Situation
Over recent years the company had been stagnating. Lack of growth and poor earnings caused our client, the Chairman of the Board, to initiate a generation change and ask us to assist in finding a new CEO.

The company is a well-known high-tech player specializing in the design, development and manufacture of customized products, and had a large but unexploited potential with interesting growth possibilities.

The first task of the new CEO was to initiate a new, five-year strategy plan. The success criteria were to build the right organizational structure, optimize business processes, achieve a significant earnings increase, and identify growth opportunities, both organically and through acquisitions.

The Board wished to find a person with significant leadership qualities, if possible with previous experience in the technology industry. The successful candidate would have a strong, result-oriented business development profile focusing sharply on financial performance with proven results from manufacturing companies supplying customer-specific projects. The new CEO would be able to identify new opportunities for the company enabling growth targets to be met.

Search
We concentrated our search on candidates with a degree in engineering together with a business degree. An alternative option was a result-oriented economist with experience in the industry. We looked for people who could document excellent results and who had experience with similar challenges to those the company was facing.

A turn-around is always an extremely time-consuming task requiring enormous resources. Thus we had to make sure of attracting people with the energy and commitment to bring the necessary professional and human competences to the company. We were looking for a CEO with a highly strategic mindset and who would be a frontrunner for the organization in the coming turn-around and future growth plan.

We presented three extremely well-qualified candidates who all matched our CEO profile – professionally, in terms of experience and on the human level.

Results
The candidate presentations were a great success. Our search had identified the absolutely ideal profiles and all candidates continued to the next step in the process.

The person who was finally chosen for the CEO position possessed the entire spectrum of qualities that we had been looking for. The chemistry between the appointee and the Chairman was exceptionally positive – something which is also of major importance for a successful result.

The new CEO had previously achieved great success in a similar situation and had the necessary drive to achieve the same success for our client.