How a company goes from a name we have never spoken to, to a placed executive who is still there a year later. Every step, the tool behind it, and what a good outcome looks like at each one.
A boutique retained executive search firm. Two Managing Partners, a small book of searches run properly, and a set of systems that does the work a junior researcher would otherwise do.
Steward Well Search is the firm clients meet. Turnkey Recruiting is the same business under its older internal name, and that name still appears in folder paths and system labels. Same thing, two names.
Externally, Steward Well stands on its own as an independent search firm. That is how it is introduced, how the site reads, and how the documents are written.
| Who | Title | Carries |
|---|---|---|
| Ricky West | Managing Partner | Operations, lead generation, marketing, systems, finance. Fronts the outreach and books the first conversation. |
| Tim Vida Jr. | Managing Partner | The client-facing craft. Qualification calls, sourcing, candidate management, closing. Personally carries eight to twelve retained searches a year. |
| Daniel Belt | Director of Operations | Launching Steward Well and running its operations and growth, so Ricky and Tim spend their hours on live conversations instead of plumbing. |
Tim is a contracted partner. He never touches the systems directly - he works from what they produce. Both partners carry the same title on purpose, so neither reads as the junior one.
Two different populations, and the most common mistake in this business is blurring them. The client is a company with a seat it cannot fill. The candidate is the executive we place into it.
Not "the company." A named person with the problem and the authority to solve it: a CHRO or VP of HR, a President or COO, or any P&L owner who has a seat they cannot fill and a board asking about it.
| Practice | Seats we place | Why we win it |
|---|---|---|
| Finance & Accounting | CFO, VP Finance, Controller, FP&A leadership | Ricky's lane. A finance operator turned recruiter reads as credible to a CHRO in a way a career recruiter does not. |
| Industrial, Manufacturing, Mining & Minerals | CEO, COO, CCO, plant and operations leadership | Tim's lane, with rare earths and critical minerals leading the pitch. |
| SaaS & Technology | Executive team seats | Tech leadership benches are turning over faster than companies can refill them. |
Specialty vehicles - work trucks, fire trucks, delivery vans. Tim's father's firm operates there and we do not market into it. If it comes up organically, talk to Tim before you go anywhere with it.
This is the single most important concept to understand before you talk to anyone. It changes what we do, how hard we work a search, and whether the client actually gets a result.
In a contingency search we only earn if the client hires someone we introduced, and usually two or three other firms are chasing the same seat. The rational move for any firm in that position is speed: send whoever is already on the market, fast, and hope one sticks. Nobody spends three weeks mapping a market they might not get paid for.
In a retained search the client has committed. That buys the thing that actually produces a good hire - time to find the executive who is doing the job well somewhere else and is not looking. That person does not answer job ads. They answer a discreet, well-researched approach, and only if they are not being shopped to five companies at once.
The commitment also changes the client's behaviour, which matters just as much. Retained clients take the intake session seriously, interview our shortlist promptly, and make decisions. Contingency clients often do not, because it costs them nothing to go quiet.
Never lead with the payment structure. Lead with the difference in what they receive: a mapped market and access to people who are not looking, versus whoever happens to be available this month. The engagement model is the consequence of that choice, not the pitch.
Two more terms that come up in every conversation. The guarantee: if the person we place leaves within the guarantee window, we redo the search. It covers a bad hire, not a changed plan, so layoffs, restructures and eliminated roles are excluded. And off-limits: once we place someone, we do not go back and re-recruit them. Ever. It is the reason a client can trust us with their org chart.
Five phases. Everything else in this document is a zoom into one of them.
Six steps from a stranger to a signed agreement. For each one: what happens, what we use, and what a good outcome looks like.
Something happens that creates an executive gap: a CFO departs, a company raises a round, a plant expands, an executive job appears on a board. A watcher runs quietly in the background and picks these up all day, every day, from public news and public job listings.
Before anyone writes anything, we work out whether this is really ours: right size, right sector, a seat that plausibly exists, and a named human who owns the problem. This step is assisted - the system reads the signal, judges whether it fits, names the likely buyer, and rates how strong the trigger is.
Two different motions here, and they are never mixed. A strong signal gets a single sharp one-to-one email from Ricky, reviewed and confirmed by a human before it goes. Everything else goes into a gentler sequence spread over about a month, which is there to stay present rather than to convert on the spot.
