When there is no one owning operations, the CEO ends up managing execution themselves. Processes that worked at one stage start breaking at the next. Departments operate in silos. Costs creep. And the growth plan that sounded clear in the boardroom stalls somewhere between strategy and reality. Whether the company needs a COO to run the day-to-day, a VP of Operations to build the systems that scale, or a Director to bring discipline to a function that has outgrown its structure, that gap gets more expensive the longer it stays open.
Talent Executives conducts retained executive searches for operations leadership across the United States. Our clients range from high-growth companies adding structure for the first time to established enterprises navigating transformation. What they share is a clear-eyed view of how much the right operations leader changes the trajectory of a business.
We place senior operations executives at the Director level and above. Some of the roles we fill include:
Operations leadership spans an unusually wide range of functional expertise. A COO for a SaaS company looks very different from a COO for a manufacturer or a multi-site healthcare provider. The skills, experience, and operating instincts required are context-specific in ways that generic recruiting approaches cannot navigate well.
Our process starts with deeply understanding your business before we begin any search activity. We need to know how your company makes money, where the operational friction points are, what you are trying to build in the next three to five years, and what leadership style will work in your culture. That context shapes everything we do in the search.
We start by learning your business from the inside out, including your organizational structure, operational pain points, growth plans, and the specific outcomes you expect from this hire in the first 90 days and beyond.
We build a targeted map of operations executives across relevant industries, company types, and geographies. This is active research, not a database pull, and it is designed to surface leaders who match your specific context.
We engage high-performing candidates directly. Top operations executives are typically embedded in demanding roles and not actively looking. We know how to find them and how to start a conversation that is worth their time.
We evaluate each candidate for operational depth, strategic capability, leadership track record, and fit with your organization's stage and culture. A COO who built operational infrastructure at a 150-person services firm and one who managed a multi-plant manufacturing network with 2,000 employees are both operations leaders, but they are not interchangeable. We assess for the specific profile your business actually requires.
For VP-level and above searches, we incorporate Hogan leadership assessments as a standard part of our process. Hogan measures how a leader operates under normal conditions, how their style shifts under pressure and adversity, and the core motivators that shape how they build and lead teams. For a COO, who is often managing through significant organizational stress, understanding how a candidate behaves when things are hard is as important as understanding how they perform when things are going well.
We present a curated shortlist with written assessments that explain our thinking on each candidate. You know exactly why they are on the list before you ever sit across from them.
We support offer structuring and compensation benchmarking and stay involved through the onboarding period to support a strong transition.
Our clients choose us because they understand that an operations search is not the place for a transactional approach. The wrong COO does not just slow things down. They can unwind progress that took years to build. We work with companies across the country that have made that calculation and chosen to do this right.
Talent Executives conducts retained executive searches across the United States. We are headquartered in Frisco, Texas, and have deep roots in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, but our clients and the executives we place are not defined by any single region.
We work regularly with companies in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, across the Southeast in Atlanta, Miami, and Nashville, throughout the Midwest in Chicago, and across the Mountain West and West Coast in Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. In Texas, we serve clients in Dallas, Frisco, Plano, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, and East Texas. Wherever you are building your leadership team, we have the network and the reach to run a search that surfaces the strongest available candidates in the market.
Our operations executive search work spans a broad range of industries:
Working with the Talent Executives team has been a fantastic experience. They bring a thoughtful, hands-on approach and truly feel like an extension of our team. Their ability to connect us with the right talent has made a meaningful impact on our organization.
Most succession plans look solid on paper until a critical leader leaves. The Bench Index is a structured, eight-minute assessment that shows you exactly where your bench is strong, where you are exposed, and what to do about it.
We recruit for Director through C-suite operations positions. The most common searches are COO, VP of Operations, and Operations Director, though we also conduct specialized searches for supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution leadership.
We start every search by understanding the specific operational context of your business. An effective COO for a high-growth SaaS company and an effective COO for a multi-site manufacturer require very different profiles. Our research and assessment processes are designed around the specifics of your environment, not a generic benchmark.
This distinction matters enormously, particularly for companies in a growth phase or undergoing transformation. In our assessment process, we ask candidates to walk us through the operational infrastructure they have actually built from scratch versus what they inherited and optimized. We look at the before and after of their tenures, the decisions they made under resource constraints, and how they have handled scaling through complexity. The resume tells you what happened on their watch. Our assessment process tells you what they actually drove.
Yes. Operations leadership is one of the most requested searches in PE-backed environments, and for good reason. The COO in a PE-backed company is often the person responsible for translating the value creation plan into operational reality: reducing costs, improving margins, building reporting infrastructure, and preparing the business for its next phase. We recruit operations executives who understand that environment and have delivered in it.
Yes. For VP-level and above searches, we incorporate Hogan leadership assessments as a standard part of our process. For an operations leader, the Hogan data is especially useful because it measures how a candidate performs under pressure and stress, which is precisely the condition a COO is most often operating in. It also reveals the core motivators that drive how they build teams, enforce accountability, and respond when things go wrong. Operations leaders who present confidently in interviews do not always lead that way when a plant is down, a supply chain is failing, or a board is demanding answers. Hogan gives you a clearer picture of who that person actually is before they are in the seat.
If the seat is open while we run your search, we can arrange interim coverage so the business keeps moving.
If you are working through a COO transition, building out your operations function, or preparing your organization to scale, we would welcome a conversation. Reach out to Talent Executives to learn more about how our retained search process works and whether we are the right partner for your search.
