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Kacper Pupin is the co-founder of Redegate, a Polish platform connecting businesses with experienced independent managers and consultants, and helping companies rethink how they access senior expertise.
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Key Takeaways
- 60% of clients are looking for opportunities, not emergency solutions: According to Kacper, roughly 60% of Redegate’s clients now hire external experts to pursue business opportunities such as market expansion, new product launches, and acquisitions. Independent talent isn’t just for fixing problems; it’s increasingly a tool for business growth.
- Operations, finance, and HR lead demand for independent experts in Poland: Companies bring in experienced specialists to manage production transfers, replace missing financial leadership, or implement organizational changes. Some projects require only five or six months of expertise rather than a permanent hire.
- Hire for the skills you need, not the job title you want to fill: Żabka regularly evaluates whether its internal team has the capabilities required for a business initiative before sourcing expertise externally. This helps the company address skills gaps while keeping valuable knowledge within the business.
- Compare the full cost of hiring, not just salaries and daily rates: Redegate can present a selection of suitable experts within two days, and its model charges for delivered, client-approved days. Recruitment delays, benefits, employer costs, and lost business opportunities can make external expertise more competitive than it initially appears.
- One successful project can change how a company hires: Kacper has seen businesses resist working with external professionals for one or two years before becoming repeat clients after their first successful project. Start with a clear business objective, define what needs to be delivered, and let the results
- demonstrate the value.
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What if you didn’t have to hire another employee?
Imagine your company is preparing to launch a new production line. Everything looks promising, the opportunity is there, and your team is ready to move forward. But there’s one problem: nobody internally has managed this kind of project before.
What do you do?
You could start recruiting someone permanently, potentially spending months finding the right candidate. Or you could hire a consulting firm to tell you how the project should be executed.
But there’s a third option: bring in someone who has already done it multiple times, let them lead the project, and once the work is finished, continue with your existing team.
That’s exactly the opportunity Kacper Pupin and his co-founder Grzegorz Gawroński identified when launching Redegate in 2020.
At that time, Poland’s independent consulting market was fragmented. Experienced professionals were looking for projects individually, while companies had limited ways to find and engage them quickly.
Six years later, Kacper sees a significant change in how businesses approach external expertise. What used to be an unfamiliar alternative to traditional employment is increasingly becoming part of their hiring strategy.
And perhaps the most interesting part is why companies are choosing it.
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Companies aren’t just hiring experts to solve problems anymore
When Redegate started, its founders expected most clients to approach them during emergencies. Perhaps a company was losing money, struggling with operations, or urgently needed an experienced manager to stabilize the business.
They expected independent experts to be something like an emergency response team.
But after reviewing several years of operations, they discovered something surprising: around 60% of their clients were hiring experts to pursue business opportunities, not to solve existential threats.
These included companies entering new markets, launching products, setting up production lines, and even acquiring businesses abroad.
For such projects, hiring someone permanently isn’t always necessary. A company might need an experienced procurement specialist for six months to establish a sourcing strategy, after which the internal team can manage the process.
As Kacper explains, the flexibility of working with external professionals makes it possible for businesses to respond to changing priorities without committing to an ongoing position.
This doesn’t mean permanent employment is becoming irrelevant. It means companies are discovering that their workforce doesn’t always have to grow permanently whenever a new opportunity appears.
Where Polish companies need independent expertise the most
Not every business function is equally represented in Poland’s interim and fractional management market.
According to Kacper, operations are the biggest area of demand, followed by finance and HR.
In manufacturing and logistics, companies frequently need experts to manage production transfers, launch new facilities, or establish procurement processes. These are complex initiatives that require specialized experience, but that expertise might only be necessary during a particular stage of the project.
Finance presents another challenge. When a company’s CFO or financial controller leaves, the business cannot simply put reporting, taxation, and cash-flow management on hold until a replacement arrives.
An interim professional can maintain those operations while the company searches for a permanent successor.
HR is also attracting more external expertise, particularly for change management, remuneration strategies, and organizational transformation.
There’s a common pattern across these examples: the company needs a specific capability for a specific period, rather than another permanent position.
And this becomes particularly interesting when businesses start evaluating their workforce based on the skills required to achieve an objective.
