The Austin Group Energy LP, Houston, TX
The Story: My first 1.2 million dollar fee.
Recently I was contacted by Talent Acq. for the leader of Natural Resources for one of the largest investment banks in North America. He said he was putting a list of names together to be considered for a potential up and coming search for a Managing Director of their North American Energy practice. A face to face meeting was set between my team and the hiring manager for early January. It was made very clear that there would be no retainer, only contingency, for this search. They also made it very clear that a team hire would be considered. A face-to-face meeting was set for early January.
I took Ted, the last guy your trained for me at the ranch. I’ll skip a lot of the details but, they grilled the hell out of us. I shared with him how our firm was different from the competition. I actually leaned on you, sharing with them how Morgan Methodology’s process made us so much efficient in the last 15 years. Towards the end of the meeting, the Natural Resources MD expressed concern that we hadn’t completed a similar team search like this. We explained that we had recruited the individual pieces, but never the whole team at once. Ted took advantage of the tough personality of the Managing Director and mirrored the guy to close hard. He looked at the MD and said, “I don’t know any other way to say this, but at the risk of sounding offensive, we are very f^#king good at what we do and it doesn’t matter what we recruit. Our style of recruiting is unparalleled and our process was created by the best in class and we follow it to a Tee . If you want the highest performance janitor from your competitor, we’ll find him.” The MD started laughing and said, “I’ve said that to my clients before. You’re hired.”
Within 2 weeks, we had a spreadsheet of nearly 50 potential targets. We shared the spreadsheet with the client and they handpicked several individuals that they wanted to explore. We gained permission from the client to make the calls and begin the evaluating process. In May, after several months of interviews the bank decided to move forward with the (you ready?) 11 person team we recruited. They made their final cut using our Morgan Assessment write-ups. Not one resume was submitted. Just our PPT presentations. Although Ted and I were co-project leads, everyone contributed to the finalists.
After nearly 7 months of work, we coordinated all the resignations. 2 in person, the rest by email, EVERY 10 MINUTES! Cruel, but it worked.
Thank you, brother.