The clock runs from brief to shortlist to signed offer, and notice periods — not search — account for most of the gap between offer and start. Founder-replacement mandates run longer than open-seat hires.
How long does a portco search take?
Longer than the hundred-day plan usually assumes, and the reason is rarely the search itself. Market mapping and approach can move quickly where the sector picture already exists. What does not compress is the sequence after a candidate says yes.
Notice periods dominate. A senior commercial hire with a three-month notice will start three months after signing regardless of how fast the shortlist arrived, and value creation plans written against a start date rather than an offer date are systematically optimistic — one of the assumptions a defensible scenario plan has to carry.
Working backward from the milestone rather than forward from the mandate is the correction. If the pricing reset has to land in the second quarter of ownership, and the person running it carries a three-month notice, the offer has to be signed before close. Sponsors who accept that plan the search during diligence, which is unusual and is the only version of the timeline that holds.
Why do founder replacements take longer?
The search is comparable; the negotiation is not. A founder transition carries equity terms, board composition and often a continuing relationship, and each of those is a conversation the candidate cannot have until they are close to committing.
There is also a sequencing problem. The incoming executive frequently wants to know what the founder's ongoing role will be, and the sponsor frequently has not settled it, which stalls a process that had otherwise reached its end. It is usually settled alongside the board seats the plan actually requires.
What can you compress, and what cannot?
Mapping and approach compress if the sector picture exists before the mandate starts — which is an argument for maintaining a view of a sector rather than building one per search. Assessment and referencing compress badly.
In practice the failures trace back to a shortened reference stage more often than to a shortened search. References taken late, under time pressure, from a list the candidate supplied, are the weakest evidence in the process and they are the first thing squeezed.
Referencing compresses badly for a structural reason: the useful referees are the ones the candidate did not nominate. Reaching a former peer or a direct report who was not on the list takes days of routing through people who will actually speak, and that routing is exactly what a compressed process cuts. The result is a process that ran fast and tested nothing the candidate had not already arranged to be tested.
What does the delay cost?
The value creation plan runs without an owner. Where the plan depends on a commercial hire — a pricing reset, a channel build, an integration — each month of vacancy pushes the milestone rather than compressing the work that follows it. Covering that gap is what an interim executive is for.
That makes the cost of a slow hire a timing cost rather than a salary one, which is why it is routinely under-weighted in the decision to keep searching for a better candidate.
How many stay past a year?
The retention number is the one worth asking any search firm to produce against a named sample, and it is the one least often volunteered. Fee percentages are broadly similar across firms; twelve-month retention is not.
Where placements fail early, the pattern in our mandates is more often a mismatch on operating context — the scale or the ownership model — than on functional capability.