How to Find Advisors for Multiple Portcos Fast
Finding good advisors is tricky. Depending on the portfolio company, there could be up to a dozen permutations of what constitutes a “good candidate.” One person might work well for Portco A but get rejected by Portco B because they lack industry fit. They may work up to a point for Portco C until they hit a new funding stage and their experience is no longer relevant.
Talent partners are not only trying to answer, “Who makes sense based on industry and stage?” They also need to determine who meshes well with founders and investors and how actively they need to be involved in day-to-day operations.
When you layer in the complicated nature of candidate movement–waiting for an executive to be open to a new opportunity, or hearing someone is suddenly on the market when you have no openings–even a strong network starts to show its cracks.
That's where SearchEssentials comes in.
A Potential Part-Time to Full-Time Advisor
Back in August, a Private Equity client with $10B+ AUM and 100 portfolio companies tasked SearchEssentials with bringing on an executive advisor to support a beauty and skincare line of business. They wanted someone experienced who wasn't currently in an executive seat, in case they decided to place this individual in a full-time leadership role later on. After calibrating against the client’s desired criteria, our team researched and engaged with __ prospective candidates about the opportunity. We prioritized executives looking for new opportunities who had served on boards previously.
We delivered a short list of the top five most qualified individuals for the client to interview.
The client feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and they told us this was the exact group they had been looking for to scale portco growth and they were excited to connect with each individual to bolster their strategy and talent intelligence.
The Open-to-Anything Advisory Model
Simultaneously, the same talent partner was engaging with a different portfolio company to find strategic advisor support, this time in the HR technology space. Seeing that our team could be an extension of their in-house support, they asked us for talent intelligence.
Could we speak with individuals currently in executive-level roles at HR technology companies to figure out who was available to come on board and how much they wanted to engage?
Our team built a list of 70 target companies to begin sourcing candidates. Once this was approved, we launched an impressive outreach campaign and, in 10 weeks, introduced them to 14 qualified candidates.
When you have to find multiple advisors to keep multiple portfolio companies on track quickly, it’s important to have a reliable resource to call up when needed.
That is SearchEssentials.
Learn More. →
