STOIX finds the C-Suite leaders who drive transformation. George builds the engine that proves we understand exactly what that takes — from the inside.
George — you asked the right questions before you'd even started. What competitors do we admire. What we wish someone would build properly. What questions you haven't asked yet. That tells us you're approaching this the right way.
Here's the honest version of what we need from you. Executive search is changing faster than most firms in our space are willing to admit. The best firms in the world are starting to look less like traditional headhunters and more like intelligence businesses — firms where data, content, and relationships compound into something no individual consultant could build alone. We want to build that at STOIX.
Your job in the first three to six months is to build the engine that makes it happen: an AI-powered marketing and revenue machine that turns the rich data we generate every day — candidate conversations, podcast intelligence, market research, client interactions — into content, insights, and BD opportunities that work while our consultants are in the room doing the only thing that can't be automated. Building trust.
When that engine works at STOIX, we have something genuinely valuable to offer other firms making the same transition. And as the whole industry learns to navigate this shift, the leaders who can drive it are becoming some of the most sought-after executives in the market. That's our core search business, sharpened by a positioning that is suddenly very timely.
Three parts. One coherent story. This document is the starting brief.
STOIX is an executive search firm. That's the business. We find the C-Suite leaders — Presidents, MDs, CFOs, CCOs — who create positive change within organisations. That purpose hasn't changed. What has changed is the moment. The leaders organisations need most right now are those who can drive the AI and digital transformation that every board is grappling with. Understanding what that actually requires — from the inside — is what makes STOIX the right firm to find them.
Executive search for transformational C-Suite leaders. Presidents, MDs, CFOs, CCOs, and the executives who sit alongside them. We find the people who create positive, lasting change within organisations — and place them where that capability is needed most.
You are building STOIX's AI marketing and revenue engine from the inside. Not as a product to sell — as the real work of transforming how STOIX operates. The engine makes the business sharper, faster, and more insight-driven. Everything else flows from that.
Because STOIX has leaned hard into this journey early, we speak to clients from a position of genuine experience — not theory. When we help a company find the leader who will drive their AI transformation, we know exactly what that leader needs to be capable of. We've been there. That credibility is not manufactured. It is earned.
"We create positive change through people." That purpose has always defined STOIX. Today it extends in two directions simultaneously: the leaders we place are the agents of change within their organisations — and the journey we're on at STOIX to transform how we work is the lived proof that we understand what we're asking them to do.
— STOIX PurposeEvery board in our market is asking the same question: who can lead us through this transition? Not someone who has read about AI transformation — someone who has navigated it, who has made the hard calls about what to automate and what to protect, who has brought a team with them through genuine uncertainty. These leaders exist. Finding them requires a firm that recognises what good looks like. STOIX does — because we are doing it.
The engine you're building doesn't just make STOIX more efficient. It makes every conversation Rory and Neil have with a client more credible. When a CEO asks "how are you thinking about AI in your own business?" the honest, detailed answer is a competitive differentiator. You are, in a real sense, building the proof of concept that underpins STOIX's positioning in the most important area of executive search right now.
Your first three to six months are focused here. STOIX generates extraordinary data every day — candidate conversations, market intelligence, client interactions, research from PitchBook, Inven.ai, and more. Almost none of it currently becomes content, leads, or revenue. That's the gap you're closing.
Every week STOIX's consultants have dozens of conversations with senior finance and technology leaders. That raw intelligence — themes, market signals, what candidates are actually asking for — should become a continuous stream of whitepapers, reports, and LinkedIn content. Not polished slowly by hand. Synthesised at speed by AI, sense-checked by humans, published with STOIX's voice.
The STOIX website should be generating leads, not just validating that we exist. That means SEO-optimised content built from our actual market intelligence, clear conversion paths for both clients and candidates, and tracking that tells us what's working. The website launch is an opportunity — use it to build something that works harder than a brochure.
