Meet Tighe Burke
Running a lean $2M executive search firm with just 6 people.
Hey, it’s Alex!
This week, we’re featuring Tighe Burke, the founder of Srch, a boutique executive search firm placing CEOs at high-growth internet businesses doing $5M to $50M in revenue.
We got into how he made the leap during COVID, why referrals power nearly every deal, what most recruiters get wrong — and how a conversation with a stranger totally changed his close rate.
If you’ve ever tried to build a high-trust, high-ticket business from scratch, this one’s for you.
Dive in below!
Srch Quick Stats:
📈 Revenue: $2 Million
👥 Head count: 6
⏳ Time in Business: 4.5 Years
✅ Placements per year: 15-20
💰 Average deal size: $73K
📅 Average sign-to-fulfillment period: 3 months
🌐 Target niche: $5M - $50M internet-based business
💵 Margins: ~90%
Getting started…
I run Srch — the name Grindr was taken at the time, so I pivoted to Srch. *laughs*
We recruit executives for companies — specifically CEOs for early stage businesses.
Most of the time they’re 10-70-person companies doing $5-50 million in revenue. A lot of them are founder-led, and they're looking for a new CEO or a new president to run the P&L and have total responsibility for that company.
We work with these companies to recruit their successors and we've been doing it for four and a half years.
The industries that we work in are anything from SaaS to E Commerce, B2B E-Commerce, D2C E Commerce marketplaces, and a lot of Internet based businesses.
At least, that was the core business, but over the last 18 months the industries we've expanded pretty dramatically, in education and B2B services, among others.
It started in April 2020, when COVID shut down schools. My kids were home, and working as a partner at a search firm gave me some unexpected flexibility.
With retained search, there's a handful of bigger firms out there, and they kind of all compete with each other, and their model is kind of all the same. I didn't realize at the time, but I was on a path toward becoming just another old white guy at a search firm.
All the big ones on the planet — that’s what they’re like at the top.
I specifically remember pushing my kids on the swing and thinking, I could do so much better and have so much more fun…
What if I die tomorrow?
So I had this moment where I thought: I’m doing this myself.
We had two kids and were expecting a third soon, and in the back of my head, I always wanted to, but I didn't have the balls to actually do it, but a couple months down the line, I still hadn’t done anything.
Then I had a conversation with my wife, and I was just bitching about the company I was working at, and she was just like, quit fucking bitching already…
Do something about it.
I was like, well, what do you want me to do about it? And she told me to start my own business.
Honestly, that was the conversation that just pushed me over the edge.
Life is too short to be unhappy, to not be totally fulfilled.
And so I started the business in August, and got my very first client on August 13.
The first six months…
The final catalyst to starting was having a friend who was running a business.
He got in touch, and said that he was looking for a CEO, and wanted to know if I could help. I told him that I was starting my own thing, and asked if he wanted to be my first client — and luckily, he agreed.
Even though I had a relationship with him already, I also knew in the back of my head that I absolutely had to do it well. Effectively, I was betting my entire livelihood on it.
I was leaving the comfort of a stable company with benefits. But I knew if I nailed it, he’d refer me to others — so there was a lot riding on that first gig.
For the first project, I charged him $45K.
The most I had ever earned in a year was around $200K in income, so I was getting a quarter of that in one project in just three months. Then again, I realized I might only receive that one gig for the entire year, so it was a little nerve wracking, but I just reassured myself that no matter what — more was going to come.
It may be $20,000 here, maybe $15,000 here, but I realized that if I constantly worried about what I was going to do, everything else would suffer.
There's never going to be a perfect time to start your business, right?
So, I chose to be intentionally naive about income. And beyond that, I was also thinking, if this doesn't work, I can go find another job to be a recruiter somewhere else.
Obviously, we made it through, but I was also very lucky because my wife took a second job to help cover some of our expenses. Had she not done that, then there’s no way I would have had the balls to take the leap.
On compounding credibility… (and getting a little lucky)
Full transparency, I got lucky — the first client I mentioned, happened to be Sam Parr.
Sam wasn’t quite the icon he is now, but he still had a big following and a $15M business. I knew doing a great job would go a long way.
And to be totally honest, I have an unfair advantage. I'm a white American male. There’s no doubt about it: that’s a good starting place when you're charging $75k to $100k for searches.
I also have a pretty big network just based on my life history…
I have four brothers. I went to college, so I have a lot of friends from there, plus my high school friends. Then I know a lot of my brother's high school friends.
Luckily, a lot of the people that I know came from affluent backgrounds, so even years back, I knew that might prove helpful if I started a business. Odds are, some of them were going to be running businesses, and networking would be a little easier in that way.
When you start a business, you're willing to run through a fucking wall to make it successful, right?
I put a lot of effort into prospecting people early on, staying up after midnight just to do as much homework as I could.
Beyond that, when you work for a brand like the Hustle — which was Sam's business — that buys you a level of credibility you can’t otherwise get.
When people in the startup community found out that I was working on the Hustle, they started taking my calls — they were much more open to giving it a shot.
