Roger Brooks, RBrooks Group - Connecting Qualified Executives with Medtec Companies | LSI USA '24

Roger Brooks  0:03  
Roger. I'm Roger Brooks. I'm the founder and leader of our Brooks group, a retained executive search firm. We're based I'm based out of Boulder, but we work with companies both in the United States and Europe. I personally conduct CEO searches, and my team helps me with that, plus we do other C suite searches, such as CFO, Chief Commercial officers, clinical R and D and the like. So what I'm going to talk to you about isn't necessarily, it's a little bit about us and what we do, but it's I want to leave a takeaway for people, so that you can take the things that we've learned, that we do, and incorporate it into your life and your company, on the things that you will do. And so the first slide is all about, it's a great hire. Isn't necessarily chess. It's a it's a game of checkers. And by that, it means, I call it being more of a checkers player as dealing with the actively looking so if you post an ad, you get all these people who respond. You basically hire the best of the group that's looking for a new job. I want you to shift your mind a little bit and think about being more the lion and going after the right people. And the first thing you have to do is figure out who the right people are to go after, and we'll get to that in a second. But the big thing is the decision process. I've got up here a slide around the CEO decision which whatever position you're after. You basically are faced with the same thing. There's somebody who's done it before that's ideal that you'd like to get, but they probably don't want to do it again. They've just, they just did it. So then you've got those people who are experienced and qualified, that might be the first time. And then you've got those people who have done it before, but they haven't necessarily finished it. They haven't driven, let's say they're a CEO, they haven't driven an exit, they haven't created value. So I called them unproven. And then you have other things where you've got somebody who might be the best strategic leader, you've got somebody who might be the best raising capital. You've got somebody else that might be the best leader of people. You got somebody else who's maybe is a great cultural fit. Somebody else maybe lives in the right space. You see the complexity, where you just layer it on, and it's like, how do you figure it out from there? And that's where you just kind of graded this weighted scale. In the end, it becomes an intuitive gut reaction, gut decision based upon all the information. But make sure you keep all the information in front of you as you're thinking about it. And then, you know, what we try to do is we try to help a client make a great decision. A lot of that's coming up with a fantastic short list of people for them to consider. And for us, we have something that I'm particularly proud of, which I did, did a retroactive study. I look back, I think it was like five years, and found that 95% of the executives we placed are still there after two years, of course, ruling out people who their company closed or got acquired or something like that. So the reason for that is a lot about process, and you got to have great process and a great group of people as a finalist before you can make a great decision. If you're down to one choice, one option, often you make mistakes, and so you want a pool of people, and that means being okay with rejection as you reach out to people. But now we can go after big data sets, because we've been doing it for a long time, and we look at large audiences. If you're after maybe just your particular search, think about it. Kind of survey the landscape. Say who are the absolute best 100 people out there, and you'll kind of map it out, maybe certain people at certain organizations. You might do some LinkedIn search. You might network with some friends and family and things like that, maybe not family, but friends or colleagues, and you're going to come up with a particular group of people. Now, once you have this group of people identified, and let's say it's your top 30, then it's time to start reaching out, but don't reach out like some people. I just think of my kids, well, I've been, I've been I talked to so and so they don't really mean talk. They mean they were texting. Don't text. Don't email, don't email. Find a way to get these people on the phone and have a conversation. And when you approach these people who may not be looking, bring them in and strategize with them, and say you can start out by just talking about themselves. Ask them what kinds of situations could come up that would cause them to make a change, and they're going to talk to you about the big picture of their life. That's kind of what you. Want just what's it going to take. So get them on their agenda, and if they're not a match, talk to them about people that they might suggest to make sure that you've identified all the right people and reached out to them. And so don't be afraid to go after people who are not looking for a new job, but work your process where you end up with three to five people, and then what we really like to do is, once you have your top group identified, bring them all in, have them give a pitch on the topic, maybe it's go to market, or something like that, to the decision makers, and you help use that information to help drive your decision. It also helps pull them into the process, because now they have to do some homework to get to know you. So that's our firm. Reach out if you want any help in trying to maybe conduct your own searches, because not everybody can use this. We're expensive, but love to work with you sometime.