Executive Case Studies 1, 2

Position: Operations
Company: Mission Critical Services

Client Search Challenge
Mission Critical Services is a 40 million dollar west coast supplier of hardware, software and consulting services to Enterprise Data Center facilities. The current president and founder of the company had decided to pursue other opportunities and needed a replacement to take over day to day operations and eventually assume the leadership role in the company. The ideal candidate would not only have industry knowledge but would also have experience building and running a company much larger in order to bring the expertise necessary to grow the company and provide additional value for himself ,the founder and existing team.

Thompson Associates Solution
The team assigned to the search created a detailed assessment of the company's current market and future possibilities. They spent time interviewing the current management team, employees and the founder to determine what skill sets and track record of accomplishment would be most valuable to help lead MCS to the next level of success.
An 18 month action plan was created to provide a road map of the 7-8 key things that would need to be done to grow the company. Using this profile as a guide the recruiting team then identified the target market of existing companies that could have candidates that had already accomplished similar tasks.

Search Result
Identifying candidates who had done what MCS wanted done within the industry was a challenge as their market niche was quite specialized. It proved to be an even greater challenge to persuade the few candidates that we did find to consider taking a perceived step back to what was initially less responsibility. We focused on selling the long term growth benefits of course, but we also identified many of the additional benefits available such as increased quality of life and the ability to have a more significant impact. We listened carefully for candidate needs that were not immediately apparent in initial conversations. We subsequently found a seasoned executive with experience in all the areas MCS was looking to go. He successfully built the company to over twice its size, and found a buyer who paid a premium price to acquire the company.

	“The team at Thompson Associates went beyond the basic job description of the position and consulted closely with us to create a bigger picture of where we wanted to go. They made us think. The result was that we were able to match our key criteria of accomplishments to what prospective candidates had actually done. I knew John had already been where were going when I hired him. They (Thompson Associates) also did a great job of finding someone who liked what we had to offer.”
	Tim Lasky, founder MCS