Placing a First-Ever Managing Director to Unlock CEO-Level Growth
Placing a First-Ever Managing Director to Unlock CEO-Level Growth
A high-growth boutique consulting firm needed its most consequential hire to date — a role that had never existed before. We delivered the right Managing Director in 90 days through deep network sourcing and consultative role shaping. The firm has nearly doubled its headcount since.
A Role Being Defined
in Real Time
This was the firm's first-ever Managing Director — a role being created from scratch. The client was actively working through scope, success metrics, and expectations during the search itself, requiring a recruiting partner who could hold the process steady while the brief evolved.
The MD needed to simultaneously oversee all existing practice areas and launch a brand-new healthcare consulting practice. Finding someone with cross-industry delivery leadership and specific healthcare expertise to build something new was an exceptionally narrow brief.
Founded by former Big Four consultants who deliberately built something different, the firm's culture was strong and intentional. The MD had to be someone who could lead and elevate that culture — not just fit within it.
The underlying purpose of the hire was to give the CEO room to operate at the strategic level — requiring someone confident enough to own the business day-to-day and drive growth independently, without needing to be managed themselves.
A Strategic Partner,
Not Just a Sourcing Engine
We approached this search as a consultative partner from the outset. Given the evolving nature of the role, we worked closely with the client throughout to help them articulate what success looked like, sharpen the candidate profile, and evaluate fit across multiple dimensions simultaneously. On the sourcing side, we combined deep LinkedIn research with direct network activation to identify candidates who were not visible through conventional channels.
We tapped into our professional network and conducted targeted outreach to identify consulting leaders with the specific combination of delivery experience, healthcare exposure, and commercial drive the role required — bypassing active candidate pools entirely.
As the client refined scope and success metrics in real time, we served as a sounding board — helping translate evolving expectations into candidate criteria and keeping the search focused and on track despite the moving brief.
Every candidate was evaluated on experience, cultural alignment, leadership style, entrepreneurial appetite, and genuine healthcare sector knowledge — ensuring the final hire could deliver on all dimensions of the mandate from day one.
Despite the complexity of the search and the fluid role definition, we delivered a completed placement within three months — maintaining urgency without sacrificing the quality the search demanded.
One Hire That Changed
the Firm's Trajectory
"We help growing businesses build the leadership architecture that makes the next stage of growth possible."
Hiring a first-ever leader for a newly created role is one of the most consequential searches a growing firm can undertake. There is no template, no predecessor to benchmark against, and no margin for error. This engagement demonstrates Bespoke Placement Group's ability to operate as a true strategic partner in ambiguous, high-stakes situations — helping clients define what they need, then delivering it with precision and speed.
