--- title: "How we closed 14 supply chain and operations placements worth $1,089,760 for a retained search firm in six months. | Stone Haven Capital Group" description: "An average fee of $77,840. Six months. A functional executive search firm placing supply chain and operations leadership. No new recruiters, no job board spend, no waiting for a past client to call with the next requisition." canonical: "https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/executive-search-firm" last-updated: "2026-08-22" --- > An average fee of $77,840. Six months. A functional executive search firm placing supply chain and operations leadership. No new recruiters, no job board spend, no waiting for a past client to call with the next requisition. Stone Haven Capital Group Schedule a Call Case study · Executive Search Firm # How we closed 14 supply chain and operations placements worth $1,089,760 for a retained search firm in six months. An average fee of $77,840. Six months. A functional executive search firm placing supply chain and operations leadership. No new recruiters, no job board spend, no waiting for a past client to call with the next requisition. - $1,089,760 generated in 6 months, from 14 retained placements at an average of $77,840. - 199,210 emails to 39,842 companies, producing 478 replies at 1.2%. - 134 interested conversations became 47 held meetings and 14 signed placements. - What did most of the work: we built the list around the function rather than around the company. - What went wrong: the opener led with the fixed fee and it read as a discount pitch. 01 ## Did they get a good result? Yes. Here it is with the arithmetic shown. In the six months before we started, fee income from new searches stood at $340,550 and arrived almost entirely from firms the partners had already placed for. Six months later the firm had closed 14 searches worth $1,089,760, an average fee of $77,840, with 47 live searches worth $2,890,500 sitting behind them. That is 3.2 times the baseline, off fourteen signatures. What happenedThe number Placements closed in six months14 Search fees generated$1,089,760 Average fee per placement$77,840 Live searches at qualification47, worth $2,890,500 Interested-stage conversations134, worth $5,494,000 Emails sent199,210 Contacts reached39,842 Replies478, a 1.2% reply rate Positive replies134, 28.0% of all replies Bounces2,191, a 1.1% bounce rate Six months of sending, at the volume a fourteen-placement programme actually needs. 02 ## Did you get them in front of the right people? Fourteen placements across six months is a little more than two a month. At that shape, a month spent talking to the wrong function is not a slow month. It is a sixth of the engagement. 47 searches cleared qualification carrying $2,890,500 between them, and 14 of those closed for $1,089,760 at an average fee of $77,840. Behind them sat 134 interested-stage conversations worth $5,494,000. Targeting reads in the conversion. 478 replies produced 134 positive ones, 47 of those reached qualification and 14 closed. That is 35.1% of positive replies becoming a live search and 29.8% of live searches closing, which is what happens when the person answering already has the requisition open on their desk. The search pipeline across six months: 47 briefings held against 14 placements signed. 03 ## What worked, and why ### We built the list around the function rather than around the company. The firm places one thing: supply chain and operations leadership. So the list started from the people who own that gap, CHROs, VPs of talent acquisition and COOs at manufacturers and distributors between $100M and $1B in revenue. Revenue band set the boundary and function set everything inside it. That produced a working pool of 45,796 contacts and 199,210 sends across six months at a 1.1% bounce rate, 2,191 bounces in total. Inbox placement held at 94.0% for the life of the programme. The opening pool, before the function and revenue filters went on. 128,229 contacts. The same market held to supply chain and operations owners at $100M to $1B manufacturers and distributors. 45,796 contacts. 50 domains carrying 150 inboxes, every one authenticated before it sent to a single CHRO. What that buys: a search firm that places everything competes with every search firm. One that places supply chain and operations gets either a clear yes or a clear no, and both of those are cheap answers to obtain. ### We kept the fee structure out of the first email. The fixed fee is the firm's strongest commercial argument and its worst opening line. A price stated cold invites a comparison nobody asked the reader to make. So the opener named the hiring problem and let the structure arrive later, once someone had already agreed the problem was theirs. None of this ran on the client's own domain. The estate was 50 sending domains carrying 150 inboxes, each authenticated on SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX before it sent anything, each held to 20 sends a day, with warmup running on all 150 throughout. It logged zero errors and five alerts in six months. The effect: a CHRO reading a fee before a capability is pricing a commodity. A CHRO reading a capability first is deciding whether you can do the work, which is the only question that ends in a retainer. ### The first email named a hiring problem and asked for almost nothing. It opened with a greeting, named one specific problem inside the function, addressed itself to the person who owns that function by title, carried a single clause of proof about where the