The Best Executives Aren't Applying Jobs: Here's how Christopher Haywood Rethought Executive Search

speaker-1: most recruiting, internal, external, they don't own outcomes. We do. Whether it's the one-year guarantee or the type of longer-term partnerships we built. Look, we've had some of the same clients for 10 years.

speaker-0: Hi everyone. My name is Carmen Devat and I will be hosting today's episode of Behind the Founders. Joining me here today is Christopher Haywood. Christopher, welcome. Can you introduce yourself?

speaker-1: Hi, I'm Christopher Haywood, the founder of Strategic Executives Agency, based out of Los Angeles. I started Strategic Executives Agency in 2012. our first initial mandate was hiring CFOs and COOs for private equity growth companies. But the reason I started the business was because coming from consulting. We had solved a problem for a private equity firm who was not satisfied with their traditional hiring options. I who was not satisfied with the traditional hiring options. I was actually brought on first as a consultant to come up with a process that worked. That process became strategic executives agency, and it started with the premise of. One, not assuming that the best people were always on the market. Number two, not assuming that title searches were, and when I say title search, meaning that you're looking for a VP of finance in one company, they might necessarily have the same responsibilities in a similar company. I didn't I didn't believe in that. And then the last part is just Theoretic idea that most search firms at that time still dealt that their value, they traded in there being asymmetric information on the market. And what that means is that at that time, starting at that time, most search firms bought lists or they could identify if you were looking for a vice president. Of finance for company A. That if you wait, like if you were they traded in asymmetric information. Basically, as a search firm, you have access to let's say we're in Atlanta and you want to recruit people from Coke. You have access to that information where clients generally don't. They don't know who the other CFO options are. What I identified was that. One, with the proliferation, with the proliferation of LinkedIn, that trading on asymmetric information wasn't a long-term strategy. number two, I thought that there are some people. We brought a lot of people from different industries into CFO and COO roles. We brought in bankers, we brought in management consultant. My background was in management consulting. I'd gotten my MBA here at UCLA. And I saw that the traditional, while there are some great people that come through the traditional path, for example, for a CFO might be audit to controller to VP of finance to CFO, these accounting based roles, that a lot of growth companies they were looking for more than just a CFO, they were looking for a business operator. And I thought That the best strategy for these demanding companies, the best way to manage these clients, was to not just look for a job description or a title, but to first understand the problem. Most of these companies, these growth companies, they either want to grow revenue, they want to cut costs, and maybe they're looking to go public, maybe they're looking for some sort of MA activity. And so they need to organize themselves accordingly. Additionally, the CFO or the COO, depending on the company, they're going to be partnered with a leader. That leader, for us, most often was the founder of the business. So in addition to the functional challenge and the business opportunities, there's a relationship there that you have to build, whether it's an integrator to a visionary. or whether you know it's a person or bring in structure. I thought that the best process, rather than posting jobs, networking, or maybe just going for title searches as I call them, I thought the best way would be for us to first understand the goals of the business, both short and long term, meet that founder and understand what really complements them. what skill set, who really complements them, and come up with a plan strategically identify people, whether or not they're on the market and attract them to an opportunity. And then the last part was project management. We wanted to maintain this proactive activity strategically coming up with a plan that our client agrees with, and then transparent up to dates on a week-to-week basis. So if you view in management consulting, we generally worked on a week-to-week basis, giving our clients updates. Here's where the project stands. Here's their strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats. Here's what we're working on next. And what I saw coming in as a consultant, that recruiting, there were some organized processes, but a lot of even good recruiters, it's they're sending resumes where we came up with a systematic project to first do due diligence to understand what is the goal of the role. Not what's the title? What's the oper, what's the business opportunity here? Then secondly, what is the universe of talent that could do this role? Not just the people with that title. For example, we're doing you know CFOs of businesses and we did one for a toy company. But having gone to school at UCLA, knowing Disney, because at this time I was in Atlanta, I knew that the Disney Consumer Products Group. Had several businesses larger than my client, where the finance leader would not only have handled these types of problems, but would also have insight because Disney was known for best practices. And so that was an example of well, why should just because they might not have the title CFO, why shouldn't we reach out to the person leading finance for that business to see? Because maybe there's some things. Maybe there are some gaps, but I would rather talk to a hundred of these people every week that we target for strategic week. Well, I'd rather reach out to a hundred of these people every week that we target for strategic reasons and get them down and a hundred people every week that we target for strategic reasons to. understand who's the best possible fit for our client to keep rather than just getting a resume and forwarding to our client, but to really understand out of that hundred, who are the two, three best people who might be interested that could do the role that are a complementary fit to the founder, to the team. It's the right time in their career. And I don't find that those people always have the same title that we're looking for. Certainly often not on the market. And we find that if we do that on a weekly basis in a transparent way, get feedback from the client, we get sharper and sharper every week. So these projects that, you know, these major executive search projects, you know, the average is around three months. And we felt we saw that. Unless we make pivots, we can really find this person between week three and seven because every week we're getting sharper. We're saying, hey, we targeted, you know, this type of person, this background from this industry or this company has best practices. You know, we've talked to these people, we get candid feedback from our client that we might, you know, change our direction or sharpen our focus and do the same thing on a week-to-week basis. That allows us to be selective because you know we're we're reaching out to so many people that you know we can get down to two or three people that we really like. We can't find three people that we really like out of 100, then you know, we're targeting the wrong thing. But we're giving our clients options, giving them feedback, so neither of us settle. And so when we get down to three or four people in the process, we find that they have optionality, they have confidence in the process. You by the way, we've targeted more than three or four hundred people. We have market information specific to that project about, you know, what people are making, what the sentiments are for the role. We're not guessing. And that was the process that, you know, I approved as a consultant, and that became the foundation of strategic executives agency.

