B2C appliance maker needed regional VP to start new B2B business line

The client is a UK-based technology company focused on the design and manufacture of home and commercial appliances.

The client was looking to open a new business unit and needed to bring on a strong business driver and leader from the construction industry, someone capable of starting something from scratch and scaling it.

The challenges was to find someone with strong B2B experience who could fit into the company’s international B2C culture. We discussed the difficulty of finding such a candidate within a very conservative construction market but offered to map that market out and based on the results, consult with the client on the direction of the search to reach a successful outcome.

For this search the keys were in both our research and consulting arms as the assignment ended up requiring a creative approach to identifying viable candidates and significant resources to comb through several industries across the region.

To begin we created organization charts of the sales and marketing leadership of all players in that region’s construction markets and benchmarked numerous candidates together with the client.

We agreed that it was unlikely that viable candidates would come from this target market and that we should switch direction to more international candidates who had business management experience at companies one step removed from the construction market (providing lighting solutions, fixtures, and fittings, etc). From this we produced a short list of four prospects from which they successfully hired and on-boarded their preferred candidate.