Events and roundtables are among the highest-quality data sources we have — a room full of senior leaders talking candidly about their challenges. That intelligence should be captured, processed, and turned into content, follow-up, and prospect lists automatically. Events shouldn't end when the room empties. They should trigger a workflow.
How we present candidates to clients on a shortlist is a competitive differentiator we're currently underplaying. Replacing PDF attachments and email chains with a branded, trackable digital room (see Sendrylo/Rylo) that shows engagement data changes the client conversation. We know who looked at which candidate and for how long. That's BD intelligence.
Some of the best work STOIX could win isn't being actively searched for yet. Speculative candidate presentations — well-timed, highly relevant, sent to the right decision-maker at the right moment — open mandates that nobody else is pitching for. AI makes it possible to identify the right moment (a funding round, a leadership change, a market shift) and generate a compelling presentation at speed.
The STOIX podcast is an underutilised asset. Every episode generates transcripts, quotable insights, and market intelligence that can be repurposed across every channel — clips for LinkedIn, themes for whitepapers, guests as warm BD prospects. One recording session should produce a month of content across multiple formats with minimal additional effort.
The model you're building isn't about replacing what makes STOIX good. It's about amplifying it. The consultants stay in the room — building relationships, exercising judgment, winning trust. The engine handles everything that doesn't require a human in the room. Your job is to build and run that engine, with the team as the sense-checkers and challengers who keep it honest.
"What would have been a 70, 80 person firm... I don't think it'll be that. I think we'll be a 25 to 30 person firm. But with people that are super specialist — freed from administrative burden, delivering a genuinely consultative experience."
— Partner, boutique executive search firm (Nexco.ai State of AI Report, Q1 2026)You are the architect and chief orchestrator of the engine. You design the workflows, select the tools, connect the data sources, and ensure the outputs are good enough that consultants want to use them. You're not implementing technology for its own sake — you're solving specific revenue and BD problems with AI as the mechanism.
The consultants are your users, your quality-checkers, and your primary source of insight about what's actually happening in the market. The closer you work with them, the better the engine becomes.
Success looks like: a STOIX consultant finishing a candidate call and knowing that intelligence is already being processed, structured, and turned into something useful — without them having to do anything. A marketing engine that produces better content than we could write by hand. BD campaigns that open conversations nobody else is having.
This won't happen in month one. But the foundations you lay in the first 30 days will determine how quickly it compounds.
Here's what we currently use, what it does, and how it feeds into the engine you're building. This is your starting audit — understand each tool not just as a product, but as a data source and a workflow input.
AI note-taker that records every meeting, generates transcripts, surfaces highlights and action items. This is the richest raw data source you have — every candidate and client conversation, structured and searchable. The pipeline from CoRecruit transcripts to content and CRM is one of your first priorities.
Purpose-built AI notetaker for recruitment — praised for cross-conversation querying (search across all transcripts simultaneously). Evolving into a full agentic platform. Overlaps with CoRecruit — worth consolidating, but don't disrupt what's working before you have a replacement.
The definitive database for private equity, venture capital, and M&A data. For STOIX, this means knowing when portfolio companies are funded (hiring trigger), when CFOs are changing (search opportunity), and which sectors are attracting capital (talent demand signal). Rich intelligence source for speculative BD campaigns.
AI-powered company and market intelligence platform — helps identify target companies, map leadership teams, and track market movements. A valuable input for market mapping and speculative outreach. Think of it as a data feed that the engine can query when building BD campaigns and candidate presentations.
The central candidate and client database. Everything the engine produces needs to feed back into Loxo — enriched candidate profiles, updated statuses, structured intel from conversations. The quality of Loxo data is the foundation the engine builds on. An honest data audit here is one of your first tasks.
Digital deal room — replaces email chains and PDF attachments with a branded, trackable workspace per search. Clients get one link; you see who viewed which candidate and for how long. That engagement data transforms client conversations and shortlist presentations. Neil heard about this from a contact — trial it on one live search immediately.
