The first functional leader changes the function.

There is a version of every senior hire that clients get wrong in the same way: they write the brief for someone joining an established team, when what they are actually doing is asking someone to build the team from nothing.

Inheriting a function and building one are different jobs that happen to share a job title. A CFO joining a business with a finance team, systems and reporting already in place needs to run and improve what exists. A CFO joining a scaling platform as its first genuine finance leader needs to do that work while simultaneously hiring their own team, selecting the systems, establishing the reporting cadence, bringing external advisers under control, and satisfying the board in the meantime. The second version is a fundamentally harder and different search - and most clients scope it like the first.

We see this across every function that scales this way: Head of Construction, Head of Development, Head of Real Estate, first investment leader into a platform. The pattern is identical. The business has grown to the point where the founder or generalist covering the function can no longer do it justice, and it hires a specialist expecting the specialism alone to solve the problem. It rarely does.

Expertise is necessary. It is not sufficient.

A strong technical background tells you someone can do the work. It tells you almost nothing about whether they can build the infrastructure around the work - hire well under time pressure, put in a reporting structure that survives contact with a board, or manage external advisers instead of being managed by them. Those are separate, learnable skills, and not every excellent operator inside an established team has ever had to exercise them.

"The real requirement is functional expertise plus build capability - and most briefs only screen for the first one."

The candidates who succeed in this specific type of hire tend to share a pattern in their own history: they have done this before, even if the title was different, and they can talk concretely about what they built, not just what they managed. That distinction - built versus managed - is usually the single most useful diagnostic question in the interview process, and it is one most panels never ask directly.

What clients should look for

Before writing the brief, be honest about which of the two hires you actually need. If it is the build version, weight the process towards evidence of having built something from a similarly early stage - team, process, systems - over pure technical pedigree. Ask for specifics: what did they inherit, what did they put in place, what would they do differently. And be realistic about the first six months: this hire will be doing two jobs at once, and the organisation needs to plan for that, not expect immediate steady-state performance.

Get this distinction right at the brief stage, and the search gets considerably easier. Get it wrong, and you risk hiring an excellent operator into a job they have never actually done.