Overview

The Master Platter is our end-to-end executive search process for founders who need a VP or C-level operator with real pattern recognition and immediate execution ability.

Someone who can solve the near-term challenges in front of you while also steering the company toward the longer-term outcomes you are building toward. Someone who has already lived the stage you are entering, can help you see around the next few corners, reduce the number of bets you need to take to unlock your next stage of growth, and build using modern, automation-driven operating models that increase revenue per employee and accelerate both valuation and liquidity timelines.

Because leaders like this are incredibly specific, the target talent pool is almost always incredibly small.

Think of it as your “candidate TAM.”

At the executive tier, it is often just a few dozen people nationwide who’ll match the experience, stage, compensation, personal drivers, and TIMING required to help you achieve your goals.

A pool that small has to be handled with extreme care. If you approach them haphazardly, you’ll risk burning through your candidate TAM before realizing you should have slowed down and thought things through better before starting.

This is why we always advocate to clients the importance of building your target candidate list for any executive search project from scratch.

You need to understand how big or small your true candidate TAM is, then design the right strategy to approach that group as a batched process, position the role and pitch them effectively, and bring forward the strongest contenders to meet your team and compete for the opportunity.

It’s also why we advocate against relying on a recruiter’s existing network. That approach almost always produces a very thin slate with only a tiny fraction of real candidate universe you should be targeting who’ll be the right fit AND timing-aligned.

A well run executive search process starts with stacking the odds in your favor by:

• Mapping the entire direct and adjacent company source list (typically this will be 250+ companies)

• Looking in those companies to review and analyze the several thousand potential target profiles

• Short-Listing the 50 to 75 of the very best profiles that match what you need on paper

• Then Headhunting (i.e. courting) that group with care and precision (expecting about ~50% will take the call)

• Persuading the top 10% of THAT pool to come talk to your team and compete for the opportunity

That is the very best way to ensure you end up with a high-quality slate of 5-7 who are qualified, interested, and available to introduce to your team and move them through your carefully pre-designed internal interview loop to land the very best person who’ll end up getting the job.

Unfortunately, the leaders within most startups are juggling too many competing priorities and default to whatever tactics and strategies are the easiest or immediately available.

It’s not wrong to use your own network, referrals, or give your internal team a shot at doing the project internally. This can work out.

However, if the success of the business is contingent upon getting this hire right, and if you or your team lack the network, or the skills to execute the search properly, you absolutely must weigh the risks of burning your candidate TAM through a haphazard process, inconsistent messaging, shallow outreach, unnecessary rejections, and an already narrow talent pool being touched in fragmented ways that inject avoidable risk into what is a critical high-stakes executive search.

Our model avoids all of that.

Ironically, our deeper, more thorough, and more carefully designed approach ends up moving faster and produces significantly higher-quality conversations at an overall lesser cost, than the “try everything at once” approach most teams attempt before realizing they need a partner like us.

If your goal is to hire a true A-player, defined as someone with a 90% likelihood of achieving what only the top 10% of any given talent pool can achieve, with the right motivations, timing-alignment, and cultural fit to do the best work of their life inside your company, instead of where they are working today, The Master Platter is the solution designed for that outcome.

The Search Story

Most founders can build their teams from zero to around ~30 people before they hit “the hiring wall”.

The “wall” appears when your personal network can no longer supply the senior GTM talent capable of getting you from early traction, to durable, scalable, predictable revenue.

That is when founders begin feeling the limits of intuition, hustle, and early-stage pattern-matching. It is also the moment they realize that the leaders who got them from $0 to ~$3M, or even $3M to $20M, is rarely the same group of leaders who can take them from $20M to $50M or $100M.

This is where Bearhug steps in.

We have repeatedly become the secret weapon for early and growth-stage founders and VCs who need to hire the very best senior leaders to build and scale the functions of Product, Sales, Marketing, and Finance. And they need us to go pull those leaders out of other high-growth environments that are 1 to 3 stages ahead of where they are now.

These are the people who have built the products, demand engines, pricing motions, revenue systems, team architectures, and leadership rhythms you need to unlock your next stage or two of growth. And that’s not an easy ask. It often takes more than 200+ hours of our time, not to mention the time required by our clients and the candidates.

And remember: the hard part of any search is NOT finding names and building a target list.

Anyone with enough time on their hands, and a pattern matching rubric can go out and do that.

