Chief Executive Officer — Search Practice

The seat

The C-suite search practice is the firm's largest business and the one the market knows us for. This role owns it: the partners, the economics, the sectors we choose to be serious about, and the standard we hold when a client would accept less.

It reports to the board and carries a P&L.

The first year

• Decide what the practice is for. We run mandates across a wide sector spread; some of that is deliberate and some is accumulated. Which three sectors should be defensibly ours in three years?
• Build the partner group. A search business scales through partners who originate, not through consultants who deliver. That is the recruitment problem to solve, and it is harder than the client one.
• Set the delivery standard and enforce it. Every mandate here is published to the Terminal and read by members. The standard is visible, which is an asset until it isn't.
• Fix the economics of the mid-sized mandate. Our largest and smallest engagements work; the ones in between consume disproportionate delivery time. That is a pricing and staffing question, not an effort question.

What you inherit

An 800-plus mandate corpus with a members' platform attached, a governance dataset on listed-company boards, an interim and advisory practice now being built out, and a brand that opens C-suite doors in India. What is not yet built is the partner bench, and that is the honest first problem.