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Chief Financial Officer, Japanese Food Producer and Store/Restaurant Franchiser
A privately held Osaka based company, famous throughout Japan for their highly popular baked good product and other franchise stores and restaurants, approached CDS to assist them to secure an experienced finance professional who could strengthen the company's growing local and global operations and oversee the activities leading up to their planned IPO. Within 10 years after the company's establishment, our client's organization had grown to an organization employing 2,000 persons and with foreign subsidiaries in the U.S. and other parts of Asia. In the past few years, this once small company had experienced a swift and tremendous growth curve as newly produced products and store concepts were gaining popularity almost instantly. As a result of the company's brands expanding, the corporate organization also evolved into a complex structure with a holding company and eight group companies. To sustain the growth and security of the company's financial structure, it was imperative for our client to employ someone with a track record of success within a large multinational company who could assist them to make the difficult transition from family-owned shop to publicly traded corporation.
After learning about our client's future business strategy and consulting with the key representatives of our client's holding company, within one week CDS presented the candidate that we were confident was the best qualified technically as well as having a personality that was a good fit to the company's fast paced culture. Furthermore, capitalizing upon the experience of his previous company, we knew that this candidate could help to educate and establish a more global way of doing business within this relatively young, but traditionally run company.
Though our client was pleasantly surprised with CDS' fast results and were highly impressed with the candidate after intense interviews with the top executives of the company, they also believed it was too soon to make a decision without benchmarking against other persons. They informed us that they were going to engage the search with other recruiting firms to source other potential persons. Although respectful of our client's reasoning, we were still very confident that this person could deliver results immediately and implement a more mature and sophisticated control structures within their growing worldwide organization. Our biggest concern was the high risk of losing the candidate's interest during this waiting period. Throughout the next few months, we were in constant communications with our candidate to maintain his interest level and to also make sure that he understood exactly what was going on in the overall selection process. Ultimately, after numerous interviews with other potentials through other sources, it was confirmed by our client that our candidate was indeed the most qualified person for the CFO role and, three months after our original introduction, the candidate was successfully placed.
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