As many of you know, we started out in 2021 as a specialist People Executive Search firm. I am extremely passionate about remaining a specialist boutique, and know that our success relies on the strength of our network and the depth of our expertise. Its important we build focused, engaged networks of the best leaders that we can activate quickly for the right role, but also to deeply understand the functions we operate in, so that we can truly advise, not transact.
We’ve come quite a long way since I was a single mum, building The Search from my kitchen table. It was time for us to evolve and expand, and I’m excited to share these exciting updates with you:
We’ve evolved our brand ✨
It was time to evolve our brand and create a new website that felt more aligned with the companies we serve – startups, scaleups and ambitious companies. It’s slightly bittersweet that I’m finally saying goodbye to the site that I built myself on Wix over three years ago, but we’ve grown up a lot over the past few years. This new website showcases of all the amazing work we’ve done so far, as well as continuing to elevate our brand.
We’re expanding into Operations 📈
Often we place the first Chief People Officer or VP People in a business that is growing, but as specialists, we were doing a lot of spot business, as we weren’t offering our support outside the People domain. Both ourselves and the Founders we were working with were investing a lot of time building trust and getting to know each other, and we realised that only being able to support with one role on their Exec team was a missed opportunity for us, and not particularly helpful for them.
I’ve thought long and hard around whether to scale “down”, building out specialist teams that hire across the People function, but given the business stages we tend to work with, it made more sense to expand “out”, but still stay focused. More and more of the Founders we work with were asking for our help and counsel outside the People domain, asking for guidance on what the rest of their Executive team should look like.
Whilst we’ve always been happy to advise, in the past we’ve turned down business, mainly due to capacity but also because we didn’t want to become a generalist search firm who claimed they could help with anything but specialise in nothing. The reason we can activate talent and close searches in half the time of traditional search firms, is because of the strength and niche focus of our engaged network, so it was important to us to stay focused.
We have expanded our offering, focusing on two core areas: People and Operations, and we are focused on nailing these two core functions. The key roles we hire for are Chief People Officers, Chief Operations Officers, Chiefs of Staff and their direct reports. We are now a team of 3 and have specialists in each area:
- Penny Daniels – CPOs
- Karolina Stastna – VPs of People and Heads of People
- Olivia Finn – COOs and Chiefs of Staff
We’ve structured the team in this way so we can support our two core clients – Founders and CEOs of small to mid-sized businesses building out their Executive teams, and CPOs and COOs in larger scale-ups who need support hiring onto their own leadership teams.
We’ve been building out these functions in stealth mode for the last 6 months, supporting our existing clients and I’m excited to share it more widely now.
Why Operations?
- We’ve experienced many of our People leader network progressing into Operations, for example VP People to Chief Operations Officer, Head of People to Chief of Staff. The natural cross over with People made it a perfect fit for us
- Founders gave us feedback that they struggle to hire Operations leaders, in particular Chiefs of Staff, and that there wasn’t any reliable search firms they could count on for these roles
- People leaders and Operations leaders work closely together in scaling businesses, and we’ve found that managing the hiring process for both has advantages when it comes to finding two people that will collaborate seamlessly
I will be focusing on C-level CPO searches and Olivia will be focusing on hiring Chief Operations Officers and Chiefs of Staff.
Our network
We have been extremely careful to be operating both of these functions within stealth mode for the last 6 months, to build and curate our network so that we are prepared to take on new searches. We’ve been receiving referrals from CEOs and CPOs, to curate a list of the best COOs and Chiefs of Staff from within scaling companies.
We are focusing on delivering in these two core areas, and we know that if we can do this well, we will add huge value not only to the People leaders in our network but also the CEOs and Founders that are looking to build powerhouse executive teams.
We have had an amazing last 12 months hiring for some amazing clients such as HyperExponential, Axon, Carwow, Solidatus, Booksy, MVF, EO Charging, 9Fin and Ramp Network. We’ve worked with VC’s such as Creandum, Balderton, Albion and Highland, and PE’s such as Bridgepoint and EQT. We are excited about what’s to come.
If you’d like to see some of the searches we have on, check out our opportunities here.
If you’re ready to hire a game-changing CPO, COO, Chief of Staff, please reach out.
