How to structure your company to execute a project funded by European funds

Good news, you've been awarded the grant. The project you submitted, with its milestones, timeline and detailed budget, is now approved. Now it's time to execute it, justify it, and prove at every milestone that the money has been used exactly as promised.

Here are 4 points worth having sorted out before you start executing.

1. Design and implement the new organization

This is, in fact, the first thing we work on with a founding team through DO'IN Fund: before touching anything, you need to design what the organization looks like once the project is underway. It's not just about adding people to the existing org chart, it's about rethinking it in light of the project's new reality.

That design includes several pieces that are best resolved together, not one by one as they come up:

• Communicating it, both internally (so the current team understands what's changing and why) and externally if needed (clients, suppliers, the funding body itself)
• Recruiting the new people needed, in the right order based on what would otherwise block everyone else first
• Reviewing and rewriting existing processes, because a process designed for the previous size and pace rarely holds up well under the weight of a newly funded project

Doing it in this order — design first, implementation after — avoids the most common problem: starting to hire and reorganize on the fly, without first deciding what the whole thing should look like.

2. Who is accountable for each milestone

European funds and Next Generation grants come with something private investment rounds don't always require in the same detail: a timeline of specific milestones, with dates and deliverables defined in advance. Each milestone needs someone accountable for it, not just a team that "handles it together".

Before getting started, it's worth answering this:

• Who is the person responsible for each project milestone, by name, not just a department?
• What happens if that person is on leave or leaves the company midway through the project? Is there a backup who knows the milestone well enough to take over?

3. Document traceability from day one

One of the most important differences compared to an investment round: here, every expense, every hour billed, every deliverable must be documented, usually for a public body that audits with strict criteria. Starting to organize that documentation from milestone 3 or 4, once you've already lost track of the first few months, is far more costly than setting up the traceability system from day one.

The question that helps you stay ahead of it:

• What system will we use to record hours, expenses and deliverables so everything can be justified without having to reconstruct the record after the fact?

4. Balancing the funded project with the rest of the business

The funded project doesn't replace day-to-day business, it coexists with it. It's easy for the team executing the project to feel that work is "what matters" and the rest of the operation takes a back seat — or the opposite: that each week's commercial urgency ends up eating into the time that should go to the project.

The key question here:

• What real percentage of dedication does each person involved actually have, and who makes sure that allocation holds up over the months, not just in the initial snapshot?

How we do it at DO'IN TALENT

With DO'IN Fund, we carry out this same precise exercise when the source is a credit line or a public grant: we design the new organization, assign owners per milestone, set up the document traceability system, and adjust the team's real dedication so the funded project and day-to-day business can coexist without either one suffering.

If you've just secured European or Next Generation funding and don't have that structure in place yet, now is a good time to do it, before the first milestone. Let us know and we'll organize it with you.