speaker-0: Okay, great. Well, Christopher, thank you so much for walking us and also the listeners out there on the step-by-step process when it comes to executive search, right? Especially when it comes to challenging and breaking the typical traditional way of recruiting and finding people that go beyond the job title as well. So just a follow-up question. So you started Strategic Executives Agency and it's been over, it's it's been nearly 15 years. So How did this business evolve into what it is today? What would you say has been the biggest change or evolvement, whether it's in the approaches, the practices, vetting those people and so on?

speaker-1: Yeah, I so I say there's two major changes. and it's really, you know, Kaizan Toyota constantly getting better. One is from the process and tools, technology has changed. You know, we talk about we do a lot of research, we do a lot of project management, we interview a lot of people. So while there are human elements that are required in a search process. you know as far as meeting people but the way that we have scaled our outreach our evaluation our week-to-week project management has definitely changed it's gotten more mature with tools which has increased our volume of outreach you know obviously i've had you know a team go around so we've kind of broken it down the weekly cycle into very tactical things with KPIs where you know started out with me calling a lot of people. So I think that from a process standpoint, we've gotten mature with the tools. And we try to manage that balance of, you know, we want to use technology to optimize our process. We don't want technology to become the process. So So we've certainly gotten more mature with our tools and you know the volume of information that we have and use and leverage. And the other part is from a products and services standpoint. as I mentioned to you, we started off only working on CFO and COO projects for. private equity portfolio companies. Whereas now we have, we do, we do search for what we call now we call that leadership search. So senior executive searches. And we've worked for private companies. We work for, you know, Fortune 50 public brands, you know, we've worked with Nike, we've worked with major hospital systems. So, you know, our client base is no longer just private equity. And we work with We work with growth family businesses, you know, so it's really more about the relationship with the founder and the upside, because for the large corporate companies, you know, there might be a tier of executives that even if they're not on the C level, that are key in helping that company grow. And that's at scale. And then for these growth companies, sometimes this is their first big outside hire, you know, bringing on You know, a COO or even maybe a CFO or maybe even like a chief of staff or a head of sales to support these growth businesses that are turning the corner. And so we now have both that leadership search, but then we have something that we call next up. And this is in demand from clients because often we would bring in, as I mentioned, sometimes for a CFO, for example, we would bring someone from banking or consulting. who don't have a traditional accounting background. Did they study it in school? Do they understand it? Sure. Does it report to them? But their job is overall business operations. So, you know, we started early on getting, you know, the people that we place in the role saying, hey, well, English role, but I need a controller. You know, I need I need someone to focus on accounting. And, you know, we had to We had to really think about it. I had to really think about it because in executive search, being working with the C level, working with senior roles, you know, there's some pride there. You know, I I really fashioned myself as the CFO and the COO whisperer. And also, you know, the obvious that we started in 2012, that I was significantly younger than our competition. So it was a big thing for. A younger guy in retained search to work with C level roles. And a lot of firms, they only work on these levels. But when the client reaches out to me because they appreciate our process, I thought it was because, you know, I was really great at CFO, COO searches, but it turns out they like our project management. They like our diligence. They like the strategy. They like how we treat every project like its own bespoke. Mission. So they started saying, hey, we can you help with control or or we need someone in business intelligence. Like you're a math major, you're you know, consultant. Like I can you talk to our marketing person? So it started out just doing those senior roles, but now even sometimes the people who support these leaders who do the blocking and tackling, you know, this up-and-coming leader. They are actually the heartbeat of the organization and they free up the executive to be more strategic. So those same executives said, Hey, can you help me with these roles? They're important too. Now, traditionally, those would go to contingent