Vice President, Off-Highway Industrial · North America

This engagement began where another firm's process had ended, without result. The client, a European-parented off-highway OEM with substantial North American operations, had engaged a search firm that lacked the sector depth and transatlantic network required to identify and engage the calibre of leadership talent this mandate demanded. By the time Hamilton Finch was instructed, the Board had lost confidence in the process and the timeline had compressed significantly.

The Finch+ mandate clarity phase was essential in resetting the engagement. We worked directly with the European parent Board and North American leadership to redefine the mandate with precision: what had gone wrong previously, what the true leadership requirement was, what success looked like in the specific context of this business, and what cultural and commercial characteristics would determine whether the appointment held. The previous firm had treated this as a standard VP search. It was not. It was a cross-border, performance-driven leadership change in a highly specialised OEM environment where confidentiality was critical and the talent pool was exceptionally narrow.

Off-highway industrial markets represent one of the most constrained senior leadership talent pools globally. The number of executives with genuine OEM-level commercial authority, combined with operational credibility across North American off-highway markets and the ability to operate under European parent governance, is remarkably small. This was a search that required direct, confidential engagement through relationships that take decades to build, not database activity or speculative outreach.

Every candidate was assessed against the specific demands of the mandate: deep commercial understanding of off-highway OEM markets, demonstrable P&L leadership across multi-country North American operations, the credibility to represent the business at customer and Board level, and the cultural agility to operate effectively under a European parent structure. The founding partner led the engagement personally throughout, conducting the search from the UK into the North American market through Hamilton Finch's established off-highway and industrial network.

The appointed Vice President is in role. This mandate reinforced a pattern we see regularly in our work: when a generalist search firm fails to deliver in a specialist industrial environment, the issue is rarely the market. It is the depth of sector understanding and the quality of relationships brought to the engagement. In off-highway markets, there is no substitute for either.

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