firm has placed at that level, and closed on a question that costs nothing to answer. It was signed with a full name and title, because a CHRO who cannot tell who wrote to them does not write back. Everything left the estate as plain text, varied line by line, so two VPs of talent acquisition at similar manufacturers never received the same wording on the same day. The five steps and the waits between them: five days, five days, ten days, then ten. The reason it works: a CHRO deletes pitches and answers questions about their own headcount problem. An opener that names the problem and then stops has given them nothing to argue with and one easy thing to answer. ### We ran five touches on five, five, ten and ten day gaps. Five steps, with three variations on the opener and three on each follow-up, all A/B tested. The gaps open tight and then widen, so the sequence is present while a requisition is still fresh and still in front of someone two months later when an internal promotion has quietly failed. Two of those touches land inside the first fortnight and the last one lands nearly a month out. A company that answers late is usually one where an internal process has just stalled, and that is the most useful reply this market produces. ### We reviewed reply quality weekly and judged angles on searches rather than on replies. With 478 replies across six months, the weekly review reads conversations instead of counting them. An angle producing friendly replies that never reached a signed engagement letter came off within a fortnight. At this volume the judgement has to be qualitative, and at this volume it can be. 04 ## The four angles we test, in every market Everything above is where the programme ended up. It did not open there. At the start nobody could say which of four openings a talent function would answer, and no amount of sector reasoning gets you to that answer in advance. So four run at once, one per angle, and the replies decide. These four travel across markets because each rests on a different reason a busy person answers a stranger. 05 ## 1. Social proof Put a comparable employer in front of them with a real outcome attached. Never draw the parallel yourself. A CHRO gets there faster than you would, and they trust their own version of it. We placed a supply chain director at a distributor about your size last quarter, start to signed offer in nine weeks. Worth the short version of how the search was scoped? 06 ## 2. The soft ask Lower the bar until agreeing costs nothing at all. No call, no commitment, just permission to send something over that they can read on their own time. Would it help to see what the supply chain leadership market looks like at your revenue band right now? Happy to send a short read across first. 07 ## 3. Value first Open with something they can use whether or not they ever reply. A compensation read, a time-to-fill benchmark, a note on who is actually available. Usefulness first, interest second. We pulled what supply chain directors are being paid across manufacturers your size this year. Want me to send it over? 08 ## 4. The short window Attach the message to a period that closes on its own. It works only where the deadline is real and belongs to them, because an invented one is obvious and costs you the contact permanently. If the operations seat needs filling before your next planning cycle, the search has to start in the next few weeks. Is that the timeline you are working to? 09 ## How we use them All four launch together against a divided list. On a programme with fourteen placements in it there is no room to spend two months discovering that the market wanted a different opening, so the split is doing real work. Within a few weeks the reply data has named the one or two worth keeping and the rest come off before they consume more of a finite pool. Which one wins is not forecastable. That one or two will win is. The same four port to LinkedIn with tighter wording and the same underlying logic. 10 ## Why this works for executive search specifically The search firms that come to us describe the same position. The work is genuinely good, the placements hold, and every new search still arrives from a company the partners have already worked with. That builds a real business with no forward visibility, and it never reaches a CHRO who has not heard the firm's name. This market suits the channel for three specific reasons: - The buyer has a dated problem. A vacant supply chain director costs money every week the seat stays empty, and the person carrying that cost is the person the email is addressed to. Nothing has to be manufactured. The urgency is already sitting on someone's desk. - One placement pays for a long stretch of the channel. At an average fee of $77,840, the commercial argument is settled inside the first two signatures. Very few channels carry that ratio, and it is what makes a deliberately low-volume programme rational. - The niche makes the answer fast. A firm that places one function gets a clean yes or a clean no in the first reply. A generalist gets a maybe, and a maybe against a finite list is the most expensive outcome available. 