consultant, but we place these people here. So they started asking us to do these roles more. So we call that next step. Now, are we a fit for every role across the organization? No, it's got to be a key role. But when there's a difference between good and great, We no longer just do CFOs and COOs. We've done projects across marketing, operations, strategy, project management that support these executives. And a lot of these people have gone on to grow to be executives themselves because it's, you know, getting a strong person in a key role, getting some leverage for that executive to be strategic. And then also secession planning in the organization, bringing in top-tier people. So it's not just leadership search anymore. It's what we call the CFO and COO search. we have next up talent. And then there was also consulting. With having a management consulting background, I would have these clients who ultimately, you know, they become my friends. and they start asking us about consulting projects. Can we do something in a more efficient way? Because everything for us is understand the problem. look at the market for options, you know, figure out, you know, what the client would be, what approach the client would be at, what what approach works for that client. And for consulting, it was instead of bringing in, I work for Accenture, like a major consulting firm that would bring in a whole team, can we find a few experts or an expert to help that executive move things forward? And you know, again, we did it a few times because people just asked us because you know they knew how we worked. And that became a part of our practice in 2015. so and then we then started people who'd worked with us wanted us to audit their, I wouldn't say HR, but their talent, some of their strategic talent. Practices because they say, hey, you guys have more of a business development model because we show our work. Like we don't have this secret process, and you know, we just end up with kids. We show our work on a week-to-week basis. And sometimes whether there's unique initiatives for pipelining or they want certain recruiting processes to operate similar to ours. so sometimes we bring in outside experts for finance operations strategy. But then sometimes people bring us in to help them with specific talent operations. And then the last and the newest thing, which is it really you know it started in maybe 2024 is that you know is that while we become friends with our clients and we work with them. And we talk about these growth businesses that are looking for mergers and acquisitions, a lot of people have exits or just executives changing. You know, making career changes while we don't take candidates to market. These are people that we work with, these are our friends, this is our community. And so we do give we started giving guidance on how we would approach it. You know, we're not on a traditional recruiting firm, we're not gonna tell you how to go to market, but we speak with leaders, we understand how the process works, and we give guidance and It what really started with, you know, helping people that, you know, we'd work with our partners that work with us during times of transition started with us really giving strategic guidance on not just their approach to the market, but thought leadership. And, you know, we have this generation of people who they're not self promoters. They see, you know, we're doing this podcast now. Yeah, they listen to podcasts, they see content, but they don't see themselves in creating content, but they also know a lot of times it's it's a corporate initiative. Hey, you need to get more content out there. Or you know that if you want a board role or your next opportunity. So we've helped people come up with we call it leadership edge. We've helped people come up with their plan, you know, not an influencer's plan, not a marketing agency's plan. What is your leadership plan that you can maintain because something that we know is that people now they they they want to be able to meet you before they meet you. And you know, a 20-year person, a 15-year executive, you can't have all your information on your resume or your LinkedIn. So we've helped people curate a story that aligns with their personality, their goals, because a lot of them they see You know, they see what's out there, but they don't just want AI or they don't want to be an influencer. So we've helped people establish their brand, which I truly enjoy.

speaker-0: Yeah, makes sense. I mean, I can clearly see that, you know, throughout the 10 plus years at Strategic Executives Agency, there's been just a lot of development, a lot of evolvement as well. And there's one thing that I would love to come back to you, which is the use of tools to automate and optimize your approach to finding CFO or finding a a COO, for an example. So I'd love to learn a little bit. bit more in terms of the AI aspect, how are you thinking about AI within your business? Like which of the AI have you incorporated in the elements of your business?

