Traditional consultancies are characterized by a top-down structure. Qualified graduates are hired and go through a series of dedicated postgraduate trainings to quickly establish expertise while already working within projects. Professional newjoiners usually stay between two and four years within consulting firms, resulting in a relatively low number of experienced consultants within the firm. Employees in traditional consulting companies often feel restricted after several years and begin thinking about an alternative market access as an external contractor.
In locations such as London and Zurich and partly in Germany, an increased trend towards contracting has been taken place for several years. Contractors are working for their customers via recruitment agencies. Although social networks allow to continue knowledge exchange, intensive knowledge management is not supported within agencies. To this end, agencies are frequently too far away from their customers with respect to functional expertise, such that the search for experts becomes more difficult for their clients. With exprio, we are acting in the middle of traditional consulting and agencies, this is to the benefit of both, contractors and customers.
exprio gives you the right balance between traditional consulting and recruitment agencies. Independent consultants who are characterized by experience and expertise in their fields of specialisation are the core team of exprio. We cooperate in terms of contacts, expertise and infrastructure. Due to our contacts, we are always very close to the customer, and often see the difficulty finding suitable candidates for special open job offers. To this end, our consultants act as possible staffing agents with functional expertise and rely on an extensive network with knowledge exchange. In addition, everyone gets a fair rate and has the possibility to generate additional income by offering the right members of exprio to the client.
This approach allows us to be very flexible with regards to the needs of our customers. Our model allows us to offer consulting services at lower rates than traditional consulting firms while guaranteeing a very high quality standard. We take advantage of the economies of scale in terms of infrastructure, we have no need for special office locations. Within exprio there is only a small investment in common post-graduate trainings, because each consultant determines his training independently. At the same time, our customers benefit from an international network of subject matter experts. In addition, our experts bring a high degree of responsibility and reliability, because each one is self-employed and is aware of the importance of our customer relationships.
exprio is still a very young expert network. The first company was founded in January 2016 as exprio Ltd in Cologne. We encounter first interest from contractors such that our network is growing from month to month, herewith the extension of exprio has its focus on quality instead of quantity. The next important step is the expansion of our network of small companies. Starting from the core company in Cologne, we are looking for more companies to join, our focus is on European countries such as England, France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.
Due to organisational changes all Network and consulting activity is offered through exprio Services GmbH from 1st January 2019 onwards.
Since March 2018, all premium members of exprio have used a common Microsoft infrastructure, we are now acting as a virtual organisation with MS SharePoint, MS Exchange Server and further common tools.
In January 2018 we have has our first meeting in Person in Cologne. The core members have further discussed and developed the idea of exprio and we agreed to offer a Basic Membership as well as a premium Membership.
In 2017 we have passed an important milestone, some members have used exprio to offer and to get projects. The number of beneficiaries and members is growing constantly over time.
We launched our new intranet Website ‘My exprio’. Members of our network are now connected through an internal platform which is used for internal purposes like invoicing, HR processing and every members has Access to all exprio related projects and member Details.
The capital has been increased to give the network a first solid basis and to allow for first master agreements with our clients.
About our projects, and social networks like LinkedIn and XING, we approach qualified professionals and try to draw attention to the advantages of our network.
The starting point of exprio was the foundation of the exprio Ltd. Due to a lot of brainstorming with experts, the idea of the network concept has evolved after 4 months.