You could even argue that list building falls into the bucket of $10 p/hour work if done manually, or free or very low cost to simply have an AI agent or the latest shiny AI sourcing tool do it for you. We won’t argue with you.

However, the hard part is setting up the search properly from the start (there’s a lot of moving parts to make it work).

• You have to invest the time to define who’s on the search committee and get them all to agree on how the role will be positioned and pitched.

• You have to be extremely granular in defining what a good profile looks like on paper + what you need to tease out during the vetting process.

• You have to pre-design every step and stage of the workflow, who’s doing what, when, and how, or you risk things failing at the 1-yard line.

Remember, you’re working with a very small candidate TAM, and you need to qualify them WHILE you persuade them so you end up being successful in isolating the top 10% from the rest who are NOT looking for a new job, and you’re trying to get them to lift their heads, engage, and seriously consider your earlier-stage, higher-risk opportunity, and come forward for the right reasons.

These people are not applying to jobs, responding to job posts, or browsing careers pages.

They are deep in execution mode at companies that already look like the future version of what you’re trying to build and you’re trying to buy their expertise to help you get there.

Sure, a trusted advisor or mentor may be able to get these type of people to take a call with you.

Yes, these people may even offer to help you on a fractional basis. But do not fall for that trap. It is the wrong framing for the problem we would argue that you need solved immediately.

Unfortunately, by the time we are often brought in, another recruiter or team has struggled to fill the role, and created a mess we have to come in and clean up.

We not only have to come in and take over. We need to fix the damage, reset expectations, rebuild credibility in the market, and realign the narrative so the right people actually pay attention. We have to restart the search the way it should have begun. With the right strategy, the right list, the right messaging, and the right structured process.

Executive Search is NOT a “who do we know?” exercise.

Executive Search is a “who do you need, and how do we persuade them?” exercise.

That is the Search Story.

The Heavy Lift

Executive search at this level is a heavy lift, and it requires an enormous amount of upfront work. We spend the first week aligning on strategy, narrative, positioning, and the exact profile you need before a single outreach message goes out. No shortcuts. No exceptions.

From there, the work becomes part research, part psychology, and part persuasion. We craft a pitch that turns “too early” into “tell me more.” We build trust quickly. We help candidates connect the dots in their career arc. And we uncover the deeper motivation required for someone to leave a comfortable seat and bet on your company.

Most founders underestimate the size of their true candidate TAM.

If you want a top 10% leader with the exact experience required to unlock $100M in revenue scale and you’re at $3M to $20M today, your usable talent pool that’s done your next couple of growth stages already is TINY. Nationwide, it might be 50. But then if you add geographic constraints, it’ll be way fewer.

You might assume the best people live in the location you’re targeting because the company may be headquartered there. But post-covid, talent is way more spread out than most people realize, which can shrink the candidate TAM even further.

Below the executive tier, yes, the pool expands by 6x to 15x!

But at the executive level, the pool is inherently shallow, the scrutiny is much higher (for all involved), and getting the timing to align really does end up being the single biggest obstacle in every search.

As mentioned, building the right list means reviewing thousands of profiles to isolate the handful who match your stage, your problem set, your constraints, and your opportunity. And once the list is built, every outreach must be thoughtful, personal, and paced.

You are not “recruiting” at this level. You are courting.

Executives might reply if you or your board reach out directly. But those conversations rarely produce the best outcome.

The smarter play is to work through a trusted 3rd party talent partner who can represent you discreetly and build curiosity before revealing the specific opportunity.

As a 3rd party, we can enter the conversation WITHOUT naming you or your company upfront. We can gather real insight on timing, compensation, and motivations, and determine whether a genuine fit exists BEFORE bias or comparison sets in.

Because these leaders know we represent multiple venture-backed companies, they are far more open and candid with us than they would ever be with you or your advisors.

Let me say that again.

As a third party, we can open the conversation without revealing your company upfront. This gives us room to learn the truth about timing, compensation expectations, motivations, and constraints before any bias or comparison colors the discussion. Senior operators are far more candid with us because they know we work across multiple venture-backed companies, and they speak with a level of openness they would never offer to a founder, advisor, or internal team member.

That’s how you mitigate risk with Executive Search. Period.

Even the best 3rd party talent partner armed with the most compelling pitch of all time, will still be unable to convince more than about 50% of your candidate TAM to consider the role. Why?

Because timing misalignment kills half the funnel before the first outreach even happens.

But you can’t guess a person’s timing (let alone interest or true qualifications) until you speak with them.

