Former Barrington Hills Man Helps Firms Thrive Amid `New Talent Reality’

With the upturn in business conditions, your employee workload is increasing quickly and you need to find a way to ramp up your capabilities.

New business initiatives and marketplace changes are stretching the depth of your organization’s talent, but hiring is difficult and costly. How do you address your needs and protect your business from the potential impact of an upturn that is not sustained?

Having pared company staffing levels several years ago, how do you prevent re-incurring those employee costs even as you address talent challenges in 2012 and beyond?

Throughout the business community, these types of dilemmas are surfacing with increasing frequency.

Into the fray to help address those concerns is Peter de Freitas, Patina Solutions’ Insurance Services Practice Leader. Currently a resident of Wayne, he called Barrington Hills home from 1987 to 2005. In that time, he served on Shelter Inc.’s Board of Directors from 1992 to 2000, including a 1996-1998 term as board chairman.

With offices in four cities, including Chicago, Patina Solutions was founded in 2008 and is one of the fastest-growing professional services firms in America as it has carved out a niche perfectly suited to this “new talent reality.”

The company has seized on the nation’s evolving demographic reality—in particular, the rising tide of the over-50 executive workforce—and has cultivated a diverse and accomplished portfolio of specialized professionals. These individuals, many with extensive C-level experience, have served corporate clients seeking flexible, tailored solutions on-demand.

The company is particular about which professionals qualify to be in their portfolio of talent.

“We pride ourselves on working closely with our clients to understand their needs and the expected deliverables to ensure we provide an effective business solution,” said de Freitas. “In most engagements, we are presenting to our clients multiple candidates who have specifically addressed the business issue at hand in a previous role. The client then has the ability to choose which professional is the best fit for their organization and the assignment.”

“The Patina professional brings significant breadth and depth to any engagement,” de Freitas added. “We believe the benefit of the Patina professionals’ experience is to provide solutions quicker, which allows the benefits of the engagement to accrue faster to our client.”

Jerry Roper, CEO of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, praised Patina Solutions for helping companies “win the war for talent.”

“Patina Solutions is creating value for Chicago businesses by helping them understand and solve both short-term and long-term talent issues,” Roper said. “They offer an excellent value proposition and, simply put, they are putting Chicagoans to work.”

Bolstered by an impressive roster of expert, seasoned professionals with Fortune 100-caliber talent, Patina Solutions offers companies convenient access to talent they cannot readily find elsewhere, said Ed Elsbury, a Patina Solutions Managing Director. Typically, they have at least 25 years of senior leadership or functional experience.

“When executing on corporate initiatives, some of our corporate clients have a knowledge or talent gap of some kind,” said Elsbury. “For others, it’s more of a bandwidth issue. They have good people in-house, but they are already deployed on other initiatives. For our small- and medium-size client companies, they want to have access to Fortune 100 talent for specific on-demand support.”

In turning to Patina Solutions, clients are seeking help with special projects, transformation initiatives, advisory services, change management and system implementation support, said Kevin Carlson, the firm’s Managing Partner in the Chicago area

Manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and life sciences are among those industries with the greatest need. All have knowledge and expertise gaps created in the wake of the recent economic downturn. Over the last decade, organizations have had to reassess their management and operating structures to adjust to changed market conditions, said Carlson.

And as positions held by senior management have been eliminated, either through retirement, cutbacks or some other means, businesses are facing the reality that they need to think about how to strategically replace that expertise.

Patina Solutions, said Elsbury, enables companies “to quickly leverage experienced professionals to get very specific or specialized projects executed quickly and effectively.”

And it does so, he added, “without having to go through the traditional channels of large consulting companies or bringing on permanent headcount.”

“Sometimes it’s a one-off project that doesn’t necessarily warrant a fulltime employee,” Elsbury said. “And often an organization going through a transformation has two distinct needs—someone who is able to execute on that transformation and someone else who is capable of leading that now-transformed company.”

To learn more about Patina Solutions, visit www.patinasolutions.com or call de Freitas at 312-447-0900, extension 208.