Our Stellar Team and Search 2.0 Drive Bespoke Partners to New Heights
There are moments when you just let the numbers speak for themselves. This is one of those moments:
- 55% revenue growth
- 64% headcount growth
- 99% placement success rate
Those numbers tell the story about what 2021 was like for Bespoke Partners.
By any measure, it was a banner year for our firm.
It also marked 10 years since the company was founded by our CEO, Kristie Nova, who had the vision for a unique search and advisory firm and then set out to build it.
Now a decade in, we have carved out a unique niche in leadership recruiting and human capital advisory services for private equity-backed companies in the software space.
While the numbers do speak for themselves, let me share a little more color about how these great results came about.
An Exceptional Team Delivers Exceptional Teams
Far and away the top factor in our success in 2021 was our incredible team.
It’s been amazing to watch these colleagues of mine exceed client expectations again and again.
It’s an incredibly tight labor market in every sector these days. Yet our team of search and advisory professionals are consistently finding and placing high-impact portfolio company executives in half the industry average search time.
The examples from the past year are too numerous to mention. Our team has orchestrated placements of game-changing CEOs, CFOs, product and technology leaders, sales and marketing leaders, and a range of others.
In some cases, our team has been responsible for transforming the entire team of a portfolio company.
Our team members exhibit qualities and values that have brought this company to this level: resiliency, commitment, team-orientation, passion for self-improvement, and willingness to go above and beyond. (You can learn more about our culture and values here.)
But they also bring something else to the table: a thorough understanding of what makes a private equity portfolio company successful and how its leaders make that happen.
That domain expertise and our unique focus on software companies mean our team can deliver search and advisory services that are tailored to the precise needs of our market.
This commitment to excellence is what enabled us to post record revenue in 2021. It’s permitted us to achieve major growth while still providing each client with personal, undivided attention. We cap our searches at six per recruiter to ensure attentive service.
The success of our team is what enabled us to open our third regional office so that we now span the country with physical offices for the first time. It’s how we can field dedicated practice teams that focus exclusively on key functional roles in software companies.
This exceptional team is supported by a unique process that brings management science to raise search and advisory to an entirely new level.
Unique Search 2.0 Process Breaks New Ground
The other primary factor in our 2021 success is our unique approach to search and human capital advisory.
We call it Search 2.0 and it brings a data-driven, evidence-based approach to assessing the fit of a potential executive for a particular role.
In today’s competitive markets, quickly finding the right leaders, recruiting them, and getting them up to speed are crucial to achieving an investment thesis.
So we have applied management science and state-of-the-art assessment tools to develop an incredibly insightful and comprehensive analysis of a candidate’s fit for a role.
The heart of that process is our FIT Profile, a framework for candidate assessment that builds a comprehensive picture of the candidate’s potential. It measures not only the candidate’s ability to fill the role, but also their potential fit with other members of the leadership team and the company as a whole.
The results? The best candidates are surfaced much earlier in the search process. You have a much clearer understanding of how the person can perform. And once the candidate is in place, they are much more likely to be successful in the position in the long term.
That’s why we are particularly proud of our placement success rate, which reached 99% in 2021. That’s measured as the percentage of our placed candidates who are still in the role a full 24 months after they are placed.
We have nicknamed this “First Time Right” placement, borrowing a phrase from the world of Six Sigma quality management. Simply put, getting things right the first time is the key to quality and efficiency.
That kind of placement success is critical for achieving the investment thesis for a private equity firm. A leadership team must be executing on a value creation plan as quickly and effectively as possible. One bad hire in senior leadership can derail the plan completely and increase the hold period for the portfolio company.
Looking to join a fast-moving, exciting company? We are hiring.
Looking for a leader for a portfolio company? Get in touch to learn what Bespoke’s exceptional team can do for you.