How we find great executives and how they find us

Posted by dmathews Posted on March 15, 2012

Our approach to investing has always been to let management run their company while we help to fill in the gaps where and when necessary.  The relationship starts after we meet a team that shares our approach to building growth companies and work out a reasonable transaction for both sides. In the market segment in which we invest — small growth companies — management teams are rarely full from top to bottom. They might be ready for a CFO, or senior executives might be wearing multiple hats so there is an acute need for more focused talent as the business scales.  We see this time and time again — rapidly growing companies with great products but missing key pieces of the team.

We constantly find ourselves in the market searching for experienced executives to join our portfolio companies. We often joke that we are actually executive recruiters disguised as private equity investors. There is a lot of truth to that. We find executives in the all the traditional ways — introductions from colleagues, from other portfolio companies and from retained searches.  In addition, we also think there are great ways to harness technology and social media to stay closer to people over the course of their careers.

To that end, we created The Leadership Network as our key resource for finding talent to add to our portfolio companies.  We maintain a detailed list of senior executives and their resumes by functional role in our CRM so we have an immediate source of relationships at our fingertips whenever one of our management partners has a need.  Our LinkedIn group keeps us up-to-date on an individual’s career movement over time and so we can efficiently reach out with updates on our activities in case there is a great match we might not have otherwise have noticed.  We also get to hear from the executives we know about new investment ideas or people they might know to add to our network.

If you would like to join our Network, please send a copy of your resume to Leaders@cgp.com AND please join our LinkedIn group The CGP Leadership Network so we can keep in touch.  Moreover, if you have a colleague who would like to get to know us, please forward this on to them.  We look forward to talking soon.