Confidential — General Contractor
A privately held general contractor delivering commercial and institutional projects across the region. After years of owner-led operations, growth had outpaced the founder's bandwidth.
Services
Psychometric Testing
Organizational Development
Custom Pricing
Confidential Search
Recruitment
Industry
Construction
Company Size
180 Employees
Timeline
Permanent Placement
How a leading general contractor secured the VP of Operations who would unlock the next phase of growth.
The challenge
The owner was running operations, business development and project oversight in parallel. The bottleneck wasn't strategy, it was bandwidth at the top.
Field execution was strong, but the leadership layer below ownership was thin. Project managers reported directly to the founder, decisions queued up, and the path to scaling past the current revenue band ran straight through one person. They needed a true second-in-command on operations, someone who could carry the weight of multi-project execution without the founder having to manage from the truck.
The approach
Confidential, executive-grade search. We protected the founder's brand, ran a deep map of operations leaders in the construction space, and only put forward candidates who could hold the room with a hands-on owner.
We began with a working session to define what the role really needed to own — not just the job description, but the decisions the founder needed off his desk. The mandate ran fully confidential. We approached operations executives inside competing GCs, sub-trades and adjacent industries, met them off-cycle, and assessed fit against the founder's working style as much as against the org chart. The longlist was tight by design. Every candidate brought to the table had the technical depth, the construction context, and the temperament to lead alongside ownership rather than around it.
The outcome
What started as a single executive search became the foundation for a real leadership team. The VP brought structure, hired beneath himself, and gave the founder the room to step back into the strategic work only he could do.
VP of Operations hired from a competing general contractor
Founder removed from day-to-day project oversight within 90 days
Project management layer rebuilt under one accountable leader
Three years in role and still in seat as a core member of the leadership team
Backed by our 24-month placement guarantee
Kernel actually took the time to understand the role before sending anyone. The VP they placed has been with us three years and the business runs better because of it.
Founder & President
General Contractor (confidential)
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