Say I wanted to get a CFO a job (the fun parts of executive recruiting)

Say you have a CFO you know that you’d like to get hired somewhere - where do you even start with something like that?

Well, you start by building up a nice little framework to get things kicked off.

Say your friend is a CFO with a consumer tech background, we can use that to create a plan to help them.

Let’s list out our steps and walk through >

1. What problem do they solve? They’re not just a CFO, maybe they’re an operator that scaled their businesses through credit, risk, advisory, and going public. In this step once we figure out their thesis, then we can define our “buyer” - Other questions here include things like company size, PE or VC, growth vs turnaround, geography, etc.

2. With that foundation built, we can now start to build our market plan - Buckets like VC / PE / Public consumer tech and sectors (did they bring an Apple watch competitor to market? A dating site? Keep these in mind.

3. Start scoring your companies on a scale from 1-5

   1. Fit / Succession Probability / Access

4. Now we build our influence map; so basically, we’re noting for every company, the CEO, Board Chair, Lead Independent Director, Governance Chair, Compensation Chair, Largest Investor, Operating Partner. Out of this info, let’s find repeated names. For example, Jane Dough sits on the chair for 4 companies out of the list of 10 we made. Nice, this means that person will be a nice person to make an acquaintance with.

5. Let’s make 4 buckets now to map decision makers > PE Ops Partners / Board Members / Investors / Search Firms.

6. Now let’s build those WARM intros because we never want to rely on cold intros. The question we’re asking is who can introduce this CFO? Investors / Former Execs / Alumni / Bankers / Search Consultants

7. This is where it gets real fun - we’re setting up our discovery meetings now because what we want to do is ask these “business influencers” about what leadership challenges they’re seeing as companies mature. The goal at this step is to gather information.

8. THEN we’re writing up our succession watchlist - I.E. Leadership tenure / Exec Departures / New President / New COO / New Board Members / Layoffs / Growth Slowing / M&A / cap table redo / New PE Sponsor

9. Now, you’ll map out your pipeline - Company A | Sponsor | CEO | Succession Likelihood | Fit for our buddy (low to high) | Relationship Strength

10. Once we have that information, we can start to pitch your friend to the right person, vs having them apply to CFO jobs where the search is already well underway

11. ***BONUS*** - You can also reverse this to FIND execs and leadership for your own company