Global executive search firm Boyden World Corp. has re-entered Southern California and tapped Orange County resident Peter Santora as a managing partner to oversee its operations here and in the Los Angeles market.
Purchase, N.Y.-based Boyden provides senior-executive and board-member searches, as well as consulting services. Its client companies represent various industries, from healthcare and technology to financial services and consumer goods.
Privately held Boyden doesn’t disclose revenue. The firm, founded in 1946, has grown to about 70 offices in more than 40 countries and employs 244 consultants companywide. It was ranked among the top “leading international search firms” in a recent compilation by HSZ Media LLC, a research firm in Greenwich, Conn. that specializes in the talent-management industry.
Santora, who’s spent more than 20 years in the professional services and executive search sectors, said he’ll work to grow Boyden’s business in the local market, as well as oversee the firm’s services in Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii.
Santora recently set up an office in L.A. and said the company plans to open an OC office in the next two months. He is currently splitting time between L.A. and his home office in Coto de Caza.
The executive search and consulting business largely has benefitted from the post-recession hiring recovery, as well as changing dynamics in company management that call for movements in the executive ranks.
Expected Growth
Boyden’s Southern California offices are expected to grow to about seven partners, according to Santora. They’ll function “like a boutique firm, but we have a global firm to back us up,” he said.
The expansion is a return to Southern California for Boyden, which had a presence here about three decades ago. It left the region, though partners at its San Francisco office and other divisions combined to continue serving the local area as part of the firm’s West Coast operations.
“We have served Southern California for years via our strategy of going to market by practice specialty, not strictly geography,” said Gray Hollett, Boyden’s chief marketing officer.
Baltimore-based Managing Director Tim McNamara, for instance, has served the western region for years with a focus on recruiting for seaports and transportation entities. San Francisco Managing Director Trevor Pritchard has also worked in the biotechnology sector in Southern California.
The decision to re-establish a physical presence here came on a couple of key factors, including the importance of face-to-face relationships and proximity to clients, as well as international trade opportunities, said Boyden President and Chief Executive Trina Gordon.
“Boyden has been studying the global market, including Southern California,” she said. “The firm has been transitioning to a strictly global approach to growth in terms of key regional markets. [Also, with their] with its vast ports and airports, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego are the key hubs for U.S. trade with Asia Pacific, which will be the most important global region in this century.”
The Right People
Finding the right executive talent to oversee Boyden’s operations in OC and L.A. was critical, Hollett said.
“We have seen many of our peers among the larger firms go into Southern California and then pull out of the market,” he said. “That is why it was important to us that we had the right person established and dedicated who knows the nuances of the market and the company dynamics within it.”
Santora’s career has spanned various markets in Southern California, including serving the banking, entertainment and real estate sectors in downtown L.A. and working for entertainment clients in Anaheim.
Santora most recently worked at the Irvine office of Los Angeles-based executive search firm Korn/Ferry International, where he spent 11 years as a senior client partner.
“The Southern California market is more complex than people typically understand,” Santora said. “It starts with the spread-out geography. It’s vast. It’s not a traditional city with downtown-centricity; you cannot ‘hop a cab or a bus’ through a downtown.”
Santora called OC a “critical marketplace,” with no shortage of small- to mid-sized businesses, as well as divisions of larger, global companies.
“For us, small is between $80 million to, say, $400 million in revenue, and then $500 million to $2 billion is mid-sized,” Santora said. “[Growth stages] are when executive talent search and management become really important. If a company is talking about going from $200 million to $500 million, it’s important that they have executives who can run the company at the $200 million level but can also plan and know the blueprint for running a $500 million company. That’s why we find it’s really important to have that relationship and build that. Also, as these small- to mid-revenue companies grow, they grow globally. That’s where we can provide access to markets for them in their first step out.”
Competitors
Boyden’s competitors include other international executive-search companies, such as London-based Stanton Chase International and Egon Zehnder in Switzerland.
Search firms’ clients are increasingly demanding that they find the candidate who’s the right “fit” for the company’s “culture,” according to Santora, who said the “role that search firms have to play has changed.”
Fit is a widely recognized need, perhaps an “imperative” requirement, according to Tony Uyehara, senior regional vice president at the Irvine office of Menlo Park-based Robert Half International Inc. He oversees the firm’s management resources division for Southern California.
“At the [executive] level, technical knowledge and expertise are there,” Uyehara said. “The conversations and meetings, then, are all about fit. I’ve got a client [that was] looking for an executive. They had someone who on paper could not have been better and did well over the phone. But when in front of the other C-level executives, the fit was not there. Their ability to connect with each other was missing, and so they very quickly dismissed that individual. They could not risk the fit being off. It will prevent growth from happening down the road.”
The value of corporate culture also was reflected early this year when Chicago-based Heidrick & Struggles International Inc. paid about $54 million to acquire Huntington Beach-based Senn Delaney Leadership Consulting Group LLC, which specializes in “culture-shaping” strategies.
Search-firm executives look for cultural fit, too.
Santora said he found Boyden’s long-term, relationship-based nature to be a plus.
“I’m here because of that kind of culture and mindset,” he said. “It’s really about having the right culture and right fit within Boyden.”
