by Hunt Scanlon Media

When a client company is undergoing transformational or high-growth change, its needs can go far beyond traditional one-position-and-out talent recruitment. Sometimes an entire team must be brought in to get a business moving quickly and efficiently in a new direction. But comprehensive team-building isn’t something that most search firms are set up and ready to do. “They’ll just come in and say, ‘Hey, if you need 10 people, give us 10 searches,’” says Geoffrey Champion, chairman and CEO of ChampionScott Partners. “That’s not what we do. We say, ‘Look, we want to understand your business. We want to consult with you. We want to work across your company and understand what your problems are, and then we can help you fill appointments.’”

Indeed, one of the more innovative approaches that Mr. Champion’s firm provides beyond straightforward executive search falls under what it calls Leadership Advisory Services. In short, it’s a year-long arrangement in which ChampionScott partners with a client, frequently working on-site, not to fill a given number of hires but to help effect change that will move a company forward through a challenging period. “We bring in a specialized team to help you build your group fast and get it done, and then you can get on with doing what you’ve got to do to make your business successful,” says Mr. Champion. “It’s like a SWAT team, if you will.”

The framework is such that the client can opt for different forms of recruitment, be it a standard search in which the search team works from a job specification, identifies candidates, qualifies them, and presents them; strategic hires, which is multiple appointments from the same basic profile; focused search, which involves identifying with the client the four top candidates on the market and recruiting one of them; or a target hire, in which a single candidate is decided upon with the client and directly recruited.

The search firm also finds trainers for its clients to choose from in whatever areas coaching / mentoring support is needed, be it executive development, team development, sales, and more. Helping find consultants to conduct senior management team development is also available. (Compensation for services is based on an annual agreement with performance clauses and varied fees depending on the types of appointments and extent of effort/time involved.)

It’s a well-conceived, flexible approach. But to succeed, it needs the full backing of the client company’s leader. “The CEO has to be behind it because that’s the person with the authority and commitment to drive the growth of the organization,” explains Mr. Champion.

Secondly, the client firm must be undergoing transformation or otherwise growing to the point that it’s exceeding its capacity to deliver products or services. “It might be that you’re moving from industry segment A to segment B,” says Mr. Champion. “It might be that you’re moving from a U.S.-only company to U.S., Europe, and Asia. Or it might be that you’re launching a whole series of new products that are filling an adjacent need to whatever your core products are.”

Dex One
A prime example of how the system works was ChampionScott’s assignment several years ago for Dex One. In 2010, the yellow pages publisher was born out of the bankruptcy of its successor, the R.H. Donnelly Corp. Later that year, the revamped North Carolina company hired Alfred T. Mockett, who had worked magic for other businesses that were struggling, to get it out of the red and back into growth mode.

It wasn’t long after Mr. Mockett took over at Dex One that he was on the phone with Mr. Champion. The search firm had played an integral part in Mr. Mockett’s efforts earlier in the decade to elevate the technology consulting company American Management Systems, recruiting 42 hires in 28 months. Now, he was seeking the recruiter’s help once again.

The challenges were many, from the firm’s heavy debt load, to an economy that was still shaky in wake of the recession, to rapidly moving market dynamics. The first piece that Mr. Mockett wanted in place was a new chief financial officer. The CFO’s charge would be to improve ties to the lending institutions, many of whom were very cautious due to the industry segment, economy, and previous team, and to help raise money to refinance Dex One’s debt.

The company’s best hope rested with a shift away from print, which was in decline, to digital advertising, where future growth beckoned. “When Alfred came to us their business problem was that the only way to get their market valuation equal to their debt load and better than their debt load was to move into the digital arena,” says Mr. Champion. “They felt, ‘We’ve got to go digital as fast as we possibly can because that’s where the future of developing enterprise value for the business will be.’ So we got them a print-to-digital CFO with significant debt and technology experience and then built up their digital business.”

That CFO was Greg Freiberg, who joined Dex One in September 2011. Previously, he had worked in that position for Savvis, a global IT outsourcing company and XO Holdings (a Carl Icahn invested company). Mr. Freiberg was expert in guiding a company through transformational change, having shepherded significant growth businesses during his career and in spearheading Savvis’s merger with Century Link, Inc. He had experience with several digital companies and knew the terrain.

As such, Mr. Freiberg could help Mr. Mockett navigate what was coming down the road as the company increased its digital footprint. “So in addition to being the CFO,” says Mr. Champion, “he was advising the CEO of ‘You need to anticipate this’ or ‘We need to get somebody in this type of role.’ Whether it was strategy, technology, or sales.”

Over the course of a year, ChampionScott would become a regular presence around Dex One’s headquarters. Mr. Champion led the way in the early stages of the assignment, then handed the reins to managing director Kevin Kernan, who found himself at Dex One some eight hours a day, twice a week. Mr. Champion, meanwhile, maintained strong ties with CEO Mockett, staying in touch every two to three weeks, while Mr. Kernan built good connections with CEO Mockett and across the entire organization. Both men worked as a team with the CEO to ensure Dex One’s needs were anticipated and fully covered.

Mr. Kernan and Champion’s development of such a close working relationship allowed their firm to thoroughly understand Dex One, its personnel, and its needs for growth. Such proximity allowed employees who might be interested in a new opening but who were hesitant to raise the matter with their boss to speak freely with the recruiter. It also gave the search firm a firsthand understanding of who within the company might make a good contribution in other areas and to be able to facilitate such changes without worrying about internal politics.

“Our primary objective is to support the CEO in building his business, not for us to get the next search,” says Mr. Champion. “And if we execute our role placing the client first – we’ll build a client relationship for life.”

In many ways, ChampionScott truly helped to support and shape the company that Dex One became. The firm ushered in a slew of key executive appointments, 13 in all, including vice president of product development, vice president of call center sales and support, director of national sales, five regional sales directors, three digital sales directors, and a senior vice president of human resources.

These weren’t jobs that everyone would necessarily want. That the company was in transformation and growth mode was a good selling point. Its troubled past, on the other hand, made some candidates wary. “When you do this work, you know in the first 20 minutes of the conversation the ones that aren’t going to take the risk,” says Mr. Champion. “It’s just the way they approach it. And the ones who are interested in the challenge, you know that in the first 20 minutes, too.”

Those that were chosen and signed on saw Dex One enjoy steady growth of its digital business, including 34 percent for 2012, with total net revenues of $1.3 billion. There was no need to refinance its debt, as it turned out, because of the company’s successful merger with Dallas-based SuperMedia, another marketing directory publisher, which was completed in the spring of 2013.

In many ways, it was all further affirmation of ChampionScott’s team-building approach. The search firm has recently added similar assignments from the likes of McGraw-Hill Education, helping to find talent, including its chief digital officer, as the company expands its digital offerings, and Neustar, Inc., recruiting senior leaders as the firm segues from mobile services to cloud-based information, Internet services and analytics.