The clients who call us aren't posting roles. They're replacing a CEO under NDA, installing a turnaround leader in sixty days, or building a succession bench for positions that don't exist on any org chart yet.
Board-mandated. NDA-protected. Clock running.
Portfolio company. New chapter. No incumbents.
The candidate cannot know they are being considered.
A $4.2B industrial manufacturer. A sudden vacancy. Forty-seven days.
The board chair called on a Tuesday. The CFO had resigned effective Friday — for personal reasons, officially. The real story was a disagreement with the incoming private equity sponsor about the pace of a divestiture. None of this would appear in any brief we were given. It took ninety minutes of conversation before we understood the actual constraint: the new CFO had to be someone the PE sponsor trusted implicitly, without appearing to be the sponsor's candidate.
“Find someone the sponsor trusts. Make it look like the board found them independently.”
We built a longlist of 34 names. Not from a database query — from direct knowledge of who had worked alongside that PE sponsor's portfolio CFOs and earned their trust through a prior transaction. Eleven names met the dual criteria. We did not share this reasoning with the client; the list arrived as if generated by process.
We approached three candidates. Not by email. Not through LinkedIn. Through a mutual relationship in each case — someone who could make a first-person introduction without revealing the client. Two took the conversation. One was the hire.
The candidate was someone the PE sponsor had worked with six years prior. The board believed they had found this person through our process. They had. The sponsor believed the board had made an independent choice. They had. Both things were simultaneously true.
Still in role at 36-month check-in. Divestiture completed on schedule.
A cross-border merger. Two equal CEOs. One role that could not exist until both boards agreed it should.
A European industrial group acquiring a US mid-market manufacturer needed two CEOs installed simultaneously — one for each entity, reporting to a single integration board that did not yet have a chair. The two appointments had to be announced on the same day. The candidates could not know about each other until the board was ready to introduce them.
We ran two entirely separate engagement teams — different partners, different communication channels, different candidate pools. Each team knew the other existed. Neither candidate pool did. The interview choreography required that both final candidates be available on the same forty-eight-hour window for board presentations in different cities.
Both candidates were introduced to each other in a single board meeting — Frankfurt, Monday morning, 9am. They had already accepted their individual offers. The integration board chair had been appointed the previous Friday. The announcement went out at noon.
Both CEOs remain in role. The dual-authority structure was dissolved eighteen months post-close as planned, with the US CEO ascending to the combined entity. This transition was designed into the original brief. Neither candidate knew it at hire.
Integration completed 11 weeks ahead of schedule. Zero leadership attrition in the first year.
He didn't know he was being succeeded. By the time he did, the transition was already working.
The board engaged us to find a “Chief Operating Officer.” The role did not exist. The founder — who had been CEO for twenty-two years — had not agreed to step aside. Three of five board members believed the COO would become CEO within thirty-six months. The founder believed the COO would run operations while he remained in strategic control indefinitely. Both beliefs were held simultaneously. Our job was to find someone who could make both beliefs true long enough for the transition to become irreversible.
Candidate must earn founder trust within 90 days
Candidate must be acceptable to activist board minority
Candidate cannot appear to want the top role
Candidate must actually want the top role
We were not looking for an operator. We were looking for a particular psychological profile: someone who had spent a career as a number two, who was genuinely good at it, who had never publicly expressed ambition for the top role — but who had, in every organization they joined, ended up running it. We found four such people. We presented one.
The incoming COO spent the first six months making the founder look good. Board presentations. Earnings calls. Analyst days. The founder began asking the COO to stand in for him. By month eleven, the founder had proposed, unprompted, that the COO take the CEO title. He believed this was his own idea. It was. We had simply ensured that the conditions existed for him to arrive at it.