speaker-1: So, you know, having worked in in process and consulting, to me, AI is a very powerful tool, but it's a tool. And it's just like when, you know, people started using a lot of systems or tools and process. These are just tools to help you optimize a process that you know. And where I think people make mistakes with AI is they think that AI is going to do the work for you. so there are parts of the process where we will use AI. so for example, you know, we have to meet with the client or partner, or I mean, so we have to meet with the partner to understand what's the business challenge, what's the business opportunity. which is a human meeting. I think that before you know, I'm gonna sit down and do, you know, kind of strategy case study and think about kind of the business where and think about like the opportunity depending on a lot of times the clients will know specifically what the opportunity is. Sometimes I'm a partner in strategizing and kind of looking at that and looking at what other people have done. That's a point where AI After we kind of have a vision and a high-level plan, I think it might help us come to help us organize our thoughts and come to like a shared plan. I think that once we've identified human part, once we've identified the type of person that's gonna fit within this leadership team, I think AI helps us. with some of the due diligence to you know we talk about being exhaustive and identifying the the universe of talent you know there are some tools and to me they're all similar but you know you got Apollo yeah yeah yeah Apollo yeah Glen you you you have these tools that can scrape the internet for information that can scrape and you know we don't like to just look at LinkedIn you can look at conferences you can look at tools and backgrounds

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. For names.

speaker-1: You you really can identify career track, for example, for one project we look for COOs that have an engineering background. Right. Like, you know, so you can come up with those strategies. And while it's not going to be perfect from a volume perspective, it's a lot easier now for me to come up with 500 COOs for manufacturing that have an engineering background. Right. Yeah. And then it can help with outreach, but you just have to be careful because there's a quality quantity balance. But you know, one thing that while there are tools to do it, we've I've seen a client do it for some more hourly jobs. I don't believe that AI can do the interviews. Of course. There are tools that there are tools that do it.

speaker-0: yeah, with AI people as well. Yeah. Yeah.

speaker-1: I don't believe, you know, like we need to we we're gonna have three touch points from a screening, the project manager meets, and then I meet with the person, we will never change that. And I also think that sometimes people need to be careful with AI because if it's if it's getting information that someone put, it's you know, like any tool or system, you know, the output is only gonna be as good as the data that exists. So what I think that AI falls short in talent is the creativity. It's, you know, one, it's whatever, you know, it's assumes that people share the relevant information or that that information is true. Right. Like it's because it's describing data, you know, I'm looking for a CO in manufacturing that has an engineering degree. Like, you know, they may not have that out there or, you know, they might not really be a CO. So, you know, AI can help with that, but then thinking outside of the box. You know, not, you know, I that's the area that that's limited. But then obviously in our updates, presentation decks. presentation decks and we don't do a great deal of marketing but i do think that again as long as the vision is from a human i do think ai helps optimize marketing it helps optimize content but for us it's mostly in information due diligence and just execution activity

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think it's always obviously important to really examine, you know, which elements should be kept as humanistic as possible versus which can be delegated to AI to help automate or optimize the process as well. let's talk a little bit about your, you know, the humanistic part, right? You have your team. tell the listeners a bit out there, you know. who is doing what, how many people are on board, to get a better sense of like your team culture and so on.

speaker-1: Well, on the client facing side. so we have client facing side and then we have an internal project team. the first person that I brought on in 2012, Sassoon Lee, now Sassoon Lee Shellhouse. you know, she's she's been with me from the start. she was, you know, maybe six months into starting this business. She's the first person I hired. She's held every role in the business from know research, recruiting, business development. She runs mostly she runs client operations, so whether it's recruiting projects, consulting projects, sometimes we do kind of engagement or or content with executives, thought leadership. Once we have something in project form, Sassoon oversees that. We then she's supported on a project-to-project basis with project managers depending on the project. So those are those are people who support because we're very tactical. Like we need to know how many outreaches that we need to make, you know, how many. How much research needs to be done. And so that is really done on a project basis, on a per project basis, because each project is its own project. Right. So we have a group of people that we use depending on the needs of that project. And depending on the needs of the project. So she manages that. The client probably won't meet the client probably won't meet a different project manager, but we do have other project managers who have been have been client-facing. internally, thanks to Cherry, I do have I have a chief of staff who'd start out an associate who's cash. And on the day-to-day, I think all founders. need a partner in operations, someone that helps, you know, you get these ideas down, get them executed, help make sure the team knows where everything is. we run our business on kind of the EOS, the entrepreneur operating system, which is weekly goals kind of pushing forward. And frankly, before COVID, I would say that we were a team of consultants, or I was a consultant with support. I would say now that I view it more as I view my, I approach it more now as myself as a founder with support. But what's not going to change is that. Whether it's what's not going to change is the client engagement. Final candidates, kind of working with strategies with our client to understand goals, options, vision. That's the part I enjoy. you know, that's you know, frankly, probably the the bottleneck of the business, but I we are not a transactional business, so we put a lot of things in place to support a process so we can keep a volume of projects going. But at the same time, those personal touches, whether we're discussing, whether we're screening candidates, whether we're discussing strategy with a client, or even updates with a client, you know, those things that those are things that we're going to hold pretty close. So we have so because the internal team, we have someone's focus on email operation. We have you know someone who formats resumes, like we have, you know, tactical resources internally, but you know, the strategic client facing resources are really myself and Sassoon. She supported her project managers on the project. I have an awesome chief of staff. And then we also have Another cherry hire, Eleanor, who helps us with some more strategic outreach rather than, you know, once we come up with a plan, we'll do it over and over again. But we do have a cherry resource who, you know, is an email campaign expert. She's actually become great in targeting the type of people that we want. Because unlike traditional recruiting, our Our goal is not just to get someone in the seat, it's to have someone grow with the business. And you know, I'm sure everyone says that, but most recruiting, internal, external, they don't own outcomes. We do. Whether it's the one-year guarantee or the type of longer-term partnerships we built. Look, we've had some of the same clients for 10 years.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm.

