The founders had built their own wealthtech platform from scratch, and the technology was genuinely good. Their backgrounds were in enterprise, institutional and banking technology, though, and the first market they wanted to win was UK financial advisers.
They'd come through their early funding rounds and knew they needed a commercial leader to take them into it. Advisers first, then a remit to broaden into enterprise and banking clients once the platform had a foothold.
The role
A Chief Commercial Officer reporting to the founders. The job had three parts: bring credibility with advisers and the people who influence them, build a commercial team underneath from almost nothing, and bring experienced leadership into a business that until then had been run by technologists.
Why it was hard
Most people could do one or two of those. A proven sales leader would have the adviser relationships but might not have the leadership depth. A senior executive from a large platform would have the leadership and the network, but an early-stage business is a different animal, and plenty of very good people find the pace and the ambiguity hard going after years with a big support structure around them.
Add the enterprise and banking remit, and the person also needed to be credible in rooms the adviser market never goes near.
How I mapped it
I looked across investment platforms, wealthtech and the wider adviser investment market, and identified around 200 people who could plausibly do some version of the job. About 50 of those turned into proper conversations.
What I was listening for, beyond the CV, was how someone would work alongside technical founders. Would they challenge them, and would the founders listen? Could they decide what mattered first when everything matters and the team is small?
That took it to a longlist of 12, then a shortlist of three, with a second wave of three ready if we needed it. We didn't. One candidate stood out from early on, and the other two were strong enough that the founders had a real decision to make rather than a formality.
The outcome
Brief to accepted offer took two and a half months. Two years on, the business is going from strength to strength, and the culture has held as it moves from a small firm to a medium-sized one.
What it taught me
Leadership matters most at the point a business is changing shape. As this one grew, getting the culture fit right mattered as much as anything on the CV.