It was while Aldagh McDonogh was marketing director of Coca-Cola and Sandra Lawler was international strategic planner at Irish Distillers that they discovered there was a dearth of flexible marketing talent in the Irish market. McDonogh was left in a bit of a quandary when a senior member of her Coke team went on six months maternity leave.

Lawler wanted to hire skilled senior executives for feasibility studies on new openings. Neither could find fast, flexible reliable talent. They had also noticed changes in ways of working, with experienced business people in search of more flexible and varied careers. Having been there, done that, opportunity knocked. So February 2000, enter Alternatives.

McDonogh and Lawler decided that the agency would be a unique business model, run by marketers for marketers. Alternatives would strive to offer the best marketing people around, allowing access to talent as and when required. Both founders had over 15 years senior marketing experience with blue chip companies and they felt cautiously upbeat.

The interim concept began in Holland in the 1970s in response to the country's stringent employment laws. The trend later spread to the UK and the US. Fortune recently ran an article on this type of portfolio-style of working. The figure for 'knowledge workers' in the US is now two in ten and it is expected to jump to four in ten by 2010.

Typically, clients would turn to Alternatives to fill a gap during maternity leave or after an executive had made an unexpected departure. But the agency may also get a call from a clients wanting to accelerate an assignment or a project on the 'to-do list'. They might need someone to run a workshop or an experienced hand to help on a part-time basis.

Alternatives recruit their 450-plus executive panel from marketers returning to Ireland from abroad, those on a year out travelling, or perhaps coming to the country with partners on secondment. Senior marketers wishing to work on an interim or a once-off project for the variety it lends would also be on the agency's books.

The panel comprises male and female marketers, with anything from three to 20 years marketing experience. They are available to work with clients for a day, a week or several months. Some even stay on permanently. Some clients will hire senior consultants and then replace them later with longer-term interims to roll out the recommendations.

Although McDonogh and Lawler do not see Alternatives as a typical recruitment agency, they do provide a permanent service. It evolved due to many of their interim managers staying on with a client as a result of a successful part-time placement. Interim success led to the agency being increasingly asked to help fill permanent marketing jobs.

As many one in five interim placements which the agency makes ends up in a permanent job. “Often clients and candidates use it as a testing ground,” Lawler said. “The brief to us may be for an interim assignment only, but other times they may tell us that it's interim but we'd actually like for the person to stay on if it works out.” Alternatives takes the pain by looking after the tax forms et cetera.

“It makes perfect sense,” McDonogh said, “for both the candidate and the client and minimises the risk of recruitment as much as it possibly can. HR would call it 'a safer hire'. A candidate may end going into a fabulous job but sometimes the culture doesn't suit that particular individual. So it's very much a two-way thing.”

McDonogh again refers back to the Fortune article: “They had a whole thing around the ridiculous 24/7, 80 hour weeks being the norm in the US. This work-life balancing used to be a woman's issue and you can understand why women with children do it. Until it becomes a man's issue, it doesn't get normalised, right?

“It's bloody true and bloody frustrating. But it is reality. What's reality as well is that they did a survey and the stats were that 70 per cent of men interviewed for Fortune are saying 'stop' and 'we want to work in a different way'. The message is that flat-out, under-resourced, knackered executives do not a better advantage make.”

McDonogh and Lawler have no time for those who see marketing as the company's 'fluffy' department that produces ads and holds creative work in higher regard than strategy. Marketing must be central to business decision-making, with a focus on improving company profits and sustainability through consumer and customer focus.

They agree with Professor Malcolm McDonald, former professor of marketing at the Cranfield School of Management. The problem is with the assumption that marketing is essentially a promotional/creative role rather than about strategy-making, which is what is wrong with the whole discipline (Correspondence with Insights, April 2005). Strategic planning does not rely on creative talents as much as on knowledge of the marketplace.

There needs to be an ability to see gaps and opportunities in the existing marketplace to which the company can market. Prof McDonald would go as far as to say that having the skills to be a cross-functional communicator are meaningless unless the marketing boss has the ability to enable them to develop credible and deliverable strategies.

In other words, being creative is all well and good – and of course we need creatives at the promotional end of marketing – but if marketing is ever to become the value driver that it could be – and should be – the discipline as a whole needs to be more scientific. Anyone can practise marketing, but to be a professional one has to train and qualify.

Lawler said that while some marketers are happy with marketing communications, others want to be involved in more strategic work. They may have ambitions elsewhere and bored with marcom projects, they end up as general manager. Marketing directors should aspire to serving at board level but they have to prove they are up to it.

“As products and services become more similar,” McDonogh said, “great people with great skills are most important for competitive advantage. By providing the best talent and training, Irish companies can attract, develop and keep the best people and produce the best results.” Training is a growth area for Alternatives these days.

The demand grew out of consultancy projects where the finger was pointed at the need for local training programmes which could match international standards. It was not a big change in the business for Alternatives, it was, as Lawler put it, simply an adjunct to being a marketing services provider focused on the talent in the business.

The agency has an agreement with the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) in the UK. CIM has a benchmarking and skills analysis tool called the Marketing Doctor, which benchmarks marketing skills against professional standards. Lawler points to a number of well-known international thinkers who have strong views on the value of training.

Tom Peters said marketers must become obsessed about talent, as the talent pool has become the number one competitive advantage and it may even be the only basis for competitive advantage. At General Electric, Jack Welch spent up to 90 per cent of his time on talent, so the pursuit of excellence became the pursuit of excellent talent.

Peter Drucker said knowledge becomes obsolete incredibly fast. The education of adults will be the number one industry in the next 30 years. But why should it be necessary for Alternatives to look overseas for a professional training programme? They had handled several consultancy projects, providing clients with improved customised skills.

But they found that while it worked, developing content and keeping it up-to-date ate up a lot of time. In Ireland, much of the 'same old, same old' learnings were doing the rounds and they wanted something fresh. CIM is rated a top provider of marketing training and it allowed CIM@Alternatives to play to their knowledge of clients and their issues.

It was around this time last year that Lawler and McDonogh signed a long-term deal with CIM. It marked the first time in the institute's 30-year history that CIM had entered into a contract with a private company anywhere in the world for market exclusivity for its in-company workshops and programmes in developing marketing and sales skills.

What defined Alternatives as Ireland's pioneers in interim marketing now extends to making the agency synonymous with structured marketing training. The vision which Lawler and McDonogh showed from the start has paid off. Clients include Diageo, Bank of Ireland, Eircom, 02, KPMG, ESB, Pfizer, Ulster Bank, Vodafone and Glanbia.

“We started out in 2000 as a 'virtual' company with a team of two people – us!” McDonogh said. “We grew from scratch, with no outside investment. Our team has more than doubled in the past 18 months, to 13 people and from a zero base we have a panel of 450 of the best marketers in Ireland and larger offices in the same building.”

“Early on, we always used the word 'interim' to explain what we did,” Lawler said, “but it's become much more than that. People in marketing would say, “oh yeah, if you need to hire someone for a few months, call Alternatives. But talent is a bigger concept than interim. Marketers can use flexible talent to outpace competitors and grow faster.”

Alternatives has been nominated as a finalist in next month's Small Firms Association (SFA) National Small Business Awards in the best marketing services category. The boardroom mantelpiece at Hopeton House may well need to be lengthened.