Sonia Prais, Laurie Ryan, and I co-founded Avant Executive Search in 2020, and let's face it, if you were going to just dive in and try to shake things up, that was a great year to do it! It's been an absolute blast and I love my team, what we do, and who we do it for. The growth we've achieved has been phenomenal and we cannot thank all the early clients and advisors that believed in us and played a huge role in getting us launched. A big thank you also goes to our employees and partners that took a leap of faith and trusted us with the next stage of their career journey, we couldn't have delivered for the 30+ global clients we've partnered with without each of you!Here's the official skinny:Avant is a female-owned, retained executive search firm and talent consultancy servicing private equity, fashion, retail, technology, and hospitality brands in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific.One of the fastest growing firms in the search industry, we were born from one simple philosophy: Ego is the enemy of great work.Reach out to me anytime to learn more about how we can help your firm acquire executive talent, diversify the team, gain real-time insight into compensation trends and plan for future growth.

After consulting on strategy and partnerships for 4 years I joined Korn Ferry in 2017 in a shift to executive search and organizational consulting. I had gotten to know KF as a candidate back in 2010 when Clearwire was a hot name that they wanted to recruit leadership talent out of. I kept in touch over the next few years and ended up joining the firm when an opening to lead the technology sector for the Professional Search business came up in 2017. We achieved almost 40% growth in the 18 months after I came on and I hired some fantastic people who are still doing well there. Korn Ferry was a great transitional learning experience and I discovered that my years of operating experience were invaluable in terms of relating to clients, candidates and unique business challenges in a way that you just can't if you haven't managed at scale on the client side.

Having worked with big brands and customer acquisition agencies for 15 years I decided to leverage the knowledge and relationships I'd acquired to found ChannelPeak. Our primary focus was helping companies expand distribution through new partnerships but we got to do some interesting stuff that was pretty far out of my wheelhouse at the time such as help develop a cosmeceutical line and source an entire catalog of home products for a foreign multi-level marketing firm. We also helped create new multi-channel platforms for customer acquisition firms and assist in M&A analysis between them.

This is pretty amazing in retrospect. I inherited a team of about 50 people in 4 markets that we grew to over 600 people in 53 markets in about 18 months for what's still one of the most the most heavily funded startups in US history. In 2009-10 I did hundreds of phone and in-person interviews from Boston to Austin and everywhere in between to staff up from zero and get each market to a successful launch. That experience was one that helped me transition quickly into talent acquisition.Having all-channel responsibility across so many markets would still rank as the toughest but most valuable executive experience I've ever had. You definitely learn to prioritize quickly or risk getting too far behind to be able implement and execute strategy in time to be effective. My team was even able to create and execute a plan to pivot the retail business from post-paid to pre-paid in 2011 which improved cash-flow by over $100M annually and ended up being a major factor in our final purchase price improving by almost 50% from Sprint's initial offer to acquire us. But by far the coolest, most rewarding thing from this experience is seeing all the amazing success that people on my teams have had the last 7 years. These were some LONG, crazy hard days but ones I'll always remember as some of the most fun in my career.

Such a great place to start my career, I still appreciate the effort and investment that BellSouth put into developing me. Nowhere since then has close to matching that. Uber-conservative, plodding culture, but diplomatically navigating old bell-co bureaucracy to create wildly successful new channels here was what landed me my next gig. Promoted 5 times in 8 years, winning Pinnacle Club Awards 4 times and being selected for executive leadership development in 2004.