Search Consulting - 20 Years in Review
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[Fall] After many years of recruiting for my teams and other teams across the companies I worked for, I made the decision to leap from my “safe” CFO life into the unknown of a commissioned recruiter. I’m a calculated risk taker. The “worst” that could happen if I failed – going back to Finance, was still a great option.
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[May] Joined a San Francisco Bay Area recruiting firm focused on Finance. Good thing I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Had been told that things were coming back from the .com bust and could expect to make six figures in one year.
The comeback was slow. Without client relationships of my own, the only hiring in demand was Internal Audit. Invested the rest of that year and the next on bus dev. The old-fashioned way. Phone lists. Professional association meetings. Referrals. No linkedin! W-2 $600 on account of a poorly written contract. Most lessons you learn early hit your pocketbook and should not be repeated! Wow.
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Still doing some “whatever came along” business. Learning to judge whether a new client relationship was a good match for me. Managed to log a top sales award nonetheless. Steadily developed relationships, gained experience working many levels of hires.
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More Director/VP/Top level finance for divisions of large companies. Mix of industries. Quite a lot of manufacturing given my contacts from my own manufacturing days. Company tours. A sense of the place, even if in Baraga, MI in winter. I loved it all.
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Colosi Associates was born. Search firms can be a good place to start. Then you realize that in an 100% commission environment, you are working for yourself. A lot of energy is wasted on internal “whose is whose”. I like investing most of my energy in making clients happy instead, so started my own boutique. Never looked back.
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Dive in the economy. No blip in our business! Great year. At some level, companies can’t do without finance. We were not victims of the downturn of the financial services/banking and housing/real estate sectors, since our work did not have a concentration risk in any one industry. Even in down times, there are pockets of organizations with money to invest. Searches for portfolio companies of a very large privately owned company in the mid-west stood out for us. Companies in tiny towns sometimes. Character-building, I guess. I am quite a character now, thank you.
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Expanded relationships into industries new to us: PE firms, family offices, real estate. A PE client once said she came to us for “oddball” roles. Newly developed, specialized roles. Searches not typical of perhaps any firm. I prefer to think of it as coming to us on account of our enthusiasm around working with ambiguity and less-defined situations. Can’t forget this one:
“Our Family Office’s Office’s foundation just purchased two 250-foot research vessels to map the ocean floor. Can you help us find a Senior Director of Operations and an Operations Manager?”
We responded, Well, yeah! Speaking of ‘maps’ there was no map for how to do this search! We created one.
Most searches Director/VP/C- level. Start-up and fast growth companies. Tech, surely. Other industries we easily crossed. Today health care services has many fast-growth pockets.
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COVID. Industries like leisure, travel were greatly affected with businesses entirely coming to a halt. But most other industries like tech and health care were busy hunkering down, getting efficient, re-making themselves. And quickly realizing that some of their C teams just weren’t cut out to handle the uncertainty.
Super busy for Colosi Associates. The shift in work locations and the need to automate drove tech companies to grow and drove other companies to adopt tech and hire technology-minded, efficiency producing leaders.
As I said to a CEO client as she was considering a change on her team: “If your CFO is not forecasting and re-forecasting and building in contingency plans for cash and income, you may not have the right CFO.”
Met a ton of clients and candidates in person (safely). It was important to continue this part of the one-on-one, interactive gesture and presence observing process that will always be key to hiring.
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With COVID mostly over, companies are focused on the huge issue of labor “preference shifts -where and re-defining meaningful work, and the downright shortage of people who will work at all. As I wrote in my recent blog post, the number one action a company can take is that CEOs and the C level must be involved more than even in recruiting AND RETAINING.
We’re happy to share that we’ve evolved well beyond our beginning focus on just Finance. We’ve successfully placed C Suite roles across functions: CHRO/CPO, COO, and Chief Growth/Business Development roles. See our recent search wins at our blog page here.
