There Are More PE Jobs Than Proven Operators
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About this Episode
"If we owned this company, we wrote the $50 million check to control this business, is that who you would hire to put in that job?" Bill Rowe asks his own team that about 20 times a week, usually when a search is down to two or three qualified finalists. After 35 years in retained executive search, nearly 25 of them recruiting for private equity, he says he thinks more like a PE investor than a recruiter: where the fund sits in its investment cycle, what the debt looks like, and what kind of leader a leveraged portfolio company can afford.
The market has shifted against the buyer of talent. Twenty-five years ago a CFO's goal was to run finance at a public company. Private equity has grown so broad that there are more leadership needs than proven operators, and the best candidates are weighing two other deals or waiting out a payday 18 to 24 months away at their current portfolio company. The industry average runs about 122 days from go to yes.
Family offices break a different set of hires. Executives arriving from Wall Street or a Fortune 50 company fail when they come in without the mentality of "I'm here to serve." The goals belong to the family, and they change by generation.
Bill founded Rowe Global in 2013 so the principals make the calls and meet the candidates themselves. His client is the company, never the job seeker, and he still remembers every placement that failed. Also in this episode: why a Southlake company cannot recruit from Prosper, a search that ended in Ghana, the left and right side of a candidate's page, and the Thanksgiving question from his kids that made him rethink his career.
About Bill Rowe
Bill Rowe
Founder, Chairman & CEO, Rowe Global
Bill Rowe was weeks from graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1991 with a history degree and no job when he read a three-paragraph Forbes article about retained executive search that used the word headhunter. He went straight into the business, starting as a research analyst at Paul R. Ray and Company, and has never left it. He spent about ten years at Foster Partners, the global retained search firm formerly known as KPMG Executive Search, rising to managing director of its Dallas practice. In 2002 he merged the firm's Southwest practice with the business of Bob and Keith Pearson to form Pearson Partners International, where he served as vice chairman and a founding partner for 11 years, and that same year began specializing in the human capital needs of private equity firms and their portfolio companies. In 2013 he founded Rowe Global with a deliberately boutique model: tenured partners make the calls and meet the candidates themselves, with like-minded partner firms providing reach across the country and abroad rather than a network of owned offices. The firm recruits CEOs, CFOs, presidents and functional leaders for private equity portfolio companies, PE funds, family offices, private companies and some public companies, and most of its work comes from long-standing clients. Rowe has run searches from West Texas to Ghana, and roughly a third of the firm's work at any time is recruiting executives into Texas. He has served on the boards of the Nancy Lieberman Foundation, the March of Dimes Dallas Market, Helicopters for Heroes and the Dallas chapter of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, and he is alumni chair of the SMU Club Lacrosse program. A lifelong rancher, he hosts the annual Rowe Global Ranch Party at his ranch in western Colorado and is heading into his 26th season tailgating on the SMU Boulevard.