Case Study - 01
Head of Compliance for a Series B Fintech
The Challenge
A fast-growing fintech had just closed its Series B...
and hit the point every scaling company in the space eventually reaches: regulatory risk had outpaced the team’s ability to manage it. They needed a Head of Compliance, and they needed one who could build a function from the ground up.
It was a tall order. The role demanded real regulatory depth across a heavily scrutinized industry, the judgment to build policy and process where little existed, and the temperament to do it at startup speed without slowing the business down. Candidates who knew compliance cold often came from large institutions and couldn’t operate in a lean, fast-moving environment. Candidates who thrived in startups often lacked the regulatory rigor the role required. The company had been searching for months and kept landing on one side of that gap or the other.
The Approach
Joe started where every search should start...
with a conversation. Before sourcing a single candidate, he spent time understanding the company’s stage, its regulatory exposure, its culture, and exactly what this person would need to accomplish in the first year.
From there, he built the profile of the ideal candidate and went straight to the network. Drawing on relationships built over three decades in the region, Joe identified professionals who lived in the narrow overlap the company needed: regulatory expertise paired with the instincts to build and move quickly. Most weren’t actively looking and would never have surfaced through traditional channels. Joe pitched the opportunity personally, screened each candidate against the company’s specific criteria, and narrowed the field to the few who could genuinely do the job and wanted to.
The Result
Within three weeks, Joe presented three vetted finalists...
Each one brought the regulatory depth the role demanded and the startup instincts the stage required.
The company extended an offer to their top choice, who accepted and started the following month. In the year since, that hire has stood up the company’s compliance function from scratch, built the policies and processes to support the next stage of growth, and become a trusted voice in the leadership team’s biggest decisions. A search that had stalled for months was resolved, start to finish, in under thirty days.