Twenty-five years. A book that comes back.

Brian has spent twenty-five years placing the people who sell, deliver and account for financial technology, and for the data and AI companies that sell to the same buyers. Across his career: 475 placements at 123 companies.

He learned the market from its infrastructure up: three years advising on options and derivatives at a wirehouse, then a founding member of a London search firm's US practice as trading went electronic, then fourteen years as Senior Vice President at one of New York's largest search firms, where the capital-markets, private-markets and technology clients included the two largest engagements of the career. Most of the relationships that make up Bennett Search Group's book were formed there.

In 2012 an education-technology company, newly acquired by a media group and rebuilding its sales organization under a new name, became the first client outside financial services. Eighteen hires later it had been bought back by its founders. In 2015 a programmatic-advertising platform followed, and stayed for a decade: two Chief Revenue Officers and a national sales team, through an acquisition and a rebrand. Different industries, the same problem at the same stage: a technical product, an owner with a plan, and a first commercial team that had to prove the category before it could scale it. Seeing that team built in one industry sharpened the read on who could build it in the next. That is why the practice now spans data and AI, computer vision and advertising technology alongside the financial markets it grew up in.

In 2019 a client's CEO asked Brian to come inside a venture-backed AI company and build its Americas organization after its Series A. Bennett Search Group was founded the same month, with the CEO's agreement, as the platform for the rest of the book. The relationship ran the length of the build: search partner before it, inside for the go-to-market build, and the company's search firm after, through its largest round and its acquisition. He came out of it with the conviction that search is best done by the person who took the brief, and by one who has sat on the hiring side of the table.

Most of our searches sit inside an investment thesis: the seat exists because the plan needs it filled by a date. What follows is what we build for. Since 2019, two in three Bennett Search Group clients have come back, and they account for four in five dollars we have billed since 2021. Several have hired us at three or four successive companies, and sponsors have brought us into more than one portfolio company. That is the relationship we are working toward with every owner: the firm a partner calls for the next seat.