Perspectives

After buying back a controlling stake in his business from private equity investors, Rhone Co-Founder and CEO Nate Checketts set out to build the executive leadership team that would guide the company's next chapter of growth. Rhone partnered with KPA's Dana Levine to assemble a high-performing ELT, which included a Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and other key executives. Nate sat down with Dana to discuss the process as Rhone’s talent needs evolved.

Growth-stage businesses are often driven by high-performing individual contributors who accomplish incredible feats. Yet at some point, founders need to bring in experienced executive leaders and functional experts to help mature and scale the business for long-term, sustainable growth. The success of this milestone hinges on timing, trust, and alignment, blending the company's DNA and culture with outside expertise, and balancing respect for what has already been built with ambition for what's next. For founders, the process is often as emotional as it is strategic.

Yet with the right partner, building an executive leadership team can become one of the most clarifying and rewarding phases of a founder's journey — one that strengthens the business and amplifies the founder’s mission at every level it touches.

Recognizing When Growth Demands a New Kind of Leader

Every successful founder reaches an inflection point when they realize that the business's needs have evolved to require different competencies, leadership, and enterprise expertise. Rapid growth creates talent needs that become impossible to ignore.

When this occurs, it's time to sit down and thoughtfully identify what is most needed in the business, in terms of experience and capabilities as well as personality and culture add. The evolving role of the founder is also a critical consideration. A well-designed executive leadership team, or ELT, provides structural scaffolding that amplifies the founder's vision and enables the founder to focus on their strengths as the business continues to scale.

Founder perspective: “As our business got more complex, we started building out individual contributors who were really good experts at their thing. Looking back, I think that's the biggest shift I made — from good individual contributors who could just do the work, to finding great leaders who knew how to attract and develop the best talent.

For us, we wanted to be a brand-led organization. I needed a CMO who was going to be protective of building the brand while also highly focused on growing the business, without losing our core identity. Dana helped us find a leader who knew how to bring in the right talent to do both brand and growth marketing really well, while tying them together so they build off of each other.”

The Power of the First Executive Hire

The first executive leadership hire should have an immediate and tangible impact. When this hire is managed carefully and intentionally, the leader acclimates quickly, delivers results, and strengthens the culture. They inject a new level of capability into the organization, creating a halo effect that elevates the existing team's visibility and sharpens their output.

For founders, this typically raises even more expansive questions: not just “who do we need right now,” but “what does this team need to look like, and who is the right partner to help us build it?” It's a milestone event that unlocks new thinking around the business's future potential.

Founder perspective: “When you hire a really great executive, everyone in and around their function steps up. It makes the entire organization better. Hiring our CMO gave me the courage to take the next step and ask: Where else should we be doing that? Where else should we consider how we uplift the organization? Am I spending my time on the highest and best use?”

Recruiting a High-Performing Team

The process from this point forward must be carefully considered. As further needs are identified, the focus evolves from finding a leader to building a team with diverse and complementary experience and leadership capabilities, critical ingredients for any high-performing ELT.

It's imperative to define the non-negotiable quality that must run through every hire, regardless of background or function. This indelible shared value is the “red thread” that connects each executive hire with the brand's mission. Treating it as a requirement within every search unites high-performing teams and differentiates them from those that fracture under pressure.

One useful exercise to help inform this conversation is asking: “Who is our customer, and what do they need from the people leading this company?” That question shifts the conversation away from titles and org charts and toward something more fundamental: how to protect the brand and build a leadership team that authentically represents it.

Founder perspective: “At Rhone, we screen for culture before skillset. If they're not a culture fit, they don't even enter the conversation, and if they are, then we say, ‘Okay, let's make sure they're really good at the job.’”

How to Leverage an Executive Search Partner

As talent needs expand beyond the founder’s network, an executive search partner can provide an essential bridge to the relationships and market intelligence needed to access, attract, and thoroughly reference the right leaders.

Building a leadership team at the pace and quality high-growth consumer brands require means operating at a level of ambiguity that a traditional search brief can't fully capture. Founders should invest time to evaluate search partners and select one that demonstrates values alignment and a passion for the brand, as this partner will serve as the brand's ambassador and storyteller in the executive talent community.

A good executive search partner will:

• Immerse themselves in the brand — its culture, mission, vision, and stakeholders — developing a 360° understanding of the business and the type of person who will thrive in it today, help drive it forward, and build trust with the founder.
• Help develop the search brief from the ground up, balancing delicate cultural nuances with ambitious growth aspirations and investor priorities, when applicable.
• Map expectations to the current talent market, from practical considerations like titling and compensation to strategic questions about the target talent pool, including whether to consider candidates from adjacent industries.

Whether to use one or multiple firms for different leadership needs is a situation-specific decision, but there are inherent benefits to selecting one trusted partner with deep institutional knowledge to build out the entire ELT.

Founder perspective: “As the team grows, Dana knows what we care about, our ethos, the players she's put on the team — the dynamics, the challenges, the opportunities. She makes sure there's the personality match and considers the intangibles you can't verify just from experience or roles.

My advice to founders: build a relationship with a great recruiter — someone you trust who has your back, isn't just chasing the next fee, and is willing to do the work to make your company as strong as it can be.”

Key Takeaways for Founders

• Know the signal that it's time to bring in outside leadership. Whether it’s investor expectations, new market complexity, the founder’s own bandwidth, or other factors outpacing what the current team was built to handle, the business now needs capabilities beyond what got it here.
• Your first executive hire sets the tone for every hire after it. Done well, it doesn't just fill a gap, it creates a halo effect that raises the bar and sharpens output across the whole organization.
• Define your "red thread" before you hire. Identify the one non-negotiable quality that must run through every executive, regardless of function or background, that unifies the team and connects it to the brand’s core mission.
• A search partner's value is in understanding the business as well as an insider does. Look for a partner who takes the time to immerse in your brand, mission, and culture, not just source resumes against a checklist.
• A great search brief is co-created, not handed off. The best partners help founders balance cultural nuance with growth ambitions and investor expectations, bringing a macro perspective and calibrating the brief to market conditions.
• Depth of relationship can outweigh breadth of specialization. One trusted partner with deep institutional knowledge of your business can be more valuable long-term than juggling multiple specialist firms.