Vesting schedules, board commitments, family considerations, upcoming liquidity events, or personal chapter timing can rule out incredible candidates who would otherwise love your join your opportunity. But none of this is about you is it? It’s simply just the reality.

So, a starting target candidate pool of let’s say “50” incredible candidate targets, automatically becomes 25 within the first few days of launching the search and reaching out to everyone.

Evaluating that remaining group and bringing forward the very best, means you really do need to go learn what ‘good is’ by talking to every single one of those who remain, and call yourself lucky if you end up with a slate of 5-7 people whose interest, compensation, and timing will align.

And the real kicker?

This is the scenario we deal with when we’re the 3rd party. So this is BEFORE anyone on your team (including you) has met them.

And knowing only one will make it through your internal interview loop, negotiations, reference checks, resignation, counteroffer defense, transition, and onboarding, one misstep at any stage can blow up the search which…

…can delay your growth.
…can muddy the market.
…can do real damage your reputation.
…can push you farther away from your bullseye candidates.

And when it comes to executive hiring, no founder we’ve ever met gets excited when the start to see the quality of the people being brought forward get further and further away from the people they loved in the beginning who for one reason or another they lost out on hiring.

This is why smart founders avoid gambling with executive hiring.

They choose the right 3rd party talent partner. They choose one with a structured process. They choose to protect their candidate TAM. And they choose to run the search correctly from day one.

That is the Heavy Lift our clients hire us to take off their plate, and it is why the investment in a real search partner pays for itself many times over.

Why You Should Avoid Larger Firms, Contingency Recruiters, and DIY Hacks

By the time a founder starts thinking about executive hiring, they usually try every other path first. It’s understandable.

It feels cheaper, faster, or easier in the moment.

But at the executive level, each alternative to what we offer has structural limits that almost always guarantee a weaker outcome.

Here’s the landscape, without sugarcoating it.

1. Larger Retained Firms

Big search firms carry strong brands, and founders often assume that means they’ll get the best thinking, the best network, and the best execution.

Wrong.

Our clients who’ve been burned by these firms know the truth.

The outcome has nothing to do with the search firm’s brand.

It comes down to the actual human doing the work.

At most large firms:

• a senior partner sells you the search, but isn’t the one actually doing the work
• the real execution is handed to junior researchers and junior recruiters
• the slate they’ll give you is often recycled from past projects
• their internal process dictates the search rather than your actual needs
• outreach becomes a box-checking exercise vs. direct persuasion and courtship

This is why searches run by the larger firms take so much longer, and so often miss the mark.

It’s not because the firm is inherently bad. It’s because the people doing the day-to-day work often lack the seniority, judgment, and nuance required to land a top-tier operator from a very small talent pool.

Plus, these firms bank on the fact that you’ll still pay their full fee (33.33% of total anticipated first-year cash comp + add-on fees), usually by day sixty, whether they fill the role or not.

For context, AESC (the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants), the primary global trade association for retained search firms, reports that only 67% of their member firms’ searches actually result in a placement.

Even at the top of the recruiting market, 1 out of 3 searches fail outright.

Sure, the brand and team and their long list of placements at all the companies you admire may look impressive.

But their process, in practice, often isn’t.

2. Contingency Recruiters

Contingency firms are a whole other animal. This group represents 99% of the recruiters you’ll meet out in the market. And they will charge fees anywhere from as low as 10% to as high as 40% depending on how valuable they feel their candidate will be to you or others in the market.

But you have to keep in mind that their economics push them to optimize for speed, not fit.

Because they’re working for free, and searches can take a while to run their course, and the fact that they only get paid if the person they “submit” lands the job, they end up:

• juggling 20–30 open roles at the same time
• shotgunning the same resumes to multiple companies to increase their odds
• relying on surface-level screening
• chase volume of activity vs. depth of client/candidate alignment

This is why founders “get a lot of resumes” but often don’t end up being able to close the person they actually needed.

You don’t build a top 10% slate by prioritizing volume.

You build it by going narrow and deep, establishing trust, and on methodical positioning and persuasion. All things contingency models cannot and were never designed to deliver.

3. DIY Internal Recruiting (and Where These Efforts Can Actually Win)

Internal recruiting teams are a huge asset for low-level, mid-level, repeatable, and high-volume roles.

But even then, if they’re only relying on an inbound motion, they’re still not working with the best available talent (more like the best of the worst).