speaker-1: You know, at different businesses, they've grown businesses. We go in there together, we put a team around them and they take it and push forward. And I think it's very important that who's ever targeting the people owns the outcome. And then you start, because you were talking about kind of people and culture in our team. You know, we, you know, the way we organize information, I think that we're I think we have fun in what we do. as much money as much as you can doing some project management. But I think that the the culture is more about week to week operations. What do we learn? What are the KPIs? You know, clear communicate with our clients, transparency, project management. Like that's kind of our culture and we have a little bit of fun doing it.

speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. And I think and I'm also loving these shout outs that you mentioned about Cherry. And we're really glad that from our side we're able to help you find people to help you to grow. what you've been building and I think that's really exciting as well. So aside from that, do you currently see any challenges that you're facing, whether it's in the operational side of things or whether it's in the client search or something like that?

speaker-1: think that you know there's you we talked about tools and operations you can always get better you know the challenges is how do we balance you know the power of these new tools and options while keeping the quality high heck how do we assess because there's an endless amount of tools you know You know, what percentage of time should we use evaluating new tools? How often should we do it? and I just think with us in my personal challenge, and it's it's an opportunity that that that we've addressed is just my schedule and travel. Because we we didn't do a lot of marketing on early and embarrassingly, probably for know the first decade in business. So a lot of the people that we work with were from referral or they were from Accenture or they were from business schools. So we just met the clients where they were at. A lot of them be in Los Angeles or but you know people moved to a different part of the country. You know, we've been to Canada and Europe, we you know just wherever the clients were. And we're still happy to do that. We're now being more intentional about building networks and markets. Because while we can do research and execute in any market, you start to learn things and patterns in market. For example, we know how to recruit people to Austin and Dallas now because we spend a lot of time there. we have a huge client in Raleigh Durham, which is also my hometown. But, you know, we intentionally build a network there and have a, you know, a better understanding of that. business community there. You know, same thing in Scottsdale, Arizona, same thing in South Florida, where I do spend a lot of my time. So I think one of the, you know, the challenge has been, you know, being everywhere where your client is, even though we're kind of in a video conference era, you know, it's there's we've still found more efficiency, whether it's understanding that market or, you know, just the realities of FaceTime with clients, identifying the cities that or the locations that we want to frequent and being intentional about building that just for some schedule relief moving forward.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it makes sense. It's all about intentionality, but also like understanding the market as well, moving forward, especially like now with during the age of AI as well. so just one final question. And this is a question that I typically love to ask towards the end of every episode for every single one of the podcast guests coming in. So if there is one, or maybe you have multiple, piece of business advice that you would Share to someone who is thinking about starting something of their own, becoming an entrepreneur, business founder, what would it be?

speaker-1: Get started. I think that, and we find ourselves doing it, especially with these AI tools. Like you have these tools that can, you know, give you, you know, as much information as you want, but at some point it can become analysis or decision paralysis. And especially if you're starting a business, you're going to have to learn anyway. And you know, you've got something that's 80-90% good. Let's get it out there and get started. Because there, you know, there are people who will plan launching a business for years and sometimes it never happens, but you get out there. I mean, one, you have some success or you get roughed up a bit and you get some market information and you come back better. And that is I think the most important part. is kind of being confidence and just getting out there and doing it.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah, sounds good. That's definitely very valuable insights as well to just like do it either way. You're gonna take something out of it, whether no matter which direction it goes as well. Christopher, thank you so so much again for coming on and sharing your journey. And definitely for sure, we will be able to share a little bit and promote you know, what you've been doing at Strategic Executives Agency. So this is behind the founders. Be sure to stay tuned for the next episode. Thanks again.

speaker-1: Thank you.