Most agencies hire a chair when someone suggests it.
An investor. A mentor. A non-exec who knows someone. A few "who do you know?" conversations lead to someone who sounds impressive and credible.
Beware. Chairpeople are usually excellent salespeople. They've had long careers building credibility and knowing how to present themselves. They should all sound like they can do the job with their eyes closed. The ones who aren't right will sound exactly like the ones who are.
What a chair actually does
Not what the job description says. What the good ones actually do.
They ask the questions the board is too close to ask. The ones that sound obvious but never get said out loud. Is this really the right strategy? Are we being honest about this client relationship? Is the CEO the right person to take us where we say we want to go?
They open doors. The right chair for an independent agency is someone who has been in the rooms you want to be in. Whose name on your letterhead signals something to the market. Whose network is genuinely additive, not overlapping with what you already have.
They protect the founder from the founder. In PE-backed businesses especially, the chair is often the person who tells the CEO what no one else will. That takes a specific kind of relationship, trust, honesty, and the confidence to say hard things without an agenda.
And in a sale process, they're critical. Translating between founder and finance. A chair who has navigated acquisitions, PE relationships and earn-outs from the inside is worth a significant multiple of their fee.
What most agencies get wrong
They hire for profile instead of fit.
A famous name. An impressive CV. Someone who looks right in a press release. These things aren't useless. But they're not the point.
Just because someone did a nine-figure exit twenty years ago doesn't mean they're in the right headspace to do that with you today. Motivation matters as much as track record.
The chair you need is the one who fits your specific situation right now. The stage of the business. The dynamic between founders. The growth ambitions. The gaps in the leadership team. A chair who was brilliant at taking a business through PE consolidation may be completely wrong for a founder-led independent that needs to grow organically for the next five years.
How to approach the process
Start with weighted criteria.
Get your senior leadership team and any investors or board members together. Answer these questions: What does this business need to become in the next three years? What does the current leadership team have in abundance? What's genuinely missing? What kind of experience would change the trajectory most?
Take those points, build a criteria list, ask each member to rate each criterion out of ten, and let the weighting do its work. That should produce a profile. And that profile, not a list of familiar names, should drive the search.
Then go wide. The right chair is rarely the first person anyone thinks of. They're sometimes in an adjacent industry, sometimes in a different geography, and often not actively looking for a board role. They need to be approached.
And be honest with candidates about what the role actually involves. A chair who joins based on an accurate picture of the business is worth five times one who joined based on an optimistic one.
The question that matters most
Not "have they done this before?" But: do they understand this business, and are they motivated to help us get there, through the hard parts ahead?
If the answer to both is yes, you're close.
UNKNOWN has placed chairs and non-executive directors into some of the most ambitious creative businesses in the world. If you're thinking about your first chair or your next one, start with us.
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