Once you do the work well — in our case, getting a CEO hired — it kind of has this compounding effect.
And being associated with big people and big brands helps amplify your own.
What really makes a great CEO candidate…
Sourcing candidates is both an art and a science.
Take one of the projects that I'm working on right now: We need somebody who has scaled an Amazon native brand before, but also need some omnichannel experience in retail and D2C stuff.
Ideally, they've been a CEO before or held some position in a P&L.
But they also need to be a savage marketer, and have a really scrappy mindset.
Most of those things that I just described — I can find on paper if I know where to look. The science part is having really rigorous research and having very high standards.
We'll go find Amazon native brands that have scaled from $20 to $100 million in revenue over their lifetime. We’ve got a bunch of different resources to help do that, but then once you get to the mindset, that's a very personal attribute that will vary from person to person.
Really, we're trying to get as many of the people who've got the on paper qualifications as possible, because when you become a CEO, chances are you've got some pretty good soft skills.
Beyond that, so much of what the final placement comes down to is chemistry.
Ultimately, it’s our job to get people who pass the ‘smell test’ as far as hard skills and being culturally relevant, but then once they get to the hiring manager, a lot of it just comes down to who they connect with, which is out of our control.
Lessons learned…
I want to make something clear: recruiting and hiring are two different things.
I could be the greatest recruiter on the planet, but I've made some hires that have not worked out for my own team, which is more fascinating than anything.
With a CEO, usually they've got 20 or 30 years of work history you can rely upon. But me, if I'm hiring someone right out of school, naturally, it’s harder to find a sure thing.
Just like any entrepreneur, I've made some painful hires that cost me a lot of time and money, but it’s a process. You get better over time.
Otherwise in 4+ years, I think I've probably gotten 300 leads, probably 280 of which have come from word of mouth referrals. Any professional services person on the planet would salivate at that sort of ratio because what we're selling is a very high ticket item.
Really, the only problem I had was closing.
I remember, I shared a conversation with this guy — another entrepreneur — at a conference a while back, and I told him, “I get a bunch of leads, but I’m dog shit at closing them.”
At the time, I probably closed on out of every six leads I got.
So he started asking me about my sales process, and I went through it and said “Well, I just set up a call with them and I tell them how we're going to solve their problem. And sometimes they sign, sometimes they don't.”
Immediately, the guy was like, “You don't know what you're doing.”
About a week later, I hopped on the phone with him again, and he told me:
You have to build a script…
Identify the prospect’s problem,
and then really dig into how painful that problem is for them,
and help them understand the cost of not solving it.
After that, bam — you hit them with your pitch.
Tell them your price, and that if they pay it, all their problems go away.
The very next day: I closed a $100k search.
After that, I reached back out and told him I wanted him to be my coach, and he still is to this day.
All of that meaning: I didn’t have the right skill or mentality. I had no idea how to sell.
Honestly, 99% of executive recruiters across the world don't know how to sell either.
They can develop business but they don't know how to sell and they don't know how to close, and it’s a huge disadvantage.
Now, we're closing about 43% of our prospects.
On key man risk…
We would not be a good acquisition target because there's very high key man risk with this.
It’s something that I'm trying to change, but I think about growth the same way I always have, which is it always comes down to the service.
If every single founder we work with loves us, then every single client is probably going to share it with their colleagues at some point. They can be part of mastermind groups, they can be part of peer to peer networks, they can go to retreats with other entrepreneurs, they can broadcast it on whatever platform they want to.
So, as I'm thinking about growth — number one, it's continuing to provide the absolute best service possible because word of mouth is the best engine.
Secondly, it’s about using different paid media platforms where our audience lives.
Thirdly, it would be more about developing a personal brand.
A couple of people have gotten in touch with me lately to say they keep hearing my name — which means there’s potential there.
For that, the idea is to keep penetrating the same audience. I won’t ask for anything, I’ll just stick to providing some expertise.
Balancing growth while maintaining a personal touch…
The key thing here is scaling up the team with some really wonderful people.
I — personally — have moved into more of a manager role, but I still take every pitch.
I still close every deal.
That said, I have an awesome team that deserves a ton of credit for the success we're having, and I don’t see that changing if we continue to have the right people around.
Secondly, I've gotten much better at identifying which leads are going to be good and which aren’t.
A four-person jewelry company hiring a head of marketing? Not our thing, but a 20-person DTC brand doing $16M and looking for a CEO? That's right in our wheelhouse.
So, part of it is having the right people around, and another is a more clearly defined ICP, which allows us to be much more successful in our engagements.
We're always getting feedback from clients.
Every time we wrap up a search, we send a survey:
What'd you like?
What did you not like about this?
How can we do things better?
A lot of recruiters, provide one good candidate and they're like, ‘Jane’ is the one, and that’s it…
They dust their hands and leave it at that.
Those recruiters don't last very long because they didn’t notice that Jane can be a real psycho sometimes or she's just not strategic enough. It's our job to make sure that there's someone else who can be a backup candidate if it doesn’t work out.
