Roger Brooks Presents RBrooks Group at LSI Europe '23

Transcription

Roger Brooks  0:04  
Hello, I'm Roger Brooks, I'm the founder of RBrooks Group, a retained C suite search firm, we're based out of Boulder, Colorado. And we do retain search work for companies both in the United States and Europe. Where we'll I'll I tend to focus on CEO searches and board searches, I've got a team that helps me out with those Plus, they take on other C suite assignments, Chief commercials CFOs, lots of Qual/Reg, and other commercial roles. So interestingly, that I'm here at this conference and a sponsor, because it turns out that about 40% of our revenue over the last five years, actually comes from Europe. And so people have like, why is that and some of it is just showing up, it gets to know a lot of people in Europe. The other thing is around the story of value creation, all these technologies. If we don't conquer the US market, they lack that significant exit value that will attract investors. So eventually, we need to get the US figured out. So we come in to do CEO searches, either the CEO goes to Europe for a period of time, like Dave Marver, over and onward, or Lloyd diamond at Pixium, they come to the EU, Europe, or we find somebody in the US, then that ends up taking over the company, or sometimes they just become a US President. So is is about chess and not checkers, a typical search process. And most people do is kind of like checkers, they collect all the actively looking people. And a company decides what's the best from the actively looking and goes forward, where chess is more of a deep dive, and to deep dive into the thinking of who are all the possible people who are all the best players, and figuring out who they are, and then not being afraid to approach them. And it's okay if you approach 10 A players and you get nine no's because you only need one. So we tend to try to go after the people who are not necessarily actively looking. And I'm not sure if there was a group of people with more retained experience in the medical device industry together myself, Charlie and Dan have over 80 years of search experience of talking to talking to and with various people in the executive roles throughout our industry. And then of course, we track it all. And you can imagine not only that conversation, but when we're speaking with someone, or often double clicking what we hear that a few times last night a double click, but we'll double click on their LinkedIn profile. And we take a look at all their shared connections. And we look at those, ah, who are the people I don't know much about that I'd like to know more about. And so that they would know well. And so we ask a lot of questions of a lot of people. And we track that. And that's how it helps us deliver people that end up being highly thought of in highly regarded. And the thing I can do, because I've been doing it so long is I can take a look at I can take a look at searches that have been done. And I can look at it. And I can tell how deep they dove. Because I can usually understand the field enough where I'll know if they're actively looking or if somebody actually did a deep dive in building out that field. And so it's something we do, but other firms do it as well. And when a lot of companies, most positions are still filled in filled internally. And so anybody is a CEO, board member executive. When you think about search, don't think about just collecting the actively looking people do a deep dive into all the people that you think could be a match and be okay with rejection you're going to face. I went back and I looked at all of our recently completed searches and it was over the last five to seven years and was astounded. First of all, we end up with 100% completion rate. What that means once we engage in a search, we don't stop until it's finished until we've got the person in place. Whereas sometimes there's stats out there that, you know, there's a lot of firms that don't quite finish all their searches. So no, that's the caveat. Sometimes clients cancel a search midstream. And when I did this retroactive study, I was absolutely thrilled to see that 99% of the people we put in place over the last five to seven years, made it through their first year and of course excluding reps of you know, we know the risks of the financing world. Sometimes we have to make cuts because we don't have funding and financing. That's the risk of our business. But I was even more impressed with the two year retention rate. 95% of our people we put in place are still there after two years. And so it's that doesn't come from luck because we don't manufacture the people. It comes from that process of having a really strong shortlist. You don't get to a strong shortlist without a really good long list and you don't get there unless you do a really deep dive. So I think doing that deep dive allows us to end up with a nice shortlist that helps our clients win. So first up