The strong-signal note leads with something genuinely useful and specific to their situation - a compensation benchmark for the seat they just lost, a first-ninety-days plan, a backfill playbook - built for them and hosted at its own link. We offer that, not our services.
Replies arrive constantly and most of them are noise: out of office, auto-responses, polite declines. A sorter reads each one and separates genuine interest, a direct meeting request, or a real question from everything else. Only those three ever interrupt a human, and when one does, it posts a single card in the team channel tagging Ricky and Tim.
Ricky opens it and Tim joins to qualify. This is not a pitch call, it is a diagnosis. What is the seat, why is it open, what happened to the last person, who does it report to, what does the board expect, when do they need someone in the chair, and what have they already tried.
The engagement letter sets out the scope, the process, the guarantee, exclusivity, and how the fee works. It is generated on-brand from the system rather than written from scratch, so every client sees the same standard of document. It goes out for signature, and the first invoice is raised alongside it.
Nine steps from a signed agreement to an executive who is still in the seat a year later. This is the part clients actually judge us on.
A deep session with the hiring executive to build the profile we will actually search against: the must-haves, the nice-to-haves, the genuine deal-breakers, the companies we should be fishing in, and the companies that are off-limits. Most failed searches fail here, because nobody agreed what "great" meant.
Building the picture of who exists in this market and where they sit today. Not the ten easy names, the actual map. This is where a retained engagement pays for itself, because it is the step contingency work cannot afford.
Discreet, personal, one at a time. These are executives doing a job well who were not planning to move, so the approach has to be worth their time and absolutely confidential. On LinkedIn this is always typed and sent by a human from Ricky's own account.
The real call. Career arc, the actual scope they carried, outcomes we can verify, why they would move, what they need to be paid, and any flags. Each candidate is written up honestly and scored against the profile from step 7, with every gap named out loud rather than smoothed over.
Around week two we put two or three early profiles in front of the client, not to submit them, but to confirm we are aimed correctly. It is a cheap course correction and it saves the search when the written profile and what they actually want have drifted apart.
Three to five candidates, by day 21, each presented on a proper candidate card: their story, their scope, what they have actually delivered, and the honest flags. Discreet by design - the card respects the confidentiality the candidate was promised. Tim approves every card before a client sees it.
We run the process rather than handing it over: scheduling, keeping candidates warm between rounds, and collecting honest feedback in both directions. Executive candidates go cold quickly when a process drags, and they rarely tell you before they are gone.
We sit between the two sides on compensation, handle the counteroffer risk before it appears, and coach the candidate through resigning. Most placements that fall apart fall apart here, and almost always because something was left unsaid earlier.
The placement is recorded, the guarantee clock starts, and we stay in contact through onboarding - checking in with both sides at thirty, sixty and ninety days. The placed executive is off-limits to us permanently.
None of these are interesting on their own. What matters is the job each one holds down so a person does not have to.
| Tool | Used in | The job it does |
|---|---|---|
| Signal watcher | Step 1 | Notices, all day, when a company loses or needs an executive. Its job is that we never miss a trigger because nobody was reading the news that morning. |
| Outreach engine | Steps 2 and 3 | Researches each signal, judges the fit, names the buyer, and drafts the note. Its job is to make personalised outreach possible at a volume one person could never sustain. |
| Approval dashboard | Step 3 | Where every strong-signal note is confirmed or killed before it goes. Its job is quality control on the messages that matter most. |
| Instantly | Step 3 | Sends and tracks the gentler sequence. Its job is presence over time without anyone remembering to follow up. |
| Steps 3 and 9 | The relationship channel, on both the client and candidate side. Always typed by a human from Ricky's account. Its job is credibility, which no automation can carry. | |
| Reply sorter | Step 4 | Reads every inbound reply and pushes only the real ones to the team channel. Its job is that a genuinely interested prospect gets a human the same day. |
| Slack, #recruiting | Steps 4 onward | Where anything needing a person lands. Its job is to be the one place worth watching. |
| The website | Steps 1 to 3 | Carries a search readiness diagnostic and a compensation benchmark tool, both free and ungated. Their job is to give a prospect a reason to raise their hand before they are ready to talk. |
| LinkedIn Recruiter and Apollo | Steps 8 and 9 | Finding and reaching executives who are not looking. Their job is market coverage. |
| The ATS | Steps 5 to 15 | The record of every search, candidate, conversation, document and invoice. Its job is to be the one place that knows the truth, so nothing depends on someone's memory or inbox. |
| Document generator | Steps 6, 12, 14 | Produces engagement letters, candidate cards and invoices on brand, from the record. Its job is that everything a client touches looks like a firm. |
| Stripe and Adobe Sign | Steps 6 and 14 | Signature and payment. Their job is to make the commercial side feel effortless and professional. |
Every tool sits on the boring, repeatable part of a step. None of them sit on the judgement. That split is deliberate and it is what lets two partners run a book of searches that would normally need a team of researchers.
