Don't shop while you're hungry.

A few weeks ago, S&P Global Animal Health announced our launch. The piece described Kennedy McArthur as a firm built to be the "true specialist" the sector has long deserved. That framing matters. Animal health has spent two decades being served, on the executive search question, by generalist firms with no commercial obligation to know it well — and the consequences are visible in every board that has had to manage around a misjudged hire.

We built the firm around a thesis that is almost embarrassingly simple: most businesses recruit too late, decide too quickly, and onboard too loosely. Each of those failures is well understood in isolation. The damage comes from how they compound.

A vacancy opens before anyone is ready for it. The replacement search begins under operational pressure. Someone — often the most capable person in the room — picks up two jobs for six months, doing both sub-optimally and signalling, by their own visible burnout, that this is what reward for excellence looks like. The first credible candidate gets the role because the cost of waiting now feels higher than the cost of compromise. The onboarding plan is a calendar invite. Twelve months later the hire isn't working, the person who covered the gap has left, and the seat is open again.

In a talent context, businesses fall into this trap more often than not. Every step downstream of "we needed someone yesterday" is worse than the step that came before it. Better decisions come from thinking further ahead.

What "thinking further ahead" looks like

Rigorous pipelining

Market intelligence briefings at a cadence that fits your operating rhythm — quarterly for some, biannually for others — so the bench is mapped before the seat is open.

Honest role briefings

The most expensive sentence in executive search is "the brief evolved during the process." We push the discomfort to the front, where it is cheap.

Disciplined process

Speed matters. Speed without discipline is panic dressed up. We resist the urge to compress when the client gets nervous.

Onboarding with intent

The hire is the beginning. We work with new appointees and their boards through the first twelve to eighteen months — converting promise into measurable performance.

The commercial model is built around this. The true measure of a search isn't a placement letter — it's the longevity and impact of the hire two and three years later. Our economics reflect that. So does our preference for fewer, deeper mandates rather than a pipeline of churn.

Utopia, for us, looks like this: internal succession and external pipelines so well-maintained that vacancies almost fill themselves. We will not get there for every client on every seat. But it is the right thing to be aiming at — and we'd rather be honest about that than dress up a transaction.

BoardForge — perceived vs actual value

The same thesis sits underneath BoardForge — the platform we are launching alongside the search practice. The first cohort is intentionally narrow: board-ready veterinarians. Vets are critically under-represented in animal health boardrooms — not because the talent isn't there, but because there is a quiet disconnect between perceived value and actual value on both sides.

Many of the vets we speak to operate with what coaches call unconscious competence — they do not know how good they are. Meanwhile, those appointing aren't tapping the vein. BoardForge is the closed-loop, AI-verified credential and market we have built to change both sides of that equation.

Twenty minutes to an assessment across six governance pillars — strategy, risk, finance, people, stakeholder, personal. Evidence verified against public sources and your own uploads. A credential that follows you, refreshed annually, with weekly intros to chairs, capital, and charities. Over time the aperture will widen to other under-represented disciplines — and the data will inform how we run searches on behalf of clients.

The work to fill the seat well

None of this requires a new philosophy of executive search. It requires the patience to act on the old one — and the specialism to know what "thinking further ahead" actually means in a sector where the next leader is as likely to come from a regulator, a clinical practice, or a feed company as from a competitor's C-suite.

If you are a chair, a CEO, an investor, or a vet contemplating a first board seat — write to us. The seat will eventually open. The work to fill it well should already be underway.

— Joe Kennedy, with Stewart McArthur

Portions of this brief first appeared in S&P Global Animal Health's launch coverage of Kennedy McArthur — "New animal health executive search firm launched," 20 May 2026, analyst Joseph Harvey.