The distributor whose executives were running the warehouse.

Time to fill is measured from the brief to the person's first day of work. Outcome figures are the client's own, attributed to them by name, never our measurement. People are named as first initial and surname by house style.

The situation

A clinic is one business. A distributor is another, and it is the second one that was growing. Being the official Widex distributor means importing product, holding and managing stock, running order fulfilment, and staying in constant contact with the manufacturer. Every one of those jobs is back office, and every one of them gets bigger as sales grow.

When DLN Medical decided to push for a major expansion, that back-office load had nowhere to go. It was landing on the executives. People whose job was to run and grow the company were spending their days on order administration and correspondence with a supplier in Denmark.

They did not send us a role. They sent us a question: we need to grow, how would you actually staff this, and what do you think we need? That is a different engagement from filling a requisition, and we treated it as one.

What we found when we looked

Before writing a single job description, we went into the business and worked out where the growth would break first. Two things came out of that.

1. The executive layer was overloaded. Several executives were doing work that should never have reached them: inbox, scheduling, follow-ups, document handling, and a steady stream of supplier and customer correspondence. None of it was hard. All of it was time, and it was time taken from the decisions only they could make.
2. There was no operational spine under the distribution business. Importing, stock, and order fulfilment were being absorbed by people whose real jobs were something else. The work got done, but nobody owned it, and nothing about it was set up to double.

The second finding mattered more than the first. Assistants would have given the executives their afternoons back. They would not have built the thing the expansion actually needed, which was a layer of people whose job was the flow of product and money.

The team we built, and why each seat

• 3 executive assistantsPhilippines

  

  One per overloaded executive. Inbox, calendar, travel, documents and the correspondence that had been eating their days. We source executive support in the Philippines because that is where our deepest bench of experienced EAs is.

• 2 operations coordinatorsKosovo

  

  Not general admin. We briefed for people with real logistics and order-fulfilment experience, because the job was to take over the Widex order flow end to end: what is coming in, what is in stock, what has to go out and when. These two became the operational layer the business had been missing.

• 1 finance and bookkeepingKosovo

  

  Someone to own the books and the financial side of the distribution business as it scaled, so that the money followed the product rather than being reconciled after the fact. Finance and accounting is where our Kosovo network is strongest, which is why the ops and finance seats came from the same market.

Two markets, chosen per role. That is not a coincidence of where we happened to have recruiters. Executive support and logistics-and-finance are different talent pools, and we went to the one that was best for each seat.

The alternatives, and why not those

A company in DLN Medical's position usually has three ways to go, and it is worth being clear about why two of them were wrong here. This is our analysis, not a record of what the client considered.

• Hire locally, one role at a time. The honest problem with this is the clock. Six seats through a local process is six job ads, six rounds of screening, six notice periods. On the SHRM median that is 44 days per seat, and the expansion was already under way. The executives would have carried the load for another quarter.
• Hire three assistants and stop. This is what the symptoms suggested, and it would have felt like progress for about a month. It treats the executives' calendars and leaves the distribution business without an owner. The next growth step would have hit the same wall.
• Build the operational layer first, then relieve the executives. Two coordinators and a bookkeeper to own the flow of product and money, and three assistants to give the executives their days back. Both at once, in four days, on one monthly rate per seat with nothing due until each person started. That is what we recommended and what they did.

How the fill went

All six people were signed, hired and working within about four days of the brief. We measure time to fill from the brief to the person's first day of work, not to a CV or an offer letter, and we say so because the qualifier is what makes the number credible.

Four days is possible for a structural reason as much as a sourcing one. The people we place are contractors we already know, with availability confirmed weekly, so there is no notice period between accepting and starting. A traditional agency's "time to fill" usually stops at offer accepted, after which the hire serves out two to twelve weeks somewhere else. That is not the same clock.

What happened next

The new team took over order management with Widex and the operational work running underneath it. The executives stopped absorbing back-office load and went back to the work only they could do. The business had an operational layer built to carry the expansion instead of one that would buckle under it.

DLN Medical came to us around September 2025 and has been a client since. In September 2026 they came back for three more roles: two sales development representatives and a marketing manager, being scoped as this page is written.

We do not have a client-supplied number for this engagement, and we would rather say that than dress the story up. What we can point to is a year-long relationship and a second order, which in staffing is the proof that is hardest to manufacture.

What this case shows

• Diagnosis, not order-taking. The client asked what they needed. The roles were the answer, not the brief. A job board or a body-shop agency cannot produce this story because it starts before the job description exists.
• The operational layer comes first. Assistants alone would have relieved symptoms. Coordinators and a bookkeeper fixed the structure, and that is what made the growth roles possible a year later.
• Talent matched to the role, not to one country. Philippines for executive support, Kosovo for logistics and finance. Deliberate, and different for each seat.
• A regulated, trust-sensitive sector. Medical devices is not a place to be casual about who gets access to orders, stock and supplier accounts. The placements have held for a year.

Questions about this case