It does four jobs. All four are the kind of work you would hand to a sharp assistant, and none of them involve a decision.
One more thing that matters more than it sounds: clients and candidates never hear about any of this. They are buying partner-level judgement and discretion. We talk about what we did and what we found, never about the machinery behind it. It costs nothing to leave out and it changes how the firm reads.
The delivery side is fully built and proven on a live search. The demand side is built and waiting on four practical things, all of which are yours.
The ATS is running with real searches, candidates, documents and invoices in it, and one completed placement behind it.
Signal watching, research, drafting, the approval dashboard and the tailored resources are all live.
Eight pages live, including the free search readiness diagnostic and the compensation benchmark tool.
The Instantly account needs paying. Until it is, nothing sends and no reply can be sorted. This one blocks everything else.
The sequence needs its own warmed inboxes on the Steward Well domain, and warmup takes about three weeks. Start the clock early.
Nobody has decided whose calendar an interested reply should land on. Right now there is nowhere to send them.
The scheduled jobs are written but have never been switched on, so the watcher and the sorter only run when someone runs them.
Around 2,300 finance and private equity contacts are loaded but sit behind sequences written for the old brand. They need rewriting and re-verifying first.
| # | Do | Which opens up |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Restore the Instantly billing and confirm sending works again. | Everything downstream. Nothing moves until this clears. |
| 2 | Set up sending inboxes on the Steward Well domain and start the warmup clock. | The sequence. Three weeks is the long pole, so start it before the copy is perfect. |
| 3 | Settle the booking link with Ricky and Tim. Whose calendar, how long, what it is called. | The conversion step, which currently dead-ends. |
| 4 | Rewrite the sequence copy for this brand, then re-verify the purchased contacts. | Releases the held list without burning the domain. |
| 5 | Switch the scheduled jobs on. | Turns a set of tools into something that runs without anyone remembering to start it. |
| 6 | Decide with Ricky what happens to the old turnkeyrecruiting.org site. | Tidies the last public loose end. |
Six habits that hold the whole thing together. They are not procedure, they are the character of the firm.
Discretion is the product. Executives talk to us because it stays between us. Candidate information lives in one place, never gets forwarded around, and never lands in a general CRM. A candidate card is written so it can be read by a client without exposing anything the candidate did not agree to share.
We are a firm, not a funnel. Everything a client sees - the letter, the card, the invoice, the email - should read as though it came from an established search practice. That is why documents are generated rather than improvised.
Price belongs in a conversation. We do not put fees, percentages or retainers in outreach or on the website. Pricing lands well when it is scoped to a specific search and badly when it arrives cold in an email.
Work starts when the agreement does. It is tempting to get going on a search that feels certain. Every firm that does this ends up doing free work for someone who changed their mind. The system holds this line for us, which means nobody has to be the one saying no.
LinkedIn stays human. Ricky's profile carries every one of our brands and there is no recovering it if it is lost. Notes get drafted with help and sent by hand. That is permanent, and it is not up for revisiting.
Say what we did, not how. Clients hear about the market we mapped and the people we found. They do not hear about tools, systems or automation. Same for our own name - Steward Well stands on its own.
Ask which side of the line something falls on. Gathering, drafting, sorting and formatting can be systemised freely. Deciding who to approach, what to commit to, who advances, and what a client is told stays with a person. Nearly every question about how to do something here answers itself once you place it on one side or the other.
Prepared for Daniel Belt, 7 September 2026. Internal to Turnkey Services and Steward Well Search. The status in module 09 is current as of this date and will move quickly once work begins.