"Superhuman for DMs." Turns the LinkedIn inbox into a structured CRM — labels, snooze, saved replies, Sales Navigator integration. Critically, it has an MCP connector for Claude/AI agents, meaning it can be integrated into automated workflows. For a firm doing heavy LinkedIn outreach, this is a significant productivity multiplier for the engine.
LinkedIn automation for outreach sequences — drip campaigns, automated connection requests, follow-up messages. The category is right; the execution is underused. A key question: is Dripify the right tool, or does the engine need something that integrates more tightly with our AI stack and Kondo?
Social media scheduling and employer brand amplification for the team. The concept — getting all STOIX consultants sharing great content consistently — is exactly right for the engine. The execution has been poor. With a proper content pipeline feeding it, Paiger could finally work. Or we replace it. Your call once the engine is running.
Current video platform — being replaced. Built for volume recruiters, not executive search. Before we move on: understand their AssistCV product (AI-powered CV formatting) and the video messaging use case — there may be elements worth replicating in whatever replaces it. Don't throw away what works.
The full Microsoft stack — Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Calendar. Teams Premium adds AI meeting summaries, intelligent recaps, and analytics. The AI features are underexplored and could add a layer of conversation intelligence sitting alongside CoRecruit and Metaview. Worth auditing what's already available before buying more.
Financial management and expense capture. Both work well. Understanding the financial architecture is useful context for how STOIX operates and bills — particularly relevant when you're building speculative BD tools that need to understand deal structure and fee models.
You're joining at the right moment. The Nexco.ai Q1 2026 State of AI in Executive Search report — based on interviews with 30+ search firms — paints a clear picture: almost everyone is experimenting, almost nobody has integrated. That gap is the opportunity STOIX is positioning itself to exploit, and to help others close.
The Nexco report found that firms with higher AI maturity share three characteristics: a dedicated person who owns AI strategy (that's you), willingness to experiment and accept that not every initiative delivers ROI, and process thinking — asking "how should our workflow work?" before "which tool should we buy?"
The firms at maturity 4+ are asking a different question entirely: not how to do what they already do faster, but what new things become possible with AI that weren't possible before. That's the question you should be living in.
Every organisation navigating this AI transition needs someone like you — a leader who can build the capability, bring the team with them, and deliver commercial outcomes from it. That talent is genuinely scarce. The organisations that are figuring this out are trying to hire it.
STOIX's positioning in this space is compelling: we're not just a firm that talks about AI transformation — we're a firm that's doing it, who therefore understands exactly what to look for when our clients need to hire for it.
You asked which competitors we admire for brand and marketing — not the biggest names, the ones doing it well. Here's the honest answer, plus what the lesson is for STOIX specifically.
Finance & ops recruitment for start-ups, scale-ups, and creative industries. CFOs, FDs, controllers, FP&A. UK and US. Structured as a group (Harmonic Finance, Operations, Talent) with a cross-sell ecosystem. The only finance recruitment firm to be B Corp certified — and they lead with it unapologetically.
Tone: Warm, principled, community-first. "Placed with purpose." Sounds like a firm run by people who genuinely care — not corporate-cold, not aggressively salesy. Their annual US CFO Survey is a lead generation engine and credibility signal simultaneously.
The lesson for STOIX: Harmonic built authority through content and community before they needed it commercially. Their research reports attract the exact clients and candidates they want to work with. The marketing engine you're building should do the same — insight-led content that pulls the right people towards STOIX, not outbound campaigns pushing at everyone.
Pure-play CFO and senior finance search for high-growth tech startups. Founded 2019. They do one thing only and they're confident about it. VC relationships include Atomico, Hedosophia, Albion VC. Their "Venture Voices" content series and "The CFO Edit" newsletter maintain year-round relationships with their entire addressable market.
