Gareth co-founded Caldera Partners in 2013 after running the interim division of a national recruiter. Caldera places interim executives and transformation leadership: turnarounds, integrations, carve-outs and the six chief-executive-shaped gaps a year that nobody plans for.
Fifteen people across London and Cardiff. Gareth holds the Interim & Transformation chair in the first volume of The Executive Search Ten.
In interim it’s obvious within a fortnight, which is useful. The ones who work are the ones who arrive with no interest in being liked.
The ones who fail spend the first month building relationships and the second month discovering they have no mandate. The mandate conversation has to happen before the contract is signed, and making it happen is most of what we are for.
Transformation used to mean systems; increasingly the AI is the transformation, and my people are the ones sent in to make it real inside businesses that bought the licence and got nothing.
Demand for genuine operators has never been higher, because the gap between the deck and the shop floor has never been wider.
Charisma, especially in a turnaround. A crisis does not need a speech, it needs a cash forecast someone believes. The best interim I ever placed was practically silent for two weeks. Then he moved, and everything moved.
For permanent hires, half real. For interim, irrelevant, and its irrelevance is clarifying: nobody asks whether the surgeon fits the culture. When the job is precise enough, fit evaporates. Which tells you what fit mostly is: imprecision about the job.
Somebody who has finished something. The last decade minted leaders who are brilliant at launching: programmes, pivots, initiatives. Boards have noticed the graveyard of half-finished change and started asking my favourite question: what have you actually shipped and walked away from, working?
They get it wrong by never imagining the gap. Half my business is boards ringing on a Friday because a resignation surprised them, when the actuarial reality is that every executive team loses somebody every eighteen months. You would not run a factory with no spare for the critical part.
The interim market is the most rational corner of the whole game, because it settles in weeks not years: deliver and you are booked for a decade, fail twice and you are done. Day rates are brutally honest. It is the permanent market that runs on stories.
When the problem is a decision, not a person. Companies sometimes try to hire their way past a choice the board is avoiding: close the division or fund it. No executive on earth fixes an unmade decision, and I have learned to ask for the decision before the brief.
Interim is where the change shows up first, because gatekeeping is weakest where the need is urgent. Boards that have never appointed a woman or a black executive to run anything will take one gladly on Tuesday when the factory is on fire, and then discover it works.
Urgency is a great cure for bias. I would rather it were principle, but I will take the results.
For my people, eighty per cent the company, and it is not close. An interim lands in the situation, not the brand: same operator, rescue in one business, stalemate in another, and the difference is always whether the board actually wanted the change it commissioned.
A plant manager for a group turnaround role, against a shortlist of consultants with better slides. The board said he was too narrow. He had closed a site, kept the union onside and hit the forecast, three times, which is the entire job.
They extended him twice and then made him permanent, which with interims is how applause sounds.
“What happens after you leave?”
It is the only measure of the work. If the change holds after the interim walks out, it was a transformation. If it snaps back, it was an expensive holiday from reality, and I want us judged on the difference.
Asked at every sitting, answered without thinking too hard.