Video Transcription
Roger Brooks 00:02
Roger. I'm Roger Brooks. I'm the founder, creator, and CEO of RBrooks Group, a retained C-suite executive search firm. We work with medical device companies throughout the country, and you can see a list of our clients here. You'll see some health tech; you'll see a lot of neuro modulation and cardiovascular. The commonality of them becomes a lot of IDE track devices and new therapeutic devices, often disruptive technologies. We get involved usually at Series A, sometimes Series B. I have a team that's probably the most experienced medical device search team in the world, with a combined experience of over 130 years of both device and healthcare search experiences. About 80% of our work is with venture-backed companies, so we fit into LSI really well. We still do a fair amount with publicly traded companies, about 20%, doing CEO and VP searches with them, and about 40% of our work is CEO search. So we're especially known for our CEO search as well as a CFO search. We just completed a CFO search that went extraordinarily well, very strong on the commercial side. Commercial searches tend to be the initial go-to market of new disruptive therapies, which is far different than finding a commercial leader that's after some incremental growth, and then also strong on the clinical side. Engineering technology is interesting; about 35% of our search practice ties back to Europe somehow, some way, whether it's for European investors who have invested in the United States, or it could be for a CEO that needs to move to Europe for a period of time, or maybe the company is ready to have a U.S.-based CEO. But whatever has been happening over the last five years, it's been amazing because I see this incredible integration of the United States and Europe in their med tech worlds. So it's coming together really nicely. There have been some great partnerships, and of course, we're 100% medical device, which also allows us to fit into the conference really nicely. 99% of the searches we start, we complete. And the one recent one we didn't, we brought two offers in to two different people, with a one-year retention rate at 98% and a two-year retention at 95%. So this is, you know, something big picture. I want to be able to challenge people's thinking a bit about the typical company we work with that is trying to achieve a $300 to $500 million valuation in three to five years. And if you don't think you can do that, the investors are thinking you can. So think about your time a bit differently, or I think about your time a bit differently, and that equates to gaining some type of net valuation increase of $60 to $100 million a year, which is about $5 to $8 million a month. And the reason why I bring that up is sometimes very key positions within an organization—companies sometimes like to do it themselves and go it alone, and they think they're saving money. Where you do it yourself, you can save maybe $100,000, but the reality is, it actually costs them a lot more because it's actually the team that needs to be driving a bigger net value increase. They do it often because they say it's a small world, and that just kills me because we don't see the small world. So while they are in a small world, or somebody does it themselves, they can find a group of qualified candidates and bring them in and hire. In fact, they might even build out their whole team with a group of qualified candidates, but they're not necessarily thinking about the most qualified candidate. And once you change your perspective and think about who the most qualified candidate is for a role at our company, you have a different perspective. And for us to get there, we filter through at least a few thousand profiles and come up with our top 100. This is something that most device people can't do, or executive teams. It's exhaustive, not exhausting, but it's a great approach to try to come up with the best, versus just somebody who needs a job or is looking. Yeah, so our process eventually yields the top three that we work closely with the client to evaluate. And the challenge, or the opportunity I present to companies to think about is, what if you do your own search and your top three are not even in the top five when a proper search is done? So that's my premise for utilizing search firms going forward. I.