Brand: Bold, high-contrast — neon lime on dark charcoal. Looks like a tech startup, not a recruiter. Candidate portal with login. Every touchpoint reinforces the same positioning.
The lesson for STOIX: Zanda demonstrates what specialisation does to brand clarity. When you're known for one thing, every piece of content you produce compounds. The marketing engine you're building at STOIX should have a similarly clear through-line — what is the singular insight that STOIX is the best-positioned firm in the market to produce?
Also study Nexco.ai closely — they're building the AI consultancy model for executive search and publishing the best available intelligence on where the industry is heading. Charlotte Gandell (CEO) and Gareth Cokell (CTO) are worth knowing. Whether STOIX's consultancy play eventually competes with or complements what they're building, understanding their model in detail is essential.
— nexco.ai · charlotte@nexco.aiEverything worth reading, watching, and following. Prioritised by relevance to what you're walking into — not an exhaustive list, but a considered one.
You asked what question we wished you'd asked. This is the answer: "What are the biggest challenges to making this vision a reality?" These aren't obstacles we're hiding. They're the actual work — and knowing them before you start means you can plan for them.
The engine you're building will generate a lot. The risk is generating noise rather than signal — AI-produced content that is technically correct but tonally flat, obvious, or indistinguishable from every other firm's LinkedIn output. The quality bar for STOIX's content needs to be high enough that people actually want to read it, not just scroll past it. Your role is architect and editor — designing workflows that produce genuinely insightful content at speed, with human judgment as the filter. This is harder than it sounds.
The engine is only as good as the intelligence flowing into it. That intelligence comes from the consultants — from their conversations, their observations, their instincts about what's happening in the market. The challenge is making it effortless for them to contribute that intelligence without adding to their workload. CoRecruit and Metaview help enormously. But there will be moments where you need a consultant to notice something worth capturing, or to flag a market signal that isn't in any transcript. Building that instinct into the team's workflow is a cultural change as much as a technical one.
STOIX's reputation is built on doing executive search properly — with judgment, discretion, and genuine expertise. Every piece of content, every candidate presentation, every speculative BD email that the engine produces carries the STOIX brand. The volume advantage AI gives us is only valuable if we don't sacrifice the quality signal that distinguishes us from generalist recruiters. Every workflow needs a human sense-check built in. The answer to "is this good enough?" should always be: good enough to have written it by hand.
The consultancy offering — helping other search firms make the same AI transition — is a compelling proposition. But it requires credibility that can only come from having done it first. The temptation will be to start having those conversations early, before the STOIX engine is genuinely proven. Resist it. A half-built internal engine is not a product. The consultancy becomes valuable when we can point to specific, measurable outcomes at STOIX — not when we have a slide deck about what we're planning to build.
There are dozens of things the engine could do. The Nexco use cases alone contain seven distinct workflows. PitchBook and Inven.ai open up market intelligence applications that could consume months of development time. The discipline is picking the two or three highest-impact priorities and executing them well before adding more. The firms making the most progress in the Nexco report were not those with the most tools — they were those with the clearest sense of which problems they were solving and for whom. Build a prioritised roadmap and defend it.
The STOIX website launch is an opportunity that comes around rarely — a clean moment to establish how the firm wants to be seen. The AI marketing engine and the website need to be designed together, not sequentially. If the engine is producing whitepapers, the website needs somewhere to put them. If the website is generating leads, the engine needs to be nurturing them. Getting Rory and Neil aligned on the website's role in the BD flywheel — before it launches — will save significant rework later.
Not a rigid plan — a framework. Each phase builds directly on the last. The goal isn't to have built the engine by day 90. It's to have the right foundations in place and the first outputs live, so the compounding can begin.
The measure of success at 90 days is simple: has STOIX started showing up differently in the market? Are clients and candidates encountering STOIX content that makes them think we know something they don't? If the answer is yes — even once — the engine is working. Everything else is iteration.
— Rory McDermott & Neil French