CEO
The CEO Circle · Chief Executive Officer
100 seats · admitting now
A chief executive cannot apply for anything. So the work is done without you applying.
An application is a signal — to your board, your investors and eventually your market — that you are leaving, and it converts a strong position into a weak one before a conversation has started. Everything in this Circle is arranged so that you are approached rather than considered, and so that your name enters a process only when there is something real for it to enter.
Who is admitted
Sitting chief executives, managing directors and group business heads of substantial Indian companies, and country heads of multinationals in India. Also admitted: leaders one appointment away from a first chief executive seat, which is the group the Circle is most useful to.
We work with no more than one hundred leaders in a Circle at a time. That is a limit on our capacity, not a judgement of anybody’s standing — there is no list, no ranking and no nomination.
For chief executives specifically
Three things true of this room alone.
The approach goes to the chair, not to a recruiter
A chief executive seat is decided by a chair, a promoter or a fund partner, and an approach that arrives through a research associate has already lost. Your Principal makes it at that level or does not make it — which is the whole difference between being presented and being introduced.
The promoter conversation, held before the process
A large share of Indian chief executive seats sit under a founding family, and the question that decides whether the job is doable is never on the brief: how much operating control is genuinely being handed over. That is established privately, before you are in a process you cannot leave quietly.
Your standing while you are not looking
Chief executives are the most searched-for and least findable people in Indian business. What a chair finds about you the week before a first meeting is managed as a matter of routine rather than assembled in a hurry when a seat appears.
When a seat is decided, you are read by the chair and the nomination committee. Every document built for you in this Circle is written for that reader.
The standing counsel
All twelve, for every member of every Circle.
The three above are what changes between rooms. These do not change at all — and the search, which every competitor sells as the entire product, is number two of twelve.
The fee
One rate, every Circle.
There is no separate price by function. What changes the retainer is how far the Circle looks on your behalf, and nothing else.
The Domestic Pursuit
India. Every listed group, every promoter house, every fund portfolio in the country.
₹20,00,000
+ 18% GST · per year · ₹23,60,000 all in
The International Pursuit
Every market on the platform, India included. The Gulf, South-East Asia, the United Kingdom, Europe and North America.
₹35,00,000
+ 18% GST · per year · ₹41,30,000 all in
₹4,99,000 reserves the seat at admission. The balance of ₹18,61,000 is invoiced on signature of the Charter and settled by transfer.
Questions
Can this run without my current board finding out?
That is the premise of the whole service. Nothing is published, no profile exists, no register carries your name, and approaches are made unnamed until you release them. The one thing outside our control is what you tell people yourself.
How long does a chief executive move actually take?
Nine to eighteen months from first approach to signature is normal at this level. That is why the retainer is annual and why a quarter of it cannot be bought — a service sold in three-month blocks would be selling a stage of a process as though it were the process.
I am a business head, not yet a chief executive. Is this for me?
Yes, and it is arguably where the retainer earns most. Group business heads, country heads and divisional managing directors are the people who take first-time chief executive seats, and most of the year is spent closing the specific gap a board would otherwise ask about.
Do you place chief executives, or advise them?
Both, and the distinction is not cosmetic. Where Gladwin holds the mandate you are put forward by a partner. Where we do not, you are represented into it. What is never promised — here or anywhere on this platform — is an outcome. No one can honestly promise a chief executive a seat.
The other Circles
