The Origin & Why
You’re probably wondering what an antique chair has to do with an executive search firm. The answer is absolutely nothing, until now. Allow me to introduce you to Sidekick Executive Search, an executive search firm built on a simple idea:
Leaders who shape a company's legacy are found by a search partner who is in it with you, gritting it out until the work is actually done.
My grandfather Hy’s antique chair (above) holds special meaning in our home. I have vivid memories of him sitting in it, a small man with empathy and ethics that filled the room. Professionally, he was a law clerk. Not the judge. Not the attorney. He was the person sitting beside them.
As featured in this 1976 article in the Hennepin Lawyer, he was the one who knew where everything was, who'd “turn the courthouse upside down” to find a missing file an hour before the clock ran out on somebody's case. As noted by Hennepin County Judge Eugene Minenko, “I’ve never known anybody more loyal to his job and conscientious of others.” Perhaps most notably, at the time he was the only clerk in the Hennepin County court system with a law degree.
People described him as incisive, one of a kind, impartial and quietly indispensable.
My grandfather’s chair has become far more than a piece of furniture handed down from one generation to the next. It represents the standard this firm has to meet to be trusted with a client’s business and a candidate’s career.
In my 16 years in talent, recruiting and executive search, I’ve come to believe that executive search is ripe for disruption. Quite literally, the business has not materially changed since Thorndike Deland, Sr. pioneered the concept in 1926. The business remains a function of two parties, clients and candidates, yet they’re not treated equally.
Nothing should ever change the warmth of a handshake, a shared meal, or looking into someone’s eyes. Those are table stakes in any relationship-based business.
It’s how the work gets done that needs a refresh, and therein lies the why behind this firm.
Most disruption in business comes by eliminating something — the middleman, the cost, the complexity, the barriers to access. We’re tackling disruption by addition.
We disrupt the search model by reintroducing a belief that should have never been lost:
Client and candidate centricity aren’t mutually exclusive.
The vision for Sidekick is to become the executive search firm relied on by clients and candidates alike because they’ve seen us prove that caring about one side was never a trade-off against the other.
Accompanying that vision are three principles that define the ethos of this firm:
We listen to what’s said — and we dig into what isn’t.
The how matters, so we prove it.
A signed offer isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of the most fragile stage of the search.
The standard I was raised on is that you stay close to the work, you tell people the truth, and you treat the person in front of you like they matter. In search, that standard applies whether someone is the client paying the fee or the candidate who didn't get the job.
That's the foundation upon which I’m building this firm.
That’s Sidekick.
