Group CFO for a PE-backed industrial services platform.

The brief

The platform had been acquired six months earlier as a bolt-on-and-scale thesis, and the incumbent Finance Director — a highly capable operator at the previous scale — was widely acknowledged as unlikely to be the right CFO for the exit envisaged. The sponsor engaged Target Search to run the replacement search with the incumbent still in seat, and with full confidentiality across the platform.

The brief called for a Group CFO who had previously served as CFO of a similarly-sized PE-backed platform, taken it through a full value-creation cycle, and either sold or IPO’d the business. Cultural fit with the CEO, who had been in seat since the acquisition, was weighted as heavily as track record.

What we did

We ran the search under our Sponsor Coverage practice, with off-limits at the fund level: no candidate from any other portfolio in the fund could be approached. The market map produced a candidate universe of thirty-eight; the longlist ran to eleven, the shortlist to three. The incumbent was informed at the point of offer acceptance and supported through a professional transition.

Every reference was taken with the candidate’s written consent, including one back-reference from a prior sponsor at the appointee’s previous platform.

The outcome

The appointee was in seat ten weeks after brief. At the eighteen-month mark, the platform had completed three bolt-on acquisitions and hit the value-creation milestones the original thesis had set. The sponsor and appointee have consented to this case being summarised in the format above; the platform, sponsor and appointee remain anonymous.