was ever revisited. In practice: one profile in our network stepped into a company on the verge of insolvency, rebuilt the cash plan and the balance sheet, and secured a new equity investor to bring it back to viability.

Sales / Revenue - a system built beyond one founder's contacts. Sales built entirely on a founder's personal network works well for years, until growth accelerates or a harder market demands a pipeline, a method, and a team that survives without that one person's calendar. In practice: one executive in our network has repeatedly stepped into stalled businesses to rebuild growth rather than simply administer what was already there.

CIO / CDO - hidden dependencies made visible before the fix. The instinct is often to buy a piece of software and hope it fixes the underlying mess. It rarely does, because the real question is not which tool to buy, it is which decisions and exceptions got buried in spreadsheets and habits over the years, and what happens the day the person who built that system is unavailable. In practice: one profile in our network built a twenty-three-person IT and transformation department from nothing and tripled delivery throughput through process redesign, on a fixed budget.

Legal Officer - protection sized to the moment, not overbuilt. Most SMEs do not need a permanent General Counsel, and hiring one rarely makes sense at their stage. What they need is someone to put the essentials in order for exactly as long as the compliance effort requires, so that a lawyer's more expensive time is spent validating a structured file rather than building one from scratch. In practice: one executive in our network has covered fractional General Counsel duties while a company's legal counsel was on leave, and acted as interim data protection officer for an insurance company between hires.

Transformation / Restructuring - hard decisions made with time still on the clock. The earlier this function is brought in - well before the ten-day panic sets in - the more likely it is that both the company and the jobs inside it can be preserved, because most of the difficult decisions left on the table by that point are ones nobody inside the company can make with a clear head. In practice: one profile in our network restructured an entire industrial site's workforce plan, negotiated a social plan affecting more than a hundred positions, and finished with zero unwanted turnover.

This is not a case against expertise

It would be a mistake to read this as "interim executives fix broken people." That is not the pattern, and it is worth being precise about what actually happens, because the two situations call for different things from the person you bring in.

Sometimes the skill really is absent. A ten-person company preparing its first cross-border contract may simply never have had anyone with legal judgment look at what it was signing, and an interim Legal Officer fills that gap for exactly as long as the transition requires - without turning into a permanent role the business does not need.

More often, in our experience, the skill is already in the building. What an interim executive actually does is rebuild the structure around it so the person already doing the job can do it properly again. The distinction is not cosmetic. It changes how a board should scope the mandate, and it changes what success looks like at handover: not a replacement, but a function that finally fits the company it serves.

The diagnostic question worth asking first

Recognising which of the two situations a company is actually in - a missing skill, or a structure that has stopped fitting the skill already there - is most of the diagnostic work in the first weeks of any mandate. It also explains why the profile brought in matters as much as the title on the door. A CFO who spent a career auditing large listed groups is not automatically the right CFO for a founder-led business renegotiating its first bank covenant, and a turnaround specialist is not automatically the right choice when the real gap is a marketing function that was never built.

If one of these eight functions in your own company has not been questioned since it was first set up, the more useful first conversation is often not about which title to hire, but about which of the two situations above you are actually in.

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By Nicolas Henckes, Founder & CEO of Kitsune Advisory. Kitsune Advisory provides interim CEO and C-level services, strategic advisory, and executive leadership development to companies in Luxembourg, France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland.