How to Hire a Chief Data Officer
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerHire a Chief Data Officer who can both build the trustworthy data foundation — governance, quality, security — and drive value from data through analytics, insight, and data-enabled products. Define whether the priority is governance and foundations or value and insight, and hire a leader […]
Second-Time CEO: What’s Different
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerA second-time CEO brings the invaluable experience of having done the job before — knowing what the role demands, what mistakes to avoid, and how to lead from day one. The challenges are different: resisting the assumption that what worked before will work again, adapting […]
How to Hire a Beauty Founder’s Successor
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerHiring a successor for a beauty founder means finding a leader who can build on what the founder created without erasing it — someone with the commercial and leadership capability to take the brand forward, genuine respect for its identity and the founder’s vision, and […]
Travel Retail Beauty Leadership: Hiring for the Channel
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerTravel retail beauty leadership is about winning in the distinctive world of airport and travel shopping — mastering the relationships with travel retailers and operators, the unique traveller customer, and the specific commercial and merchandising dynamics of the channel. Leaders need genuine travel-retail experience alongside […]
Family Business Leadership & Succession
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerLeadership and succession in a family business are uniquely complex because they blend family relationships, ownership, and management — three overlapping systems that do not always align. Succeeding means being clear about these roles, making leadership and succession decisions on merit and the business’s needs, […]
The First 100 Days for a New Leadership Team
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerA new leadership team’s first 100 days should focus on building alignment and trust, agreeing priorities and how the team will work, and establishing early momentum — before pursuing sweeping change. Teams that invest early in becoming a genuine team, rather than a group of […]
Leading a Scale-Up: What Changes as a Business Grows
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerLeading a scale-up means shifting from doing to building — from hands-on founder-led execution to building the teams, structure, and systems a larger business needs, while protecting the speed and culture that made the business special. It demands leaders who can add discipline and scale […]
How to Hire a Chief Information Officer
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerHire a CIO who can run and modernise the technology the business depends on internally, connect technology decisions to business outcomes, and manage growing security and resilience risks — not just keep the systems running. Define whether the priority is running core systems, digital transformation, […]
Executive Title Levels: VP, SVP, EVP and the C-Suite
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerExecutive titles generally ascend from Vice President (VP) to Senior Vice President (SVP) to Executive Vice President (EVP), with C-suite titles (CxO) typically at the top, leading whole functions on the executive team. But the levels are not standardised — what a title means depends […]
What Is a Position Specification?
By Annabel Norman, Managing Partner · Norman Consultants The short answerA position specification (or ‘spec’) is the detailed document that defines an executive role for a search — the business context, the mandate and challenges, the responsibilities, and the profile and experience sought. More than a job description, it aligns everyone on exactly what the […]
