Placed a Chief Strategy Officer into a sovereign-adjacent Saudi investment platform building portfolio-level coherence across direct, indirect and co-investment mandates, in 10 weeks.

The mandate

A sovereign-adjacent Saudi investment platform engaged us in 2024 to recruit a Chief Strategy Officer. The platform operated across three distinct investment programmes: direct private investments, indirect fund commitments and selective co-investments. It required senior strategy leadership to drive portfolio-level coherence across the three, particularly as the institution moved into its second institutional cycle.

The CSO mandate sat above the heads of each programme but reported directly to the platform CEO. The brief required a candidate with prior strategy leadership inside an institutional investor, demonstrated experience integrating direct and indirect investment programmes, and the institutional fluency to operate inside a sovereign-adjacent governance environment with multi-stakeholder decision rights.

JOH Partners ran the search on an exclusive retained basis, with two of the three founding partners spending direct calibration time on the brief. The candidate set was narrow at C-suite level; the work concentrated on diligence, persuasion and stakeholder alignment.

Our approach

The mandate ran across four phases.

01. Calibration

Two weeks. Joint calibration with the platform CEO, Chief Investment Officer and Chair of the Strategy Committee. Output: a single-page mandate brief defining decision rights and the CSO's authority across the three programmes.

02. Market mapping

Two weeks. The map ran across institutional-investor strategy leaders globally, with primary weight on candidates with combined direct and indirect investment experience. The Saudi-resident layer was thinner than expected; the GCC-resident layer carried most of the qualified candidates.

03. Longlist research

Three weeks. Primary research weighted toward governance-environment fluency, not just strategy track record. Five of the qualified candidates were currently inside sovereign or sovereign-adjacent institutions; the strategy filter further compressed the pool.

04. Shortlist and assessment

Three weeks. Four candidates presented with full assessment dossiers. Final-round selection sequenced by the platform's investment committee diary; offer signed at week ten.

The outcome

The Chief Strategy Officer took the seat in 2024 and remains in seat at twelve months. The new strategy function has produced the platform's first integrated portfolio strategy paper, presented to the Investment Committee at the end of the first year. Co-investment activity has increased measurably, supported by clearer portfolio-level theses across the three programmes.

The team

The mandate was led by the partner heading our Investments and Private Equity practice, supported by a research director (full-time across ten weeks) and a delivery PM (full-time throughout). Total partner hours: approximately 280. Quarterly retention check-ins continue as part of our 24-month standing commitment.

We needed strategy leadership that could sit above three programmes without diluting any of them. JOH ran the work like the institutional question it was. Every conversation was already calibrated by the time it reached our committee.