The Situation

A $180M family-owned industrial manufacturer had been run by its founder for over three decades. The business was profitable but aging—outdated systems, manual processes, and a leadership team that had grown up alongside the founder. He was approaching retirement and knew the company needed to modernize before any transition.

The plan was to hire a COO who could professionalize operations, drive efficiency, and eventually serve as the steady hand through an ownership transition. But the founder had a deep fear: that an outside executive would steamroll a loyal, long-tenured workforce and destroy the culture that had built the company.

What We Found

This was as much about temperament as it was about capability. The COO needed real operational horsepower—lean manufacturing, ERP modernization, supply chain—but those skills were the easy part. The harder requirement was a leader who could drive change without breaking trust, in a workforce where many employees had thirty-plus years of tenure.

The obvious candidates were the wrong fit. The high-flying operators from large corporates had the technical credentials but often the exact change-at-all-costs style the founder feared. The real target was rarer: an executive with the discipline of a professional operator and the emotional intelligence to lead a family business through generational change.

What We Did

We designed a search that weighted cultural and behavioral fit as heavily as operational skill.

We targeted operators from similar environments. Rather than chasing big-corporate names, we focused on executives who had successfully modernized mid-market, family-owned, or founder-led manufacturers—people who understood that change in these businesses is earned, not imposed. Most were not actively looking.

We made psychometric assessment central, not supplementary. Because the founder's biggest risk was temperament, we put every finalist through a comprehensive psychometric evaluation focused on leadership style, change management, and how they build trust and exercise authority. This was decisive: it screened out a technically outstanding candidate whose profile showed low patience and a top-down style that would have confirmed the founder's worst fears.

We involved the founder and the family in the right way. We structured the final stages so the founder could test not just competence but chemistry and values—ensuring the person he chose was someone he could genuinely hand the keys to.

The Result

We placed a COO who had spent his career modernizing family-owned manufacturers—an operator with the rare blend of technical rigor and the patience to lead change one earned win at a time.

Within two years, he led an ERP implementation, lifted on-time delivery from 82% to 96%, and improved operating margin by four points—without a single involuntary departure among the long-tenured leadership team. The workforce that the founder feared losing instead became his strongest advocates.

The founder has since begun his transition with full confidence. He told us the assessment process was what convinced him—for the first time—that he could step back without putting everything he'd built at risk.