What Żabka understands about hiring external experts
One of Kacper’s most interesting examples comes from Żabka, Poland’s well-known convenience-store chain.
Redegate has worked with Żabka for several years, providing expertise across functions such as HR, operations, procurement, and finance.
But what makes this collaboration particularly interesting isn’t the number of projects. It’s how Żabka approaches hiring decisions.
When a new challenge appears, the company first identifies the business objective and the skills required to achieve it. Then it evaluates whether those skills already exist within the organization.
If the internal team has the necessary capabilities, it handles the project. If not, the company considers bringing in someone from outside.
Simple, right?
Yet many organizations still approach workforce planning in the opposite direction, beginning with the position they want to fill rather than the capabilities they need.
There’s another benefit to Żabka’s approach. External professionals can introduce knowledge and practical experience that remain with the internal team after a project finishes.
As Kacper puts it, external experts shouldn’t be seen as a threat to existing employees, but as an opportunity to strengthen them.
Sometimes the greatest value of hiring an independent expert isn’t just what they deliver, but what your team learns along the way.
Are freelancers actually more expensive than employees?
This is one of the biggest questions companies ask when considering senior independent professionals.
At first glance, a fractional executive’s daily rate might seem much higher than the equivalent daily salary of a permanent employee.
But Kacper suggests looking beyond that comparison.
Permanent employment involves recruitment costs, employer contributions, benefits, bonuses, and other expenses. More importantly, finding the right senior professional can take months, during which important initiatives may remain unfinished.
And that delay has a business cost, even if it doesn’t always appear clearly in a spreadsheet.
With Redegate’s model, companies pay for days of work delivered and accepted by the client, without necessarily committing to a fixed long-term engagement.
Kacper says Redegate has even seen projects where hiring an external expert proved less expensive than direct employment once the wider costs were considered.
Of course, that doesn’t mean independent professionals will always be cheaper. For a role requiring long-term, continuous work, permanent employment might make much more sense.
But for a well-defined transformation project or temporary skills gap, the economics can look very different.
The better question isn’t how much a freelancer costs per day, but how much it costs your business to achieve the desired result.
Why one successful project can change everything
Despite growing interest, not every Polish company is ready to embrace fractional professionals.
Kacper still encounters managers who prefer permanent employment because it feels more familiar and predictable. Some have had disappointing experiences with consultants, while others worry about costs, legal arrangements, or bringing outsiders into their organizations.
He doesn’t believe these companies should be criticized for their caution. Changing established ways of working takes time.
Interestingly, he has seen clients hesitate for one or even two years before finally agreeing to try an external expert.
And once that first project succeeds, they often return.
Why? Because an actual business result can demonstrate something that presentations and sales pitches cannot.
Instead of trying to convince an entire organization to change its hiring philosophy overnight, companies can begin with one clearly defined project, agree on measurable expectations, and evaluate the result.
If the collaboration works, they have a practical example to build on.
Will AI make experienced independent experts even more valuable?
AI is also influencing the future of consulting and independent work, although not necessarily in the way many expect.
Kacper observes that AI can already perform some of the research, analysis, and preparation tasks previously handled by junior consultants.
But he sees a difference between developing a strategy and taking responsibility for implementing it.
Companies might have excellent business plans, but still lack someone who knows how to turn those plans into results.
That’s where experienced independent professionals can be valuable. Someone who has implemented a similar process twenty times brings practical judgment and execution experience that goes beyond producing recommendations.
Whether AI will eventually change that balance remains uncertain. For now, Kacper sees execution as an important reason companies continue hiring experienced external specialists.
And this brings us back to perhaps the most valuable lesson from the entire conversation.
Before hiring anyone, whether permanently or independently, identify the business result you want and the expertise required to deliver it.
Once those two things are clear, choosing the right working arrangement becomes considerably easier.
Tips for success
1. Define the result before searching for talent.
For your next project, write down one measurable business objective, the expected deliverable, and the deadline. Use these to identify the expertise required rather than starting with a job title.
2. Check your internal capabilities first.
Identify which skills your team already has and which are missing. If the gap is temporary or project-specific, evaluate an independent expert alongside permanent hiring.
3. Test the model with one project.
Choose one clearly scoped initiative, bring in an experienced external professional, and assess the outcome. Include knowledge transfer so your internal team benefits even after the engagement ends.
