What we do
Whether the leader you want exists in your market at the compensation you have — how many there are, how many are reachable, and what would have to change. Answered in three weeks, without a search commitment.
Most searches are authorized before anyone has established that the role is fillable as written. This engagement is that question, answered first. If the answer is yes, here is the search →
How this is different
Anyone can count how many people hold a title. The useful number is what survives your actual constraints: scope, sector, compensation, geography, and the ones you have not written down yet. A map of this kind commonly narrows from sixty-odd names to fewer than ten. The funnel is the product — the finding that your band reaches the 35th percentile, or that your on-site requirement costs you more people than your pay does, is what you are buying.
We do not tell you someone “seems open to a move,” because nobody has been contacted and that would be invention. Every accessibility rating rests on a visible fact: time in seat, an ownership change, a promotion that went to someone else, a relocation already made. You can audit each one, which means we can defend each one.
Two reasons, and the second is ours. Nobody in the map has been approached or knows they are in it; in a market of thirty-odd companies, a document describing someone’s career situation gets traced back, and that cost lands on whoever commissioned it. The second reason is plain self-interest — identifying the population is the expensive half of a search. We do that under a search engagement, and this fee comes off the front of it.
Figures are modelled from survey data, posted ranges under pay-transparency statutes, and proxy disclosures from comparable issuers — all of it historical and aggregated. We do not collect or pass compensation information about identified individuals between competing employers. The figures are good enough to tell you whether your band is in the right territory. They are not good enough to build a specific offer, and we say so in the document.
What you receive
Who engages us for this: Sponsors sizing a management change before they commit to it · Boards testing whether a succession plan has an external option · Companies entering a new region or sector · Anyone who has run a search that failed and wants to know whether the market or the process was the problem
A full specimen map is available on request. It is built on fictitious companies and individuals and labelled as such, so you can see the structure and depth before you commission one.
Investment
| Item | Standard |
|---|---|
| Fixed fee | $12,000 |
| Duration | Three weeks |
| Credit | Applied in full against a retained search begun within 90 days |
Fixed before work begins and unchanged by what we find. If the answer is that your role is not fillable as written, you have paid $12,000 to avoid authorizing a search that would have failed, and we would rather tell you that in week three than in month five.
It does not establish that anyone is good. Every judgment is made from the outside — scope, trajectory, tenure, the shape of a career — and none of it is assessment. It does not predict who will move; people stay for reasons no outside observer can see. It is a photograph and it ages — in a market this size it can be materially out of date within a few months. And it does not give you a list to call, by design — if that is what you need, what you need is a search, and this fee comes off the front of it.
Industries
The method does not change between sectors. What changes is who counts as a competitor, which adjacent industries actually produce transferable operators, and where the feeder organizations are — which is the part that requires knowing the industry.
Start a conversation
Twenty minutes. I will tell you honestly whether a map would tell you anything you do not already know. If it would not, I will say so rather than sell you one.
jj@celersilens.com 704-740-2099
