Agenda Week Quotes Cowen Partners Executive Search
Burnout Hits CFOs as Boards Grapple With Departures
Shawn Cole, president and founding partner at executive search firm Cowen Partners, said pent-up demand from the pandemic is driving CFO changes in 2021. CFOs may have stuck around for longer than planned to get companies through the business impacts of Covid-19, he said.
“There were a lot of things that did or didn’t happen last year that caused people to stay put,” Cole said. “A CFO isn’t ethically going to leave the business during a global pandemic, so they rode out the wave. You have an entire year of people that were planning on retiring that postponed it now leaving.”
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About Shawn Cole, President & Cofounder
Shawn is a serial entrepreneur and executive leader with over 15 years’ experience founding and running successful companies. Shawn’s business career has been centered on value creation for both turnarounds and startups.
Shawn is President and Co-Founder of Cowen Partners, a national executive search firm focused on the key elements of a successful business: sales, marketing, and finance. Business clients across the country trust Cowen Partners to take their companies to the next level by finding them executive talent, such as a CEO, CFO, COO, Chief Revenue Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer. Clients are both small and large, publicly traded, pre-IPO, private, and non-profit organizations, typically $50 million to multi-billion dollar revenue Fortune 1000 companies or have assets between $1 billion and $15 billion.
An active participant in the business community and startup space, Shawn Co-Chairs The Cowen Partners Venture Fund which provides seed funding and early stage investments, focusing on market disruptors in niche markets, community businesses, and minority entrepreneurs.
Shawn attended Oregon State University’s College of Business Austin Entrepreneurship Program and participated in a first-of-its-kind experiential entrepreneurship experiment at Weatherford Hall. He was also a Founding Member and President of Oregon State University’s Students in Free Enterprise, an international non-profit organization working with university students who want to positively change their communities and learn practical knowledge to become socially responsible business leaders.
About Cowen Partners Executive Search
Cowen Partners is a leader among the nation’s best CFO executive search firms, enabling companies to harness the power of human capital to fuel their success. Cowen Partners gives our clients access to the top 1% of human capital to create opportunities that accelerate their growth and market share. With Cowen Partners, clients can grow at scale, create value, and drive results with world class talent. Our clients are both small and large, publicly traded, pre-IPO, private, and non-profit organizations.
Clients are typically $50 million to multi-billion dollar revenue Fortune 1000 companies or have assets between $500 million to $15 billion. Successful placements span the entire C-Suite and include VP and director level leadership roles.
With our proven processes and guaranteed results, we have successfully placed hundreds of candidates in industries including technology, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, financial services, and private equity.
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