Moving from Corporate to Startup Leadership
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerMoving from corporate to startup leadership means trading structure, resources, and scale for ambiguity, speed, and doing more with less. The leaders who succeed embrace a hands-on, adaptable, build-it-yourself mindset and let go of reliance on the systems and teams a big company provides. Self-awareness […]
What Is a Search Committee?
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerA search committee is a group formed to lead the hiring of a senior role — commonly a CEO, executive director, or board appointment at a nonprofit, institution, or organisation. It brings together the stakeholders who should have a voice, defines the role, oversees the […]
Hiring Externally vs Promoting from Within
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerPromote from within when you have a ready internal candidate whose capability and potential genuinely fit the role, to reward and retain talent and preserve knowledge and culture; hire externally when the role needs experience, skills, or fresh perspective the business lacks internally. The best […]
How to Build a High-Performing Leadership Team
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerHigh-performing leadership teams share a few things: the right people with complementary strengths, genuine alignment on goals and priorities, trust and honest debate, clear ownership and accountability, and a shared commitment to the whole business over individual functions. Building one takes deliberate effort from the […]
Signs Your Business Has Outgrown Its Leadership
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerA business may have outgrown its leadership when the same problems keep recurring, when decisions bottleneck at the top, when the business is operating beyond the team’s prior experience, or when growth stalls without clear external cause. These are signals to strengthen or evolve the […]
Beauty Retail Leadership: Hiring for the Retail Channel
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerBeauty retail leadership is about winning where beauty is sold — mastering the specialty and department-store retail relationships, the merchandising and in-store experience, and the growing overlap with digital and direct channels. Leaders need deep retail relationships and execution alongside brand and commercial strength, because […]
Prestige vs Mass Beauty Leadership: What’s Different
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerPrestige beauty leadership centres on brand desirability, experience, and premium positioning, often through selective distribution; mass beauty leadership centres on scale, value, broad distribution, and winning at retail. The instincts and models differ enough that strong leaders in one do not automatically succeed in the […]
How to Hire a Fragrance Brand Executive
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerHiring fragrance leadership means finding people who understand the category’s distinctive blend of creativity, craft, and commercial reality — the role of scent creation and the perfumer relationship, the storytelling and emotion that sell fragrance, and the commercial and retail dynamics of the category. The […]
Executive Bonus Structures Explained
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerAn executive bonus is variable pay tied to performance, usually paid annually against defined targets — financial, strategic, and often personal or team objectives. How a bonus is structured signals what the business wants the leader to prioritise, so designing it well, around the right […]
What Is Executive Severance?
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerExecutive severance is the compensation and terms a senior leader receives on leaving a business, particularly if their employment is ended by the company. Agreed in advance as part of the appointment, it provides security to the executive and clarity to the business, and typically […]
