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Capabilities: Founder / CEO & Board Advisory
The decisions that define your organization’s future deserve more than a transactional advisor.
Founders, CEOs and board members operate in a narrow world, surrounded by people who have a stake in the outcome, an agenda of their own, or a reluctance to deliver difficult news. What most senior leaders lack, and privately know they lack, is a seasoned counselor who will engage candidly on the full range of strategic and talent challenges they face, with no agenda except the right outcome.
Who This Is For
We work with leaders who cannot afford to get this wrong.
This practice exists for decisions consequential enough to warrant genuine independent counsel: not a vendor relationship, but a trusted advisor who has seen this decision play out across hundreds of organizations and will tell you what they actually think.
Boards of Directors
CEO succession planning, director recruitment, governance advisory and independent counsel on leadership risk.
CEOs & Senior Executives
Strategic counsel on team composition, succession, organizational design and the leadership decisions that determine outcomes.
Founders & Owner-Operators
Advisory for founders moving from operational to strategic roles: succession, professionalizing the leadership team, preparing for the next stage.
Private Equity Sponsors
Portfolio leadership at growth or transition stages: pre-close assessment, post-acquisition team building, performance intervention.
What We Advise On
The inflection points where independent counsel matters most.
Five situations account for most of the work this practice takes on.
01
CEO succession planning
A structured, objective process for identifying and developing internal successors, or managing an external search when internal options are not adequate. Succession as strategy, not reaction.
02
Board composition and effectiveness
Independent counsel on structure, the capabilities your board needs at this stage, director recruitment where gaps exist, and assessment of existing governance practices.
03
Founder transition
Confidential advisory for founders moving to board roles, ownership without management, or full exit. Organizationally complex, emotionally charged, and better navigated with someone who has done it before.
04
Strategic inflection point counsel
Independent advisory during M&A, restructuring, leadership crisis or major pivots, when the people inside the organization have competing interests and incomplete perspectives.
05
Senior team assessment and composition
An objective view of whether the team around the CEO is the team the next three years require, and what to do about it.
How We Work
A small number of clients. Complete attention. Real candor.
We take on a deliberately limited number of advisory relationships at any time. This is not a scalable product line. It is a relationship, and relationships that change outcomes require genuine investment of attention, judgment and trust.
Independent perspective
No stake in any outcome except the right one for your organization. We will tell you what we think, including the inconvenient parts.
30 years of pattern recognition
Succession crises, founder conflicts, board dysfunction, leadership failures: we have seen them across hundreds of organizations.
Complete confidentiality
Every engagement is strictly confidential, conducted with principals, not teams.
Senior-led, always
Rob Andrews and senior partners conduct these engagements directly. No delegation in relationships of this consequence.
Published Perspective
If execution risk has ever surprised your board, this explains why
Rob Andrews writes for NACD Directorship Magazine on why boards are seldom surprised by strategy and routinely stunned by execution, and what they can do to see it coming.
Questions we hear most
Before you call, a few straight answers.
When should a board start CEO succession planning?
The day the current CEO starts. A board that begins succession planning when a departure is announced has already lost the ability to run an objective process. We help boards maintain a living succession plan with named internal candidates and an external benchmark.
Do you also conduct the board or CEO search?
Yes, through our retained executive search practice, when the advisory work concludes that an external search is warranted. The advisory relationship stays independent of that decision.
How confidential is a founder-transition engagement?
Completely. Engagements are conducted with the principal directly, and nothing is shared with the organization until the founder decides it should be.