Tom co-founded Whitcombe Ellis in 2015 with Jess Ellis after nine years in consumer search either side of a spell in-house at a grocery multiple. The company places chief executives, commercial and digital leadership into consumer brands, retailers and the private equity that owns them.
Twelve people across London and Manchester. Tom holds the Consumer & Retail chair in the first volume of The Executive Search Ten.
They can hold two things at once: what the business needs now and what it needs in three years. Most people are good at one. The ones who only do the second are the expensive ones: everything looks visionary and nothing gets shipped.
Retail is unforgiving about this because the tills report daily. You find out fast whether the three-year story was covering for the absence of a Tuesday plan.
Consumer got hit twice: the tools changed our work and changed our candidates’ jobs at the same time. Merchandising, pricing, media buying: the layer of management that ran those by instinct is being asked to run them by model.
The leaders who survive it are the ones who stopped pretending to be the smartest analyst in the building. Their job moved up a level, and the good ones noticed.
Founder energy. Every brief wants it and no board can live with it. What they actually want is founder urgency with employee manners, and that is a rarer animal than either.
In consumer it is often code for “will the founder listen to them”, and that is a real question wrongly labelled. Ask it straight and you can solve for it.
The lazy version, hiring people who feel familiar, is how five retailers end up with the same executive team in rotation. Our industry runs a carousel and calls it a talent pool.
Somebody who has traded through a downturn with a consumer who has less money. A decade of growth CVs taught a generation to ride a wave. The current job is making Tuesday profitable, and the people who can are suddenly the most interesting names on my list.
They plan for the chief executive and ignore the commercial bench underneath, which is where the next chief executive was supposed to come from. Then they call me surprised that the bench is thin, having sold the bench to private equity two years earlier.
It is a sentiment market. A retailer has one bad Christmas and its whole leadership is unhireable for two years; a brand gets one viral year and its middle managers are fielding chief executive calls. Neither signal survives contact with due diligence.
When speed matters more than certainty. If a scale-up needs a commercial director in six weeks, a search process is the wrong tool and I say so. We are the considered option, and some moments should not be considered for four months.
Consumer boards look better than most sectors, and the shop floor always did. The missing middle is the trading floor: the buying and merchandising leadership that actually runs a retailer is still nowhere near reflecting the customer it serves.
I gave the sitting sixty-forty the company, and retail is the proof: the same executive who was a genius at a business with a warehouse advantage got called a failure at one without it. The lorries were the difference, not the leader.
A category director from a discounter for a premium brand’s top commercial job. The board worried the brand would cheapen. She ran the tightest trading floor they had ever seen and the brand got stronger, because waste was what had been cheapening it.
“What did working in a shop teach you?”
Everything, is the answer. Every consumer leader I rate started on a floor somewhere, and the ones I worry about talk about customers the way people talk about a country they have only seen from a plane.
Asked at every sitting, answered without thinking too hard.