This is exactly why we built Top of Funnel Talent (more below) which gives your team a steady flow of qualified, pre-engaged candidates for non-executive roles without drowning them in inbound applicants or forcing them to reinvent the outreach motion every time a new role opens.

Everything before the first interview with your team, from project strategy, to research, to sourcing, to messaging, to outbound engagement, is identical to a full executive search. We just handle the first half (arguably the part that requires the most specialized skill set) so your team can stay focused on interviewing, closing, and onboarding the right people.

But even the strongest internal teams hit natural limits at the executive level.

At the executive level of recruiting, the work requires:

• a level of assertiveness that make even the best teams squeamish
• credibility with seasoned operators who have already “seen the movie”
• the political distance to speak candidly with both sides
• a slower, high-touch courtship process
• the judgment to pressure-test narratives founders and their teams cannot see from inside the walls

Sure, your target executives may take the call from your internal team, but these candidates will not share the full truth about their timing, compensation expectations, personal constraints, or risk tolerance.

Not because they’re hiding anything. But because doing so early in the process with a future potential employer undermines their negotiating leverage and exposes them before they have enough context to evaluate the opportunity.

So internal recruiting wins where the talent pools are larger (and the bar can be slightly lowered).
But Executive Search wins where discretion, persuasion, and deep qualification matter.

Top of Funnel Talent is built to supercharge your internal team’s ability to access the top 10% of the passive candidate market for non-exec roles.
The Master Platter exists because executive hiring requires a completely different approach and skill set.

4. Founder / CEO Direct Outreach

This one surprises people the most.
Executives absolutely will respond to founders.
But responding is not the same as engaging.

When you reach out directly, candidates:

• Google you
• scan your metrics
• form snap judgments
• evaluate the opportunity prematurely
• self-disqualify before hearing the comprehensive inside story

Direct outreach can work in later stages, when your brand speaks for itself.

But at the earlier stages (especially pre-series B), a strategic third-party buffer dramatically increases the odds the top 10% will take the conversation seriously and remain open long enough to be persuaded.

5. Fractional, Advisor, or “Try Before You Buy” Paths

These are great for technical consulting, special projects, or short-term stop-gaps. Seed stage companies LOVE to give this strategy a try for “executive” level roles when they’re desperate to try and crack the PMF equasion.

But not for recruiting a true leader who must own outcomes day one.

Fractional leaders rarely:

• shift from part-time to full-time later (telling us they “know way too much” to join the other startups on their profile)
• leave lucrative portfolio careers where they don’t need to take on the emotional weight of a true operating role
• commit to the long-term arc of scale by going all-in

Founders mistake interest for availability, and availability for commitment.
The conversion rate from “fractional curiosity” to “full-time hire” is astonishingly small and quite the gamble.

We encourage you to commit fully, believe in your vision, and refuse to settle for anything less than the best talent available in the market. That requires a real process, real focus, and a third-party talent partner who can tell your story better than you can and who will fight for your outcome as if their business depended on it.

The Truth

All of the above paths will generate activity.
But none are a reliable way to land the person who has already built what you need built next.

The above paths will poll the market.
We will persuade the market.

The above paths will look for whoever is available.
We will bring you the leaders worth making available.

The above paths use the process that fits their model.
We build the model around what your outcome requires.

This is the structural difference.

What You’re Really Buying

At this level, you are not buying resumes, hours, or activity.

• You are buying certainty.
• You are buying judgment.
• You are buying a process that protects your candidate TAM, navigates the psychology of senior operators, and gives you leverage you cannot create on your own.
• You are also buying a partner who does the work.

The person who runs your intake is the person who runs your search. No handoffs. No junior teams. No recycled slates. Each partner runs a maximum of 3 searches at a time because that is what it takes to do this properly.

This is why our process consistently moves 2.5x faster than the industry while producing slates that look nothing like what founders see elsewhere.

When you buy The Master Platter, you are not renting a brand or outsourcing a task.

You are installing a high-trust operator into the most sensitive and high-stakes project in your company: the search for the person who will determine what your company becomes next.

That is The Master Platter offer.

What This Produces

Across all searches, our average time to placement is 50.7 days. Clients interview 3–4 deeply qualified people off our slate before making the hire. Not a pile of maybes.

The first 30 days are on us. After that, the pace is driven primarily by your team’s speed, responsiveness, alignment, and decision-making rhythm. All areas where we guide you closely from start to finish.

