Placed the first non-family CEO into a $3B Saudi industrial group, signed within 11 weeks.

The mandate

A third-generation Saudi industrial group with five operating verticals (petrochemicals, materials, infrastructure services, hospitality and a smaller technology arm) engaged us in early 2024 to find their first non-family CEO. The seat had been held by the founder’s eldest son for fifteen years, and the family had collectively decided that the next phase required executive leadership from outside the family system.

The brief was deceptively simple. The reality was anything but.

The group operated as a holdco-with-strong-personalities. Each vertical MD had effectively reported to the chair, with limited operational integration between businesses. The new CEO needed to be senior enough to command the room, operationally credible across at least three of the five verticals, regionally fluent enough to function inside the family’s governance culture, and confident enough to take on a board where four of seven seats were held by family members.

Our approach

Our work ran across four numbered phases.

01. Calibration

Before any candidate work, we ran six calibration sessions over four weeks: three with the chair alone, two with the full board, and one with the family principals. The output was a single-page mandate brief signed by every family principal: success criteria, off-limits, compensation envelope, decision rights and the explicit statement that the new CEO would not have a family member as direct supervisor.

That last point took two of the four weeks to land. It was also the single most important pre-search decision the family made.

02. Market mapping

We mapped 147 candidates across three concentric circles: Saudi industrial executives currently inside the country, GCC industrial executives outside Saudi but with regional credibility, and international executives with credible Saudi operating experience.

The Saudi-resident layer was thinner than the family expected. The GCC-resident layer was the deepest. The international-with-Saudi-experience layer was richer than expected, including a number of executives who had run Saudi operations for European industrial majors.

03. Longlist research

From the 147 mapped candidates, we ran primary research conversations with 38 over four weeks. Twelve passed our internal calibration. Five were brought to the family.

04. Shortlist & assessment

We presented five candidates to the family with full assessment dossiers. Three were invited to a final round in Riyadh. The chair’s preferred candidate was not the family’s preferred candidate; we ran a structured arbitration session that resolved the difference inside three weeks.

The outcome

The family hired a Lebanese executive who had spent fifteen years running operations for a global building-materials group, including five years as the regional head for MENA. He was 52 years old, fluent in Arabic, French and English, and had no prior connection to the family. He signed on a four-year base contract with a deferred bonus structure tied to two-year and four-year retention milestones.

He took the seat in October 2024. As of mandate review at 18 months in, he is in seat with strong family-board alignment. The group’s consolidated EBITDA has improved by approximately 14% on a like-for-like basis, and one of the five verticals has been carved out for a strategic exit, a decision the previous (family) CEO had been considering for three years without resolution.

The team

The mandate was led by the partner heading our Group Holdings practice, supported by a research director (full-time on this mandate for ten weeks), a market analyst (full-time for six weeks) and a delivery PM (60% allocation throughout). Total partner-hours: approximately 380.

We continue to provide a quarterly retention check-in with the new CEO and the chair as part of our 24-month standing commitment.