CEO Executive Search: Our Approach

Exec Capital operates as a retained CEO executive search firm, not a database search service. Every CEO search begins with a structured briefing conversation, normally arranged as soon as the board, founder or investor is ready to talk. That conversation establishes the business context, the board dynamics, the ownership structure, the CEO mandate, the cultural requirements, and what a successful appointment looks like at twelve, twenty-four and thirty-six months.

From that brief, our team conducts a research-based executive search — identifying the specific individuals whose CEO track records match the mandate requirements, approaching them directly and confidentially, and building a shortlist on the timetable we agree with you at briefing. This is not a posting-and-screening exercise. Every candidate on the shortlist has been assessed against the specific brief before being presented, with Adrian Lawrence FCA overseeing the mandate throughout.

Exec Capital’s retained CEO search model produces a materially better appointment than contingency CEO recruitment. Contingency recruits for availability; retained search recruits for fit. The difference shows in the quality of the shortlist and the durability of the appointment.

The Institute of Directors and the Financial Reporting Council’s UK Corporate Governance Code set out the governance expectations for CEO appointment processes across UK businesses. UK Private Capital (the trade body formerly known as the BVCA) publishes guidance on leadership in PE-backed businesses, where the CEO appointment is typically the most value-critical decision made in the first months of ownership. Exec Capital’s mission is to become the UK’s leading executive recruitment agency.

A good CEO brief is more than a job description. It records why the role is open now, what the board expects the next CEO to change and what it expects them to protect, how much authority the role carries over strategy, capital and people, and who else has a say in the decision — a founder, a majority investor, a parent company or a regulator. We write that brief down and agree it with you before any approach is made, because it becomes the yardstick against which every candidate is measured. If you are still shaping the role, our CEO job description guide sets out the core responsibilities most boards include.

Who Will Lead Your CEO Search

Your CEO search is run by our specialist executive search team rather than passed between desks. A named consultant manages the search day to day — the market research, the confidential approaches, the candidate conversations and the feedback loop with your board — and stays with the mandate from briefing to appointment. Adrian Lawrence FCA, our founder, oversees each mandate, so the board has a senior point of contact and the assessment carries a practitioner’s view of the commercial and financial side of the Chief Executive role.

Exec Capital is part of FD Capital Group, a group of five specialist search firms: FD Capital, Exec Capital, NED Capital, Accountancy Capital and SMF Capital. The senior networks of each firm are pooled across the group, and many of the C-level executives in those networks also sit as non-executive directors. For a CEO search that matters, because the people best placed to recommend a Chief Executive — chairs, investors, CFOs and NEDs who have worked alongside them — are often already in our networks.

Types of CEO Engagement We Place

Permanent CEO

A thorough retained search for a full-time Chief Executive — appropriate where the board wants a considered, high-quality appointment with a shortlist built specifically for the mandate rather than drawn from available candidates. The timetable depends on the seniority of the role, the size of the candidate pool, notice periods and the board’s own availability for interviews, so we agree it with you at briefing rather than quote a standard figure. For PE-backed, regulated or highly sector-specific mandates we set out at the start where the extra research time is likely to go.

Interim CEO

A defined-period CEO appointment — appropriate for an unplanned departure, a governance situation requiring independent leadership, a PE transaction requiring management continuity, or a permanent search that needs to be run carefully rather than under pressure. Experienced interim Chief Executives are usually available at short notice, so we can move quickly on urgent interim CEO mandates; the timing is agreed with you when you brief us.

Fractional CEO

A part-time CEO arrangement — appropriate for businesses that need CEO-level strategic leadership and external authority without the scale to justify a full-time appointment, typically one to three days per week on an ongoing basis. Most commonly placed with smaller and earlier-stage businesses where the founding team needs experienced CEO-level challenge and direction. See our fractional CEO service for the full model.

When to Hire a Permanent, Interim or Fractional CEO

The first decision is not who to hire but what kind of appointment the business needs. A permanent CEO is the right answer when the board is ready to commit to one leader for the next phase. It is the wrong answer when the business is in the middle of a crisis, a sale process or a strategic review whose outcome will change what the next CEO has to do. In those situations an interim CEO holds the business steady while the permanent brief becomes clear. For smaller businesses that need CEO-level judgement but cannot justify, or do not yet need, a full-time Chief Executive, a fractional arrangement is often the better fit.

Three questions usually settle it. First, does the board know what it needs the next CEO to do for the next three to five years? If not, an interim appointment buys time to find out. Second, is the leadership gap urgent? A permanent search done properly takes longer than most boards would like, and an unplanned vacancy rarely waits. Third, can the business afford, and does it need, a full-time Chief Executive? If the honest answer is “not yet”, a fractional CEO is usually the sensible step, and many fractional arrangements later convert into a permanent role once the business has grown into it.

Other ways to hire a CEO. This page covers permanent CEO recruitment and executive search. If you need cover now, see our interim CEO service, and for investor-owned businesses our portfolio company CEO recruitment page. Where the role is closer to general management than group leadership, our managing director recruitment practice covers it, and if you are working through the process yourself, our guide on how to hire a CEO and our hire an MD or CEO page set out the steps.

