Retained search and board advisory for biopharma's technical leadership. CMC and Quality is our discipline. Executive search is our craft. Every engagement begins with a diagnostic.
112+ placements · 13 years · $7.3Bn+ aggregate client exit value · 125+ assets moved toward launch
Before we define a search profile, we work with the board and CEO to understand the company's stage, dominant operational risk, and the leadership mandate the role actually carries — not the one written on a job description.
We interview the board, the CEO, and the operating team across three lenses: the company as it is today, not what the deck says it is; where the board, the investors, and the ownership group need it to be over the next eighteen to thirty-six months; and where the stakeholders actually disagree about what the role requires.
We surface the gap. We rewrite the role profile. Then — and only then — we run the search.
The diagnostic is the product. The placement is the output.
Every engagement is run by a partner, end to end — never handed to a junior researcher. We specialize across the technical and commercial spine of biopharma: CMC, Technical Operations, Quality, Commercial, and Clinical. How we deploy that expertise depends on what your stage actually needs.
Partner-led search for C-suite and VP leadership across CMC, Technical Operations, Quality, Commercial, and Clinical. Diagnostic-first, for platforms at inflection points — Series A–G repositioning, pre-IPO calibration, post-CRL recovery.
Executive Director to Director — site heads, functional leadership teams, and net-new capability builds across the CMC organisation.
A deployable team of senior CMC, Tech Ops, and Quality operators, dropped onto your critical path. C-level expertise at typically 50–60% of the fully-loaded cost of an equivalent full-time hire — with the data to prove the model (below).
The CTO Mandate Assessment, compensation benchmarking, succession planning, and org design. Often the right product when search is the wrong one.
Coaching, interview preparation, and guidance for senior CMC and Quality leaders moving between roles.
The larger retained firms are slow; the contingent firms are volume-based. Both fail in the same place — neither surfaces what a company actually needs before filling the role. We start every engagement with a diagnostic across the stakeholder base. It runs on three simultaneous lenses, and the hire sits in the gap where all three intersect.
What the business actually is — not what the deck says it is. Org structure, governance, operating model, bench strength, economics, technical posture, and culture, gathered through document review and targeted interviews with the leadership team and the board.
Where the board, investors, or ownership need the business to go next — strategic growth drivers, capital-structure decisions, repositioning. Anything material enough to change what “leadership” has to mean for this hire.
The gap between how different stakeholders describe the role and the ideal leader. Usually the most valuable lens: what the board thinks the role requires often differs from what management does. Surfacing that gap before a hire is the difference between onboarding and unraveling.
For each engagement we build a function-specific maturity framework calibrated to the role and the business — the CEO Four Situational Challenges, the Commercial Maturity Framework, and the CTO Mandate Framework for CMC and Quality leadership. What the client search committee gets from every diagnostic, as bespoke:
Phase 3’s first CEO search. Commissioning Agents Incorporated, an employee-owned professional-services firm serving FDA-regulated sectors, engaged us to succeed the founder and lead the next chapter.
Rather than move straight to a slate, we ran the full diagnostic. Interviews across the board and executive team — aligning eight board members — surfaced the real question beneath the search: not simply who to hire, but what the company needed to become over the next decade. We recalibrated the engagement from Growth-Oriented to Transformational. That one reframing changed the benchmark pool.
We built a transatlantic slate across the EU and USA, convened the international finalists for a leadership assessment day, and reached unanimous board agreement — signing the offer 82 days from kickoff. Sheena Dempsey was appointed Chief Executive Officer.
103 candidates mapped · 69% reply rate · 7 to interview · 3 finalists · 1 offer accepted.
Below the C-suite sits the layer that actually ships. We build it — the site heads, functional leadership teams, and net-new capabilities a stage transition demands.
The leader who owns a facility's people, quality, and output — and the leadership team beneath them.
Executive Director and Director hires across QA, QC, Manufacturing, MSAT, Tech Transfer, Process & Analytical Development, Supply Chain, Engineering & Facilities, Automation, and Project Controls.
Standing up a function from zero — a new modality, a new site, a new quality system — with leaders who have done it before.
A fractional engagement only costs more than a full-time hire once weekly hours cross the break-even line — roughly 33–39 hrs/week at Director level and 28–37 at CxO.
Illustrative. FTE benchmarks assume a ~40% benefits and overhead load on base salary.
Sub-officer placements — the directors and VPs beneath the leadership seat — are often the most operationally consequential hires a platform makes. The bench matters as much as the seat.
Our data shows that three seasoned contractors — each working no more than 25 hours per week — can deliver Phase 3 ready material in under two years at 50–60% of the cost of an equivalent team of full-time hires. The savings come from fringe benefits avoided, the flexibility to deploy exactly the expertise each phase requires, and the ability to ramp up or turn off as the program demands.
In April 2023 we built Eledon’s senior CMC leadership team — Senior Directors of Drug Product, Drug Substance, and QA & Regulatory — to carry the organisation from clinical to Phase 3 and commercial readiness.
We delivered the build as Eledon’s pipeline accelerated across 2023:
Clinical milestones per Eledon Pharmaceuticals investor disclosures, 2023. Source.
Our search work sits alongside published intelligence products — the same analysis we run inside engagements, made public. Because we believe evidence beats opinion.
The published board governance model for biopharma's CMC and Quality risk. Five mandates. Reviewed by seventeen CxO-level technical operations leaders. 250+ downloads in the first month. Free.
25,402 biotech VC deals analyzed. Investors ranked by follow-on rate — which firms come back for round two, and which write one check and stop.
No surprises on terms. Here is how an engagement works before you ever pick up the phone.
We work on a performance-based retainer, billed in three stages: one-third on engagement, one-third at a confirmed-interview milestone, and one-third on completion. The structure keeps our incentives tied to progress, not just the brief.
Every search we have run since 2018 has included diverse representation on the slate. It is how we work, not an add-on.
Every search carries a replacement guarantee. The period is agreed with each client at the outset, sized to the seniority and risk of the role.
We partner with internal talent and HR functions rather than around them — aligning on process, candidate experience, and confidentiality from the first diagnostic.
Thirty minutes. A structured read on the role. We tell you whether search is the right product, whether the brief reflects the company you are actually inheriting, and whether the leadership architecture sits where it needs to be for your next capital event.
