Background: growth outrunning management
This is a consumer chain business in the Yangtze River Delta. Less than six years after it was founded, its store count had grown from single figures to close to a hundred, and annual revenue had passed RMB 500 million. The founder came from the business side and, from the very first store, ran operations and the supply chain personally. The business details were all at their fingertips.
The problems surfaced in the second half of 2023. As the store count passed eighty, the founder began to feel the strain. Days were spent visiting stores; evenings were spent approving finance, dealing with HR and liaising with suppliers, often until the small hours. Middle management worked hard but lacked a role that could take a founder-level view and coordinate operations overall. The operations director position had been vacant for nearly six months.
Internal promotion had been tried. Two regional managers were pushed into acting roles in succession, and both stepped back after two or three months. The issue was not capability but the size of the leap: running a region and running the whole system require completely different ways of thinking, coordination ability and decision-making perspective. The founder had also tried recruiting directly and interviewed more than a dozen people, but either the industry background did not fit or salary expectations were too far apart.
By the time the project began, the company's situation could be summarised as follows: the business was still growing, but organisational capability had become the bottleneck. The founder was caught up in transactional work with no time to think about strategy; middle managers worked in isolation with little cross-departmental coordination; new store openings had slowed; and the head-office support system could not keep up.
Diagnosis: not a missing person but a missing layer of organisational capability
After joining, the YUNLUE team did not start looking for people immediately. It spent a week on the Job Portrait, the starting point of the JTIF methodology: first establish what problem the role actually has to solve, rather than starting from who is available on the market.
We held two in-depth interviews with the founder and separate conversations with five core middle managers. Three key findings emerged:
First, the central tension in the role was balancing commercial instinct with system building. The founder's own business ability is very strong. Previous candidates either came from the business side but could not build systems, or had management experience but little understanding of front-line operations. The Job Portrait therefore specified a capability structure weighted 70% business execution and 30% system building.
Second, the reporting relationship needed redesigning. The founder had been used to managing regional managers directly, and inserting an operations director in between could easily create information gaps. We recommended adjusting this so that the operations director took full responsibility for day-to-day operations and the founder focused only on the monthly business review and major exceptions.
Third, candidate fit could not be judged on the CV alone. A growth-stage company moves fast, changes often and has imperfect processes. It needs someone who can find a direction amid ambiguity and is willing to roll up their sleeves, not a professional manager who follows procedures inside a mature system.
On these findings, we built a complete Job Portrait covering four dimensions: a list of core tasks, a capability and competency model, reporting relationships and decision rights, and key cultural fit points. This portrait became the anchor for the subsequent search.
What YUNLUE did: from Talent Mapping to an evidence chain
Once the project started, we followed the standard JTIF process, with the overall search cycle running to about three and a half months.
The first step was to draw the Talent Mapping. We targeted consumer chain businesses of comparable size in the Yangtze River Delta, along with selected restaurant and retail brands expanding across regions, and mapped about 80 potential candidates. The Talent Mapping was not a simple list. It was layered by three dimensions, scale fit, relevance of the role and stage of career, to identify the 20 people to approach first.
The second step was candidate assessment and two-way fit. For every candidate recommended, we attached a complete Talent Portrait report covering experience verification, analysis of strengths and gaps, cultural fit assessment, and motivation for leaving and salary expectations.
One candidate had a very impressive CV: regional general manager at a well-known chain brand, having led a team of more than 200 people. But in-depth interviews revealed that the company's systems were so mature that he was mainly executing head-office strategy rather than building systems. Against the 30% system-building requirement in the Job Portrait, we judged the fit to be low and did not recommend him.
On average, we reviewed 10 candidates for every one recommended, and the client interviewed 6 candidates for every one hired. Across the whole search, YUNLUE's average number of meetings per appointment was 1.98. With the right direction, efficiency follows.
The third step was evidence-chain verification. For candidates reaching the final round, we conducted a complete experience verification to build the evidence chain. This was not a matter of making a few reference calls, but of cross-checking: speaking separately with supervisors, peers and subordinates, and corroborating the candidate's account of their capability from different angles.
The fourth step was tracking after joining and 90-day integration. The candidate's start date was not the end of the project. YUNLUE followed the 90-day integration period, speaking with the candidate and the hiring team at key milestones, identifying problems early and helping to resolve them.
Results and lessons: filling an executive role means adding organisational capability
The candidate formally joined on day 98 after kick-off. This was slightly shorter than YUNLUE's average search cycle of 99 days.
The first three months required the most patience. This operations director had previously been a deputy operations director at another chain business, with experience of building systems, but needed time to become familiar with this company's operational details. The founder also had to get used to no longer deciding everything personally.
At the end of the 90-day integration period, we held a joint review with both sides. The founder's feedback was: "I can finally sleep through the night, and I have time during the day to think about strategy." The operations director's feedback was: "The team's foundations are good; what's missing is method. I'm putting the processes in place step by step."
By day 180 after joining, the business success indicators were becoming visible: the average new store opening cycle was 15% shorter, store operations had become noticeably more standardised, and cross-departmental collaboration had improved. More importantly, the founder had stepped back from day-to-day operations and begun planning new business lines. This bore out YUNLUE's long-term success rate of around 70%.
Reviewing this project, there are several lessons:
First, filling key executive roles in a growth-stage company is, at heart, catching up on organisational capability. Many founders think they need an operations director, when what they really lack is a full system for translating strategy into execution. Getting the Job Portrait right before hiring is essentially a way of mapping out your own organisational logic.
Second, two-way fit matters more than one-way screening. The JTIF methodology stresses two-way fit: not the company choosing a candidate, nor the candidate choosing the company, but finding the point where both genuinely fit. Growth-stage companies have their strengths and their shortcomings. The key is to find someone who can accept these imperfections while adding value.
Third, 90-day integration and 180-day business success are two key milestones. Many search firms consider the job done once the person is in. But joining is only the beginning. The first 90 days determine whether the executive survives, and the first 180 days determine whether they deliver. Attention at these two points does more for long-term success than interviewing a few more candidates.
Filling key executive roles in a growth-stage company is never simply a matter of finding a star. It is an opportunity for organisational upgrade, an opportunity for the founder to redefine their own role, and the necessary path from a company driven by people to one driven by systems.