We build leadership teams, from the C-suite down
Retained executive and senior leadership search for private equity, venture and growth capital-backed businesses across the UK and Europe.
Leadership gaps rarely come one at a time. A first institutional CFO arrives to a finance function that does not exist yet, and has to build it. An AI mandate lands on a business months before anyone is in place to deliver it.
We run the C-suite search, and then the appointments that follow it, in the same business and to the same standard.
Our search practice
C-suite search
Six roles account for most of our search work. Each is a different job, and in our experience the ownership structure shapes it more than the sector does. A buyout CFO and an infrastructure-hold CFO have less in common than two buyout CFOs from unrelated industries.
CEO Search
The appointment the whole investment case rests on. We place chief executives who own the value creation plan and can carry a board through it.
Learn moreCFO Search
Build-phase and exit-phase CFOs are different people. We settle which job the business is actually hiring for before the search opens.
Learn moreCOO Search
Operating rhythm rather than reporting. We place COOs who remove the constraint the value creation plan keeps hitting.
Learn moreCRO & CCO Search
Revenue is where most growth plans succeed or fail. We place commercial leaders who build a repeatable engine rather than a strong quarter.
Learn moreCPO & CTO Search
Product and technology leaders who are as credible with a PE board as they are with an engineering team.
Learn moreChief AI Officer Search
A specialism rather than a title. We place CAIOs who can evidence AI embedded in product or operations, with an outcome attached.
Learn moreThe layer beneath
The leadership team beneath
A C-suite appointment is usually the start rather than the end. The people who follow are hired into a business we already know, alongside a leader we already placed, which is why this work tends to run faster than the search before it.
Finance leadership
Finance Directors, Financial Controllers and Heads of Finance, building the function beneath a new or stretched CFO.
Commercial leadership
Sales and business development leaders, including the first commercial hires alongside a newly placed CRO.
Operations leadership
Operations and delivery leaders who carry the operating plan day to day under a COO.
Product and technology
Product and engineering leaders who take the platform through its next stage of scale.
AI leadership
Heads of AI and transformation leads who turn a portfolio-level AI mandate into shipped work.
People leadership
HR and people leaders who stand up the function, permanently or through a transaction.
Board
Board appointments
Non-Executive Chairs and Non-Executive Directors, for a young board that needs independent experience, or an audit and risk committee that needs a chair before diligence. Recent work includes an independent Chair for a founder-led consumer brand in Italy, and an audit and risk chair for a growth-equity-backed software business preparing to raise.
Interim
Interim leadership
Structured interim mandates where a permanent search would take too long against the reporting gap, or where cover is the right answer rather than a commitment made mid-transaction. We run interim and permanent processes in parallel where an urgent gap sits alongside a permanent brief.
Track record
Selected outcomes
A selection across all four, with client and investor identities withheld.
Chief Executive Officer into a buyout-backed industrial services platform in DACH, with a bolt-on completed inside the first year of the hold.
Chief Financial Officer into VC-backed enterprise software. Assessed shortlist of five, the first dedicated finance leader in the business.
Chief Revenue Officer into a growth-equity-backed B2B SaaS platform with a demanding multi-channel sales model.
Finance Director into PE-backed multi-site services in the Nordics, owning consolidation and month-end beneath a stretched CFO.
First Sales Development Representative into VC-backed enterprise SaaS, standing up outbound alongside a newly placed CRO.
Family-office-backed manufacturer in the UK, after a chief executive departed midway through a strategic review.
In their words
We needed our first real finance leader, and board-ready numbers fast, across three jurisdictions and with no team beneath them. HMN understood the brief immediately and gave us a shortlist we could genuinely choose from. The person they placed has been transformative for how we report to our investor.Chief Executive Officer, VC-backed enterprise software
Where we work
Sectors and geography
We work across the UK and Europe, in technology and SaaS, AI and machine learning, business services, financial services, fintech, healthcare and life sciences, consumer, industrials and manufacturing, energy and sustainability, and media and entertainment.
On a live search, the first credible candidate is with you inside two weeks of the brief being settled, and a full shortlist of three to five in four to five weeks. Where leadership risk is the question rather than a vacancy, our Talent Risk Assessment is a seven-day diagnostic, and our approach to search sets out the process in full.
Start a conversation
Whether you back the business or run it, tell us the role and what it has to deliver. We will come back with a view on the market for that hire and whether we are the right firm to run it.
If you are considering your own next move, tell us where you are and what you want next. We will only come back when something fits.
Start a searchRegister your interest