Four disciplines. All retained.

Non-executive directors, chairs, and senior independent appointments for listed companies, scale-ups, and substantial private businesses.

Our Chair and non-executive practice covers FTSE 100 and 250 appointments, substantial private company boards, and the increasingly significant private equity-backed business community. The work is, in our view, the most consequential category of senior search — Chair appointments shape the firm's relationship with its board, investors, and ultimately its CEO for the years to follow. We approach this work with the unhurried discipline it requires.

CEO and Managing Director appointments where the search itself materially shapes the company's next decade.

CEO succession is the work that sits closest to the centre of what we do. A serious CEO succession process, in our experience, has two distinct phases — a long, considered advisory phase that ends with a brief the board has genuinely agreed on, and a comparatively short search phase that ends with the appointment. The discipline is to invest properly in the first phase. We will frequently decline engagements where the firm wants to skip it.

CFO, CTO, COO, CHRO, and other C-suite functional appointments. Search work where domain depth and cultural judgement are non-negotiable.

We work on Chief Financial Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief People Officer appointments where the domain depth and cultural judgement required justify the structural commitment of retained work. We do not work on functional appointments where a strong contingent firm would do the work as well — we will tell you so, and recommend one.

Assessment, succession planning, team effectiveness, and the considered work of building leadership capability beyond a single appointment.

An increasing share of our work is the considered advisory that runs alongside, or precedes, our search engagements. Succession planning. Senior leadership team assessment. Onboarding support for newly appointed Chairs and Chief Executives. The work that gives the eventual appointment the best possible chance of succeeding — and that, frequently, reframes what the appointment should be.