Filling a CFO Search Two National Firms Couldn't Close

How we closed a stalled executive search for a global medical device manufacturer and turned one hard-to-fill CFO role into a growing, high-trust relationship.

At a Glance

Industry: Medical device manufacturing (privately owned, highly regulated)

Client size: $500M to $1B in annual revenue, 1,000 to 5,000 employees, manufacturing sites across five countries

Headquarters: Wisconsin, outside a major metro area

Role filled: Chief Financial Officer Search status at engagement: Third firm brought in, after two national finance-search firms had worked the role for two weeks with no results

Time to first candidate slate: 5 business days

Result: CFO hired, still with the company three years later

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Context

When a longtime CFO announced retirement, the company needed a replacement who could do two jobs at once: think and act like a strategic executive, and stay hands-on with the controllership of a highly regulated, multi-site manufacturing business. At that level of seniority, it's a rare combination to find in one person.

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The Obstacle

The company started where most companies start on a search like this: with two national firms that specialize in finance placements. Two weeks in, neither had produced a workable slate.

We were brought in as the third firm on the search, already two weeks behind.

The role was on-site, outside a major metro area, in a region that also hosts a dense cluster of large, publicly traded medical device companies. Most of the finance talent moving through the area's recruiting pipelines had built careers at that scale: enterprise-level, several layers removed from day-to-day ownership of a company's finances. This role needed the opposite: someone willing to still own the ledger, not just the strategy. Roughly 60% strategic and executive-level, 40% hands-on controllership.

The two national firms were searching for the most senior executive they could find. That's not a search that fails on execution. It fails because it's aimed at the wrong candidate from the start.

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The Solution

We started from a different read of the role: this wasn't a search for the most senior name on the market, it was a search for someone who would still own the ledger personally, every month, not just set strategy from above. Our core methodology revolves around PATH: Precision, Access, Timing, and Honesty. This search, above all, required Precision: not searching harder, but searching for the right thing. That's exactly how we won the account.

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Once the target was right, two things changed the search:

Local market knowledge beats a generic national search. Based close to the client, roughly 40 minutes to an hour away, we already knew the smaller, industry-adjacent companies the national firms weren't looking at. Someone who built their finance career at a smaller company typically closed the books personally, hands-on, month after month. We targeted candidates with exactly that background: hands-on ownership of a smaller company's finances, followed by a move to a larger organization outside the client's industry, the kind of move that adds the strategic scale a half-billion-dollar company expects. The role's 60/40 split showed up naturally in that path: hands-on instinct first, strategic scale second.

A geography built on commute patterns, not assumptions. The national firms were sourcing candidates from the region's largest metro area, where talent typically won't commute more than 10 to 20 miles. We went the other direction, toward smaller cities of 40,000 to 80,000 people on the opposite side of the headquarters, where candidates are often willing to drive 40 to 50 miles for the right opportunity. Direct outreach, referrals, and boots-on-the-ground recruiting into a market we already knew opened a pool the earlier searches never touched.

The Outcome

We presented five qualified candidates within five business days of taking on the search, faster than the two national firms had managed in the two weeks before us.

In total, we put forward seven candidates, and the client's team interviewed most of them. The candidate who was ultimately hired was presented August 15. From there, the client ran its own extensive, multi-round interview process, including travel across the country, before extending an offer on October 19.

That two-month stretch reflected the stakes, not a slow start. A search at this level costs the client real time and attention, and we matched that stake with our own scrutiny before a single candidate went forward. That scrutiny is Precision again, this time straight from our recruiter manual: under our Rule of 3, candidates are weighed on whether they can plausibly generate or preserve value equal to three times their own base salary, not just check the boxes on a job description. Under our Four-Eyes policy, no candidate reached the client until a partner, Marc or Casey, had personally reviewed and approved the submission. We had already delivered that vetted slate months earlier; the two months that followed belonged to the client's own process.

The Impact

Three years later, the CFO is still with the company.

It was the first six-figure-plus finance placement we'd made for this client. Since then, they've come back to us for more, not just additional finance leadership hires like controller and director of finance, but increasingly the searches other firms would consider hardest to fill.

The client now trusts us with exactly the kind of nuance that opened this relationship in the first place. The client's talent acquisition team has praised the engagement internally in the years since.