How We Assess CEOs

Most CEO candidates interview well. They have spent years presenting to boards, investors and staff, and the polished story is part of the job. Our assessment is designed to get underneath that story to the decisions the candidate actually made and the results that followed. We assess every shortlisted candidate against five areas, weighted to the brief you have agreed with us.

1. Strategy

Can the candidate diagnose a business quickly and set a clear direction that the board, the management team and the workforce can understand? We look for evidence that they have changed a strategy, not just inherited and continued one: what they chose to stop doing, which markets or products they exited or entered, and how they knew it was working. We also test judgement under uncertainty — how the candidate decided when the data was incomplete, and what they did when a decision turned out to be wrong.

2. P&L and commercial delivery

A Chief Executive owns the whole profit and loss account, not a slice of it. We test the candidate’s grip on the numbers: the drivers of revenue and margin in businesses they have led, how they used management information, how they worked with their CFO, and how they responded when trading went against plan. Our founder is a Chartered Accountant, and this is where a finance-literate assessment earns its keep — separating the leaders who drove results from those who happened to be in the chair while the market did the work.

3. Capital allocation

Every CEO decides where the business’s money and management time go: investment, acquisitions, working capital, dividends, debt and headcount. We ask candidates to walk through significant capital decisions they have made, the alternatives they rejected, and the return the business actually achieved. For PE-backed and listed mandates, we probe how they balanced short-term cash and covenant pressure against long-term value, and how they handled an exit, refinancing or fundraising.

4. People and the leadership team

The CEO’s most important output is the quality of the team around them. We look at who the candidate hired, who they moved on, how long their direct reports stayed, and whether they developed successors. We take references from people who reported to them as well as from chairs and investors, because the view from below is often the most revealing. Culture fit matters too, but we define it in practical terms — pace, decision style, tolerance for risk — rather than as a vague sense of chemistry.

5. Board and investor relations

A CEO who cannot work with the board will not last, however good they are operationally. We test how the candidate has handled disagreement with a chair or investor, how they reported bad news, how they prepared for board meetings and how they balanced founder, investor and lender interests. Under section 172 of the Companies Act 2006, directors must promote the success of the company having regard to employees, suppliers, customers, the community and the long term; the best CEO candidates can show how they have applied that duty in practice, not just recite it.

Warning signs we look for

Some patterns come up again and again in CEO appointments that do not last, and we test for them deliberately:

• Results that belong to the market, not the leader. Strong growth during a rising market, with no clear account of what the candidate did differently from competitors.
• Short tenures without a clear story. A run of appointments ending within two years can have good explanations, but it needs one, and the references should support it.
• A team that never stays. High turnover among direct reports, or no successor developed, often points to a leadership style that will not suit your business.
• Mismatched scale or ownership. A leader whose whole career has been in large corporate groups may find a lean, founder-led business very different, and the reverse is equally true.
• Vague answers on numbers. A Chief Executive who cannot explain the margin, cash and working-capital position of a business they ran is unlikely to manage yours closely.

None of these rules a candidate out on its own. They are the questions we make sure are answered before a name reaches your shortlist, so that the board spends its interview time on the strongest candidates rather than on discovering problems that could have been found earlier.

How we test it. Our assessment combines structured competency interviews, a case discussion based on your business’s real issues, in-depth referencing (including references the candidate did not nominate, taken with their consent), and verification of qualifications, directorships and stated results. Our CEO interview questions guide shows the kind of questions boards can use at final interview.

“Exec Capital has supported SBS Insurance Services over the past three years through the provision of a Fractional FD/CFO. Their expertise has made a significant difference in professionalising our finance function and delivering accurate, timely management information—exactly what our business needed to grow with confidence.”
Tracey Rees, COO, SBS Insurance Services Ltd

 

Sectors We Recruit CEOs For

We recruit CEOs across a broad range of UK sectors. Those where we have the deepest candidate networks and the most frequent mandates include:

Technology and SaaS

CEOs with experience of scaling technology businesses — from Series A through to exit — including the commercial-model transitions, engineering-team leadership and investor relations each stage requires.

Financial services and regulated businesses

CEOs with regulatory literacy, FCA or PRA supervised-entity experience and the governance discipline regulated firms require. SM&CR awareness is a baseline expectation for CEO candidates in regulated contexts.

Private-equity-backed businesses

CEOs who have operated in PE-owned businesses and understand the value-creation-plan discipline, the operating-partner relationship and the pace of delivery PE ownership requires. This is one of the most frequent contexts for CEO appointments at Exec Capital.

Professional services

CEOs able to lead partner-led or expertise-driven businesses, with the credibility to lead senior professionals, the commercial instinct to drive growth and the governance discipline to manage a partnership or board structure.

Consumer, retail and industrial

CEOs with brand, customer-experience and commercial P&L experience in consumer-facing businesses, and CEOs with operational excellence and supply-chain leadership for manufacturing, industrial and distribution businesses with large operational teams.

CEO Search by Situation

Sector matters, but the situation the business is in usually matters more. A Chief Executive who has thrived in a listed group can struggle in a founder-led business, and a turnaround specialist is rarely the right person to run a stable, cash-generative company for the next decade. We shape every search around the situation first and the sector second.