11 ## What did not work, and what we did about it That is the case for the channel. Here is the other half of it. Three things went wrong on this engagement, and you should hear them from us rather than infer them later. ### The opener led with the fixed fee and it read as a discount pitch. The structure went into the first line, on the theory that it was the most differentiated thing the firm had to say. What a retained search buyer heard was a cheap fee, and a cheap fee implies a cheap search. The replies that came back asked what the fee excluded rather than who the firm had placed, which is the wrong conversation to be winning. What we changed: the fee came out of the opener entirely and moved to the point where someone had already agreed they had a hiring problem. The list was tightened underneath it at the same time, from 128,229 contacts down to 45,796. ### The sequence re-engaged a list before the previous pass had finished. A second campaign was launched against contacts still moving through the first one, so a share of the list sat inside two live sequences at once. The same person received two different openings from two different senders in the same week, which settles the question of whether a machine is writing to them before anybody has read a word of the offer. What we changed: re-engagement was gated on the prior pass completing, and the sequencer was configured so no contact could hold a place in more than one live campaign. Of 39,842 contacts reached, 36,257 finished the sequence cleanly once that rule was in force. One conversation with a search buyer, from the first email through to a booked call. ### Replies were routed to a research coordinator. Positive replies landed with a coordinator who could not answer the first question a CHRO asks, which is who else you have placed at this level. The honest answer available to them was that they would check and come back. By the time names arrived the conversation had cooled to nothing. What we changed: every positive reply went to a search partner with a same-day commitment and comparable placements ready to name in the first response. Of 478 replies, 134 were genuinely positive. On a programme with fourteen placements in it, each of those is worth protecting one at a time. A programme this small in deal count has nowhere to hide an error, and a document showing none of them has had the section removed. These three are the corrections that tend to repeat, which is the only reason they are worth your time. 12 ## Why would this work for your business? Perhaps it does not, and there is no cost to finding that out before anyone commits. Work down the table. This works ifThis is a poor fit if A single placement is worth five figures in feeYour average fee sits in the low thousands You place a defined function better than a generalist canYou take whatever role a client sends you Your fee structure survives being read cold, without a callYour pricing only makes sense once you have explained it A partner can answer a positive reply the day it landsReplies queue behind delivery work for a day or two You have consultant capacity for the searches you winYour consultants are already carrying all they can staff If the left column describes you, what transfers is the method rather than anything unusual about this firm. A defined function, a fee structure that survives being read cold, and no route to a CHRO who has never heard the name. All of it came out of process, and the process does not change for you. 13 ## One more thing worth understanding A search firm should not run outbound through its own busy season. It is the piece of advice most often nodded at and then ignored. The failure mode here is not an empty pipeline. It is a full one. Outbound that works produces signed engagement letters on a schedule you set months earlier, and a retained search arriving when every consultant already carries four active mandates gets worked badly. Candidates go out slower, the shortlist is thinner, and the client can tell. What that costs is not the fee. It is the referral that client would have made and now will not, in a market where a search done well is the whole origination engine. An empty month costs you one month of billing. A search run at half attention costs you a source of work for years. So the programme was timed against the firm's own capacity rather than against the calendar. Sending volume was set to produce roughly the number of searches the consultants could actually staff, and then held there. That is why 199,210 sends produced 14 placements, and why nobody involved reads that as a low number. 14 ## Before and after Before After Search fees in the six-month period$340,550 $1,089,760 Growth on the baselineNot applicable 3.2 times Where new searches came fromCompanies the partners had already placed for A named market of 45,796 qualifying contacts Average fee per placementSet as a percentage of first-year compensation A fixed $77,840 Who answers a positive replyA research coordinator, when they got to it A search partner, the same day 15 ## If you want to know whether your market has this in it A quarter of an hour usually settles it. Tell us which function you place, what a fee is worth when a search closes, and how many searches your consultants can carry at one time. We come back with how many of those buyers are genuinely reachable, what conversation volume is realistic against that number, and a direct answer on whether this channel suits you. If the answer is no, we say so on the call. Neither of us gains from discovering it in month three. ## Want to know whether your market has this in it? The first conversation is short. You tell us who your buyers are and what one is worth to you. We tell you how many we can actually reach, what the meeting volume looks like, and whether outbound is the right lever for you at all. If we think it is not, we will say so. 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