Musings of a CEO Headhunter 💼
Interesting experiences from mandates – Part 2
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In our last blog, we discussed an unique role that sat right in the middle between a CEO and CFO. In this second part, we explore a fairly common ask – to help clients find CEO/CFO talent to fill newly created structures.

It is normal for corporates to pivot and reorganize – from a functional structure (heads of functions, reporting to a CEO/MD) to a BU structure (key functions report to BU Head, who report to CEO/MD) and vice versa – to better support business objectives.

Within the BU Structure itself, there could be several gradations (‘Lite BU structure’ where only the Sales & Commercial report to BU Head to a ‘Company within a Company’ structure where almost all functions – including manufacturing/operations, SCM, S&M, HR BP, Finance BP.

One of our clients had operated in BU structure some decade back when they were much smaller, pivoted then to a functional structure and about a year back, decided to go back to a BU structure, as the product portfolio, organization size, geographies served and nature of competition has changed since their last pivot a decade back.

Each of the BUs in the new set up would be different – for instance, one would be about 3000c+ in size, subject to intense, cut-throat competition while another would be about a 1000c in size, also subject to competition but with significant headroom for portfolio diversification, while the third is in a very nice space with good business acceleration potential.

At a high level, thus, each of the BU Heads need to come with different skill sets – the BU Head for the 3000c+, commodity business would have to have nerves of steel, be agile to react to rapid market developments and be able to deal with very senior stake-holders to *shift* industry dynamics. The second one would have to have a solid, strategic, ‘product-market approach’ and be able to tap into the opportunities including organic/inorganic options. Given the nature of the industry, it was imperative that all had to come from the chemicals space. We worked with the client to successfully hire Dy MDs for the two new BUs.

These differences in what would make the CEO successful, is what makes these mandates very interesting. Though both were CEO roles and catered to products along the same product value chain, the differences in the ‘ask’ were such that it was like running two unrelated mandates, requiring very different approaches to mapping and candidate assessment. Getting a good handle on the organizational strategy becomes crucial in being able to deliver on these kind of mandates and our background in strategy consulting translate into a huge asset in such cases.

By Ramadhurai k

CEO Lead at Resource Bridge