The two appointments at the very top of a business — the Chief Executive and the Managing Director — are the ones boards most often get nearly right, and nearly right is where the cost lives. A candidate who looks entirely defensible at offer stage can reveal a mismatch six to twelve months later, by which point the price is no longer a fee but a stalled strategy and a year lost. Exec Capital has just published two substantial additions to its Knowledge Centre that tackle exactly this problem: a complete guide to hiring a CEO, and a companion guide to hiring a Managing Director. Both are written personally by Adrian Lawrence FCA, founder of Exec Capital and an ICAEW Verified Fellow, and both draw on real search experience across UK owner-managed, PE-backed, scale-up, mid-market and corporate businesses.
These are not thin marketing pages. Each is a genuine long-form treatment — the kind of substantive guidance normally only available inside a paid advisory engagement — and together they form the most detailed free resource the UK market has on the two most consequential senior appointments a board makes.
How to Hire a CEO: the most consequential appointment a board makes
The How to Hire a CEO guide opens from a hard truth: this is the single appointment where the gap between the candidate who looks right and the candidate who performs is widest. Part of that is because the role is genuinely difficult to assess from outside it; part is because boards routinely under-specify what they actually need; and part is because the strongest CEO candidates are evaluating the firm just as carefully as the firm is evaluating them. Written for chairs, founders, nomination committees and major shareholders, the guide walks the full arc of a CEO appointment from first decision to first day.
Its most useful argument is about timing. The realistic timeline for a CEO appointment runs to twenty to thirty weeks, and most boards start later than they should. The guide makes the case for beginning succession planning two to three years before the incumbent is expected to leave — not running a continuous search, but holding an explicit succession plan, mapping the external market periodically, and keeping a search relationship warm enough to mobilise quickly. For boards facing imminent succession without that groundwork, it sets out the two practical responses that actually help: engaging a search firm before the role is announced so early candidate work runs in the background, and planning a deliberate interim arrangement so the pressure to fill the seat never overwhelms the rigour of the assessment.
From there the guide gets specific. It breaks down the role specification into four questions — what the CEO must deliver, what the firm looks like under them in three to five years, how the chair-CEO relationship is structured, and, crucially, what the firm does not need from this CEO. It maps the five candidate pools that recur in real searches, from sitting CEOs at peer firms through step-up executives, founder-CEOs, turnaround specialists and the often under-considered internal candidate. It lays out the six-phase search process with realistic durations at each stage, and it is candid about the three things that most often mislead CEO assessment: personal chemistry with the chair, pattern-matching to the predecessor, and discounting candidates who simply don't interview brilliantly.
The compensation section is unusually concrete for a public-facing guide, setting out indicative UK base-salary ranges by firm size and ownership structure and explaining how base, bonus, long-term incentives and benefits interact — including the joining payments and notice provisions that quietly reshape the headline economics of a senior offer. And because the appointment only succeeds once the candidate is actually in the seat, the guide closes on the first hundred days: the chair-CEO working relationship, the inherited executive team, and the stakeholder communication that sets the tone for the year.
How to Hire a Managing Director: one title, several genuinely different roles
The How to Hire a Managing Director guide tackles a different problem: the MD title is one of the most variable in UK business, and that variability is exactly where searches go wrong. The same three letters cover a leader running a standalone business, a divisional head inside a larger group, a country MD within an international structure, and the senior partner running a professional services firm. The candidate pools, compensation envelopes and search dynamics differ across each pattern — and boards that skip the work of defining which pattern they are recruiting for tend to watch the brief drift and the strongest candidates lose interest.
So the guide front-loads the distinction. It works through the MD-versus-CEO question directly: a CEO carries full strategic authority, whereas an MD typically carries operational and commercial authority within a defined framework, often reporting to a group CEO, parent-company executive or PE sponsor. It then sets out the five situations that genuinely warrant an MD appointment — the standalone business of meaningful scale, the subsidiary or division within a group, the founder transition, the shift from founder-led to professionally-managed structures, and regulated business contexts where operational accountability needs to sit with the operating unit.
The substance of the role is broken into its four real components — commercial leadership, operational leadership, executive-team building, and the stakeholder management that matters most in group structures where the parent-subsidiary relationship can make or break an MD's effectiveness. The candidate-pool section is equally practical, covering sitting MDs at peer firms, senior functional directors stepping up, group executives moving into direct operating roles, Big Four and consulting transitions, and industry-specialist MDs. Notably, the MD guide also covers all three engagement models — permanent, interim and fractional — reflecting the reality that smaller businesses often need senior commercial leadership two or three days a week rather than a full-time appointment.
On assessment, the guide highlights the dimension that most reliably separates a strong MD from a senior commercial executive promoted prematurely: operational depth. It is honest about the timeline too — typically twelve to eighteen weeks, slightly shorter than a CEO search because the candidate pool is broader and board engagement is usually less complex — and it names the five pitfalls that recur, starting with confusing CEO and MD scope and under-specifying the parent or shareholder relationship.
Why these guides carry weight
The value of guidance like this rests entirely on who wrote it, and both guides are written and led personally by Adrian Lawrence FCA. Every CEO and MD mandate at Exec Capital is handled by Adrian himself — there are no junior account managers running these searches — and the guides reflect the way he actually thinks about each appointment when running a live search. Exec Capital runs both as integrated work: the substantive search (market mapping, candidate identification, engagement, shortlisting) runs alongside the structural work the board needs to do, whether that is the chair-CEO relationship and onboarding plan on a CEO mandate, or the firm-pattern and reporting-line definition on an MD mandate. The firm works on a retained basis, and the engagement runs through to the candidate's first day in role rather than ending at offer acceptance.
Where a mandate needs specialist depth, Exec Capital draws on its sister practices — FD Capital for CFO and Finance Director appointments, NED Capital for non-executive search, and Accountancy Capital for qualified finance professionals below senior director level.
Read the guide, then start the conversation
Both guides are designed to be useful on their own. A board can read the relevant one, sharpen its thinking, and brief any search firm more effectively as a result — with no obligation whatsoever. For boards that want to go further, Exec Capital offers a structured initial conversation built around the specific situation rather than around selling a search: many boards use that first call simply to work through whether and when a search makes sense, or to settle the MD-versus-CEO question, before any formal mandate begins.
If you are working through CEO succession or a Managing Director appointment, start with the How to Hire a CEO guide or the How to Hire a Managing Director guide — both part of the wider Exec Capital Knowledge Centre. When you are ready to talk through your specific hire, you can speak to Adrian directly or call the team on 020 3287 9501.
