In her search for a new team of leaders to helm and scale her 14-year-old jewellery business, the Singaporean founder gains five non-intuitive insights that would help anyone on their own high-stakes search
In my previous articles from this feature series for Gen.T, I talked about why I chose to put my company Choo Yilin on hiatus and when I realised it also needed new leadership to scale. Once all of this became clear, I made plans for the search.
Just like so many events that had occurred during my entrepreneurial journey, there was no precedent I could draw on.
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I’ve put together a list of five tips that helped me to navigate what I consider to be the most significant, high-stakes search of my life.
You may not be looking for new owners to your company, but chances are you will be embarking on your own personal high-stakes search. Perhaps you’re fundraising or looking to change industries while being your family’s primary caregiver.
Or maybe you’re debating which new city to relocate your family to, and need to reconcile multiple considerations like your children’s schools, career prospects and other never-ending lists of requirements.
Your high-stakes search is uniquely yours, but I’ve found that the five tips below can shape how we think about our journeys. So I hope they will be helpful to you as well in some way.
Tip 1: Define your non-negotiables
The most important first step I needed to take when I embarked on my search for a new leadership team was to define what I was looking for. More often than not, we have a sense of what we want, but we’re not always conscious of it.
I found that in order for the search to be effective, especially if I was going to be engaging my networks to assist, I had to make my company’s needs explicit.
For some, the creation of this list is a short, fast and immutable process. But that’s rare.
For most, articulating our needs is usually a long, slow and mutable process. So if you’re sitting in front of your laptop, with your brain doing pretzels, you’re not alone.
For me, I found it helpful to speak with trusted associates—fellow entrepreneurs, investors and executive coaches who would have valuable insights and networks. Through their supportive but sharp questioning, the list that I was building of what would serve Choo Yilin best started to evolve.
This helped me realise that the conventional route of hiring a professional CEO through headhunters wouldn’t be suitable for us. What we need is the infrastructure and global networks that would allow Choo Yilin to navigate the inevitable growing pains of going global.
In an ideal situation, Choo Yilin would be partially acquired by an institutional buyer who understands and respects the nuances of building a luxury brand globally and digitally. The buyer would believe in our story, DNA and value. After all, Choo Yilin needs stewards who can grow the company but also preserve our distinctive identity.