Other than the fact that we operate debt-free, every decision here is made the way a PE board would make it: KPIs, measurables, urgency, accountability, and a relentless intolerance for the status quo.
Every Falcon search runs the same operating system, from asset study through offer close. The discipline is what produces a 98-day average and an 86% still-in-seat number.
The Falcon team reads the CIM, the most recent board presentation, and the management update. We build a working map of the investment thesis, the value creation plan, the competitive dynamics, and the cultural profile of the business.
A search firm that does not know the asset cannot articulate to a top candidate why the role is worth serious consideration. We do not leave that conversation to chance.
Stage one — an ideal profile scorecard built with the deal team that defines "good" in explicit terms, not impressionistic ones.
Stage two — three to five sample profiles of real executives, anonymized, that represent the target archetype. The deal team reacts and we calibrate.
Stage three — one or two contrarian profiles deliberately outside the stated criteria, to surface the real hard edges of the spec versus the stated ones.
Stage four — explicit trade-off analysis. Every search involves trade-offs between proven and hungry, between sector depth and functional excellence, between ceiling and current capability. We force those trade-offs to the surface in week one, not week six.
Every LBO, carveout, and platform in the applicable sector, scale, and end market. 99% of Falcon's CFO slates and 80+% of all other slates are populated by executives with prior PE-backed experience. We invest in an enterprise PitchBook subscription for exactly this purpose.
We also hold direct relationships with 50,000+ executives through the PE-CXO community, which means passive candidates that most search firms cannot find are often already reachable through our network.
They are in seat, performing, and receiving an average of 5.4 recruiting inquiries per week. We make up to 10 distinct outreach attempts per target until we achieve engagement. Our placements respond on the fourth attempt on average.
We recruit, we do not post. Every pitch call is substantive: the candidate hears the investment thesis, the value creation plan, and the specific reason we identified them for this role. Impassioned pitch calls. Maximum engagement.
Every submitted candidate receives a 3-4 page write-up. Employment status and interest rationale. No-surprise compensation vitals. PE-backed scope and outcomes: revenue growth, EBITDA improvement, TEV movement, and the specific value creation levers the executive pulled, not just a description of the businesses they ran. Intangibles surfaced in the recruiting conversation that do not appear on a resume.
Not summaries. Track record validation. The write-up is modeled on deal team diligence because that is the standard the submission needs to meet.
We drive the full process with transparency, speed, and advisory support from day one through close. Weekly pipeline reports with full funnel data: considered, targeted, engaged, recruited, screened, tested, presented. Reason codes on every eliminated candidate. Active management of interview scheduling, debrief facilitation, and offer structuring.
We treat every open seat as a cost to the investment thesis because it is.
Progress reports are how most search firms manage sponsor anxiety without delivering information. They are narrative. They tell you the search is going well without telling you what "well" means in measurable terms.
Falcon's weekly pipeline reports are data. The deal team sees the same picture we see.
PE-CXO is the world's largest community of private equity-backed executives. 50,000+ members, 71% of whom are active portfolio company operators. The community exists independently of any single search and represents years of relationship-building across the PE-backed executive population.
When Falcon targets a candidate for a search, that executive is frequently already a PE-CXO member. The relationship context changes the conversation. A cold outreach from a search firm and a warm outreach to a community member are not the same interaction. The response rate reflects it.
Most search firms quietly deprioritize replacement searches. The economics do not reward them identically to a new engagement, and the team knows it.
Falcon pays the same internal incentives on replacements that it pays on original searches. The difference between that commitment and the industry norm tells you exactly who is aligned with the partnership and who is aligned with their own P&L.
We use AI for transaction mapping, candidate universe construction, and pattern analysis on our Salesforce placement data. We keep humans accountable for PE-fit assessment, every candidate write-up, and all relationship intelligence.
AI-generated write-ups hallucinate. They describe track records that contain errors and present them with confidence. Every Falcon write-up is researched, verified, and signed off by the human who recruited and interviewed the candidate.
The speed dividend AI creates gets reinvested into deeper vetting, not margin.