Nothing sucks more than getting everyone excited about hiring, and then the guy shits the bed and then realizing you have to start the search from scratch.
Becoming the best boss possible…
I think I've got a lot of work to do as a manager and as a leader of people — this is all very new to me. Sometimes I can be too much of a nice guy and not enough of a hard ass — which isn’t the worst problem to have, but either way, I think that I've got a lot of work to do.
It’s one of my kind of personal goals for this year.
I've been given a lot of opportunities in my life…
I was able to go to an amazing high school, play whatever sport I wanted to. I was able to go to college, have some of that paid by my parents, and get a degree.
After that I lived in Korea and I taught English for two years…If you want to grow up real quick, move to Asia without speaking the native language and you'll figure out how to hang tough.
I think those efforts helped me mature a lot. I also went to — and am currently a board member at — a boys summer camp in northern Wisconsin, which I can't say enough good things about.
It's called Red Arrow Camp and it really helped shape me into a self-reliant individual.
When you're in the oldest senior cabin, you have to take a 10 day canoe trip through the boundary waters. You’ve gotta portage through the woods, and there are no trails, and 1 billion mosquitoes biting you at all times.
It really puts some hair on your chin. So just like a lot of these experiences, I think that shaped me into the type of a leader I am and want to be.
On the business side, I've had some not-great bosses myself, and I’ve used that to be better just by doing the opposite.
Biggest challenges…
What we have is not a recurring revenue model. It's very transactional.
There is some predictability involved, given that we’ve been doing this for long enough and we have a lot of data, but there is no set formula. So the biggest challenge I’m facing is keeping the pipeline going and making sure that there's always a long list of people that we can provide an awesome service to.
When you think about it, most 20 or 30-person companies need a CEO once every five years. So this is not something that they're going to come back for again anytime soon, especially if we’ve done our job well.
Until we find a way to diversify in a notable way, that lack of repeatability is definitely a threat to the business.
Networking while building a remote business…
I found a lot of value in meeting other entrepreneurs over the last two years at different events.
I used to go and listen to the talks. Now, I don't even listen to talks anymore. I just go hang out, have beers, and make new buddies.
What we sell is so expensive that so much of our relationships have to be organic.
It's a huge barrier to entry for any people who want to start a recruiting business.
I tried mentoring two dozen people last spring, and I could teach them everything about recruiting, but the business development part's so damn hard because it takes so long to develop these relationships. People just don't have the savings to withstand not getting any income for six months or a year.
No doubt, having a lot of pre-existing relationships has been a competitive advantage, especially early on. But apart from that, everything's been remote since day one, and it hasn’t been that hard.
Staying top of mind without playing the fame game…
When I lived in Korea, I would get on the bus and everyone was staring at their fucking phone.
It drove me nuts. I thought, this bus could crash or someone could hijack this bus and every one of these people just be sitting ducks because they have zero idea what's happening. And that was in 2011.
I think for my own personal brand, I know we have an audience, and I need to make sure that people keep hearing my name, but I don’t want it to be super transactional.
I'm doing some other things to get myself out there. I’m speaking at the Holdco Conference in Utah in a couple weeks. I’m pretty stoked about that.
I've also written a 70,000 word book. Here’s me being shameless…laughs
It's a fable about an entrepreneur who runs and builds a great business, but just hates his life. His marriage is falling apart and he finds this person who can help turn it around and everything gets better as a result.
I've never really sought the limelight. It's not something I'm comfortable in.
I've always thought that if I could build a $10 million business and nobody really knows a lot about me, that’s a win. With the way the internet works now, it’s easier said than done, though.
But I don't have an Instagram, I don't have Twitter, and I'm happy to keep doing that.
Why most recruiters fail…
There's a low barrier to entry to become a recruiter, because the costs are so low.
We have some software tools, and we have salaries, and that’s about it, so it’s a very profitable business. I think a lot of people hear that, and think, man, I can make so much money if companies just hire me to recruit for them.
Then, they inevitably run into a big, problematic question: why would that company hire you? You're a nobody. You don't have any expertise.
Beyond that, there’s a very high failure rate because people aren't willing to put in the work, and honestly don't have the creativity and the charisma to develop relationships and provide value.
Every entrepreneur on the planet gets unsolicited inbound from some RPO india who can “do it better than anyone”. That stuff speaks to what a lot of wannabe recruiters could learn, because that kind of outreach is brain dead and feels transactional, which is the exact opposite effect you want.
People who want to become recruiters don't understand that. They have to give to people before they can get from people.
What long term success looks like…
Honestly, the vision is just to create an awesome place to work.
A lot of people hate where they work, because they don’t have fun, or their boss sucks, or they get shitty benefits. Conversely, this business can also challenge people and inspire people and help them grow.
To me, that’s a legacy worth chasing.
So, in 30 years when this thing's all said and done, if we’ve given a couple dozen people the opportunity to find meaningful work in their lives, that’s success to me.
That’s it for this issue!
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Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry