Industry Case Study
Presenting a Founder-Minded CEO Slate for Proxies in Under Three Weeks
Industry Case Study
Proxies is not your average beverage brand. They pioneered non-alcoholic wine in North America, built a loyal D2C following, and have since expanded into cider, cocktails, and Bellinis. Backed by a Toronto-based food and beverage VC, they had just closed a fresh round and needed a leader who could run a 5x growth strategy and take the brand to its next stage.
But this was not a conventional CEO search, and that was the whole problem.
The brief was unusual in three ways:
Most retained search firms quote 8 to 12 weeks for a CEO search. We did it in less than three.
When we took the call, we knew speed could not come at the cost of fit. Here is how we compressed the timeline without cutting corners.
We ran a working session with the lead investor and the company president to pressure-test the role. We dug into what was actually broken (commercial strategy and sales leadership), what the current team brought to the table, and what kind of person would thrive alongside a cynical, lawyer-trained president who knows his own gaps.
We left that conversation with a sharp profile: a former operator or consultant who wants to stop advising and start building, ideally with CPG or beverage exposure, and who sees equity as the real comp.
Instead of casting a wide net, we built a focused list of roughly 80 candidates across three buckets:
We ran personalized outreach with a story-led pitch that leaned into the equity upside and the category-defining opportunity. Response rates were strong because the role itself was genuinely compelling once framed correctly.
Every serious candidate completed our signature 2 to 4 page self-evaluation, walking through their career progression, what they are running toward, and the moments they are most proud of. This is the part of our process clients tell us they value most. It gives the board real insight into how a candidate thinks before they ever sit down for an interview.
We screened more than 30 candidates by phone and video, and surfaced the ones who showed both the commercial muscle and the founder energy Proxies needed.
We presented a curated slate to the Proxies board inside the three-week window, each candidate with a full self-evaluation, our notes, and a clear point of view on fit. Every candidate was live in the firm's transparent client portal, so the board could review materials in real time without waiting on email updates.
The board had a qualified, diverse, founder-minded slate in hand before the month closed. No black box. No mystery. No 90-day wait.
Three things made the timeline possible:
Fixed-fee model that aligns us with speed and fit, not billable hours. We are not incentivized to drag a search out.
Real-time candidate portal. Clients see what we see, when we see it. That cuts days of back-and-forth out of every search.
Self-evaluations that do the heavy lifting up front. Boards get to know candidates as humans before the first interview.
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If you are building something ambitious in CPG or food and beverage and need a search partner who can move fast without cutting corners, let's talk. Or explore our F&B and CPG practice and how our search model works.
