Charlatans, Inc. - Associate Kingfish Group Employee Review

It's called Kingfish for a reason - they fish for executives. Your days, like mine, will likely revolve around mass emailing executives of interest, getting them on the phone for a screening conversation, transcribing call notes, editing calendar invites, etc. Since executive search work is highly unaccretive, working here felt like being a hamster trapped in a hamster wheel, constantly chasing down the next executive (8am to 9pm or later). It's a lot of work for a business that, I believe, is fundamentally running in place. The proof is in the pudding - the firm has been in existence for close to two decades now and has been unable to meaningfully scale during this time. I would caution against buying into the standard pitch, which to paraphrase, goes something like: "We're a growing lower middle market private equity firm," "We're a thought-partner and co-investor alongside other top performing private equity firms" or "We're a startup/We've changed a lot over the past few years." While the firm has some money to invest, it struck me as delusional - or outright fraudulent - to call this a private equity firm, given that the vast majority of the firm's work and operations revolve around executive search. There is a strong tendency to use obfuscating language which makes this hard to see from the outside - referring to clients as "partners," calling executive search the "platform team," etc. From what I can tell, there is a lot of believing in their own lies/marketing here, which perpetuates major business and strategic problems and causes a lot of people to leave. For whatever infinitesimal portion of the work which was investing/finance related, the entire exercise felt forced and amateurish. As far as I can tell, you will not be given the tools, training, or information necessary to succeed and therefore will likely parrot back what you've heard from the private equity client as your own "point of view." It seemed to me that a lot of the folks at Kingfish weren't informed or savvy enough to call-out the nonsense. The ones who were, tended to exit fairly quickly (LinkedIn is littered). If you ask me, odds are you will be stuck with managers and peers who don't have good exit options, are doggedly process-driven, and are willing to push the "marketing" envelope into uncomfortable territory. Overall, I believe this is a poorly performing executive search firm with no credible business strategy, limited skill development/exit options, and a serious ethics problem in describing who they are and what they do.