Founder succession

Hiring the first non-founder Chief Executive is one of the most delicate searches a business ever runs. The founder usually remains a major shareholder and often stays on the board, and the new CEO needs both the authority to lead and the respect of a team that has always looked to the founder. The searches that work best are the ones where the founder and the board agree, in writing and before any candidate is approached, what the founder will and will not do after the appointment.

PE-backed and investor-owned businesses

Private equity investors frequently review the leadership team around a transaction, and the CEO decision is usually the first one they make. The new CEO is judged against an investment case with a defined horizon, so the brief must reflect the value-creation plan, the reporting rhythm and the likely exit route. Where the business needs cover during a transaction or after a sudden departure, a private equity interim CEO can hold the position while the permanent search runs.

Listed and AIM companies

For a premium-listed company, the UK Corporate Governance Code expects the nomination committee to lead the process for board appointments, and that appointments are made on merit against objective criteria. AIM companies have their own governance arrangements, and many follow a recognised code. In either case the CEO search has to stand up to shareholder and analyst scrutiny, and we document the process so the nomination committee can show how the appointment was made.

Regulated firms and the SMF1 function

In firms covered by the Senior Managers and Certification Regime, the Chief Executive normally holds the SMF1 function and must be approved by the regulator before taking up the role. Under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 the regulator has three months to decide a complete application, with the clock stopping while it waits for information it has requested, so the timetable for a regulated CEO appointment has to include the approval process. Changes to the SMCR that took effect on 24 April 2026 give firms twelve weeks to submit an application where they put temporary cover in place for an unexpected absence. The FCA and PRA consulted in October 2026 on further reforms to the approvals regime; until final rules are published, plan a CEO appointment on the basis that SMF1 approval is needed before the candidate starts. The FCA’s SMCR pages set out the current regime, and our SMF1 guide covers the practical steps. Note that payment institutions and e-money institutions sit outside the SMCR and follow their own approval arrangements.

International groups and UK subsidiaries

Overseas groups setting up or growing a UK business often need a Chief Executive who can operate inside a matrix: reporting to a parent company abroad while carrying the full legal responsibilities of a UK statutory director. We also run CEO searches for businesses based outside the UK that want a leader with UK or international experience. These searches need clear agreement at the outset on reporting lines, decision rights and how the CEO’s performance will be judged by a parent board that is not in the room every day.

A New CEO’s First 100 Days

The appointment is not the finish line. Most CEO hires that go wrong show the signs early, and most of them could have been caught or corrected in the first few months. We agree with the board, before the new Chief Executive starts, what the first 100 days should achieve, and we stay in contact with both sides through that period.

Days 1 to 30: listen and diagnose

The new CEO meets the board, the leadership team, key customers, suppliers, lenders and, where relevant, the regulator. They review the numbers in detail with the CFO and walk the operation. The aim is to understand how the business really works, where the value and the risks sit, and which of the board’s assumptions in the brief still hold. A good CEO says little and asks a lot in the first month.

Days 31 to 60: set direction

By the second month the CEO should be able to tell the board what they have found and where they intend to focus. This is when early decisions about the leadership team usually take shape, and when quick operational fixes — a pricing anomaly, a cash leak, a stalled project — can show the organisation that the new leadership is serious.

Days 61 to 100: commit and deliver

By around day 100 the board should see a clear plan with priorities, owners, measures and a budget, agreed with the leadership team and in line with the investment case or strategy. Changes to the senior team should be under way, and the CEO’s own objectives and incentive targets for the year should be signed off.

What the board should do

Boards make new CEOs succeed by being clear about authority, available without interfering, and honest early when something is not working. The chair should hold regular one-to-one sessions in the first months, and any outstanding founder or investor expectations should be settled before day one rather than discovered later. Our guides to the first 100 days in a portfolio company and to executive onboarding go into more detail.

Who We Place

Our CEO and MD clients are typically owner-managed and founder-led businesses moving to professional management, private equity and venture-backed companies, family-owned groups, regulated financial services firms, and overseas groups building a UK presence. Most are in the lower and middle market, where the CEO appointment shapes the whole business and the board needs a search partner who will engage with the commercial detail.

Chief Executive and Managing Director roles are among the busiest areas of our practice. Recent work has included a managing director placement, a managing director search for an owner-managed manufacturer appointing its first managing director from outside the business, a CEO search for a founder-led distribution business based outside the UK, and a confidential CEO and MD brief for a financial services broker. We do not name clients, and every mandate is handled in confidence.

Alongside the Chief Executive, we regularly recruit the rest of the top team — CFOs, COOs and chairs — and many CEO searches lead to a second appointment once the new leader has assessed their team. Where the board itself needs strengthening, our chairman recruitment service can run alongside the CEO search.

Looking for CEO jobs?

This page is for businesses hiring a Chief Executive. If you are an experienced CEO or MD looking for your next permanent, interim or fractional role, please register with us as a candidate and browse our current executive opportunities. Many of the CEO roles we work on are confidential and never advertised, so registering is the best way to be considered.