What you get at the end is not just a new senior leader for your team. You get someone calibrated to your stage, your problem set, your ambition, and your culture. You get a leader who reshapes how the company executes. You get a hire who changes the trajectory of your business, not just the size of your org chart.

The Real “Cost” Economics of Executive Search

It isn’t extra. It is the same investment you will be making in the leader you hire. It simply begins earlier.

In early and growth-stage startups:

• VP-level cash compensation almost always starts with a 2.
• C-level cash compensation almost always starts with a 3.

Equity does not change that. Market physics are market physics.

The cash outlay for the person you want in truth, does NOT begin on their start date. It happens much sooner. In part because you’ve likely lost money by not bringing this person in sooner. But also because the value of the work you will pay that leader to perform is no more or less important than the value you’re going to have to pay your search partner to find that person, persuade them, and guide them all the way to a signed offer and successful start.

And because you’re not paying us like a contingency shop (different service for a different need), you’re going to have to start paying about the same amount you’ll end up paying your future leader, on a monthly basis, for about as long as it typically takes to run the search.

While this is not literally how invoicing works at Bearhug (we do not charge a monthly retainer and instead invoice in thirds tied to pre-agreed performance milestones so you carry zero risk), it is an important mindset shift and should change how you value the work we do and the outcome you want to achieve.

Executive searches with Bearhug average 50.7 days from kickoff to a signed offer. As mentioned earlier, the first 30 days are entirely on us. The rest depends on your team’s responsiveness and the timing of the candidate you select. You also need to account for the period before the search begins, which includes the Discovery Diagnostic and Solutioning Session, along with the transition period after the offer when the candidate resigns, works through their notice, and prepares for day one. And of course, any delay in starting the search adds its own cost.

In practical terms, the dollars you allocate to us should mentally be viewed as the same dollars you will soon allocate to them each month. You are simply starting the payments earlier in order to create the outcome you need.

You are not paying extra for search.

You are simply paying for your future leader by funding the system required to find them.

Same dollars. Moved earlier.

Dollars used to create the outcome you need, instead of gambling on it.

And because our incentives are aligned, you won’t pay a single penny if we fail to deliver the results tied to each of our three pre-agreed milestones.

Seen through this lens, the investment should hopefully click.

Founders who understand this never debate search fees again, because they see what is actually at stake and what they are actually paying for.

Ready To Explore Working Together?

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably not “shopping for a recruiter.” You are more likely trying to decide whether bringing in the right partner will meaningfully change the outcome of this hire.

Here is how we’ll begin.

Step 1: Discovery Diagnostic (30 minutes)

We’ll start with a focused 30-minute Discovery Diagnostic.

The goal is simple: understand where you are today and what “good” needs to look like in this seat.

On this call, we cover:

• where the business is now and what is breaking or blocked

• what this hire must solve in the first 12–24 months

• the realities around timing, comp, stage, and team structure

• history and details about any prior attempts you have made to fill the role

If your situation is complex, it helps to leave a small buffer on your calendar in case we need a few extra minutes.

After this call, we use what you shared to draft a concise Executive Search Summary: a working document that recaps the context, challenges, ideal profile, and a draft search structure. This is what we will review together next.

Step 2: Solutioning Session (Review & Customize the Executive Search Summary)

Next, we send you the Executive Search Summary and a draft search plan for your review before our Solutioning Session.

During this session, we:

• walk through the summary and confirm we captured your world correctly

• talk through the proposed profile, search strategy, and timeline

• refine anything that does not quite fit

• decide together whether the structure feels right for your stage and goals

Sometimes this takes the full hour. Sometimes it is much shorter if alignment is obvious. And occasionally, we both see within a few minutes that it is not the right fit. We only use as much time as is genuinely useful.

By the end of this step, we either agree on what “great” looks like and how to pursue it, or we part ways with clarity and no pressure.

Step 3: Proposal and Kickoff Window

If the plan feels right, we translate it into a simple, 3-milestone-based invoice timeline that reflects the economics and structure we discussed.

Because each partner only runs a small number of searches at a time, we will also be direct about our capacity and the kickoff window we can hold for you. If you decide to move forward, we lock in onboarding and a launch date. If not, you still leave with a clear, structured understanding of the role and the search approach you will need to run either way.

👉 See our list of recent placements and learn more about our zero risk “performance partnership” guarantee [here].

If this resonates, book your Discovery call using the button below and we’ll guide you step-by-step. 👇