Building the Executive team for Country Chef

The Country Chef Bakery Co. is a family-owned, 100% Australian FMCG business that has been baking on the Sunshine Coast since 1952, making some of the country's best-known desserts for major retailers nationally. We had worked with Country Chef since 2019, placing operational roles across supply chain and engineering for a founder-led business in a region where talent is hard to reach. Over five years we learned to tell their story to candidates who didn't yet know the brand.

When Country Chef decided to bring in a non-founder CEO to drive its next phase of growth - a significant shift for a privately owned, founder-led company, they reached out to our Executive Search team.

At the same time, it lost three other key executive stakeholders. They engaged us to run all four searches at once.

The Challenge

Moving from a founder-led operation to an external CEO changes how a business thinks. Country Chef needed leaders who could take the company on that journey, not simply run the function they were hired into. The searches ran against three major constraints:

• Location - not everyone wants to relocate to the Sunshine Coast, so we mapped areas carefully for people who could realistically make the move
• Brand perception - the name "Country Chef Bakery" reads as a small bakery to those who don't know it, when the business is far larger and more sophisticated than that
• Disruption - with several key people leaving at once, the outside view was of a business shedding talent, which makes it harder to attract and influence 

A business going through this much change can't lean on its own brand to draw the right people. Country Chef came to us to borrow the strength of ours, to tell the real story and present the disruption as an opportunity for leaders who wanted that kind of challenge.

Our Approach

We ran national searches for all four roles, drawing on the intimate understanding of the business we'd built over five years. Rather than treating them as separate mandates, we approached them as a single team build  weighing which personalities and calibre would work together, not just filling four positions.

• Two of the senior appointments came directly through our national network, people we had known for five or six years
• The finance roles came through targeted search, focused specifically on FMCG and comparable environments
• None of the four came through advertising

Where the founder-led business had once wanted talent to optimise a stable environment, it now needed resilience - leaders who understood this growth wouldn't happen overnight, that it would be tough, and that it would call for hard people decisions along the way ultimately affected what a good culture fit looked like.

The CEO search showed what influence and judgement looked like in practice. We identified two strong candidates -  one with SME experience close to what the business was used to, and another from a larger business who had delivered the outcomes Country Chef was aiming for. The board initially leaned towards the first candidate as it's what they knew, but because the shortlist was strong, the second candidate and our consultant relied on years of trust with the board to influence a bolder call than their instinct. She is still in the role today.

The Outcome

We built their executive team - the CEO, a Chief Commercial Officer who relocated from Melbourne, a CFO found on the far north side of Brisbane, and a Financial Controller months later. Three came from three different states and completely different backgrounds, brought together into one leadership team.

The calibre lifted the whole business. Hiring the four together was integral a new CEO with the old leadership team underneath rarely gets the outcomes, so building the layer at once gave each appointment the peers and rigour to succeed. All four are still in place. Visiting the site recently, the business had stabilised and moved into significant growth - the best position it had been in for some time.

Strategy sets the direction. The people brought in to deliver it are what turn a plan into growth, which is why building the team as one deliberate project mattered more than filling any single role.