Adding Operational Leadership to a 44-Year-Old Software Subsidiary and Unifying Commercial Execution Across a Pan-European Platform: Two Searches for a European B2B Mobility Payments Group

The Challenge

Our client is one of Europe's largest B2B platforms for on-the-road payment solutions, serving customers across more than 50 countries through one of the continent's largest energy-independent acceptance networks. Controlled for decades by its founding family, the company had recently bought back a private equity investor's minority stake to return to full family ownership, a moment that typically sharpens a business's focus on the leadership layer it needs to fund its next phase without an outside investor setting the pace.

Two distinct gaps needed solving. Some years earlier, the group had acquired majority voting rights in a decades-old transport management and freight forwarding software subsidiary with its own founder-linked leadership structure. As that subsidiary pushed further into cloud and AI-driven product development, it needed additional operational leadership capacity working alongside its existing management, someone who could carry commercial and organisational weight without disrupting a business that had built its reputation over more than four decades. Separately, at the group level, the company's commercial organisation had grown across dozens of European markets without a single owner for governance, CRM discipline, or standardised execution, a gap that tends to surface only once fragmentation shows up in forecasting and cross-market consistency rather than in any one market's numbers.

They turned to The Big Search.

Overview of the two executive searches

A European B2B mobility payments platform | Two executive hires | September 2025 → June 2026 | Post-Buyback Commercial Infrastructure Phase

Between September 2025 and June 2026, The Big Search partnered with the client to fill two leadership mandates: an additional operational leader for its logistics software subsidiary, and a VP of Commercial Strategy & Excellence to unify commercial governance across the group. The two searches ran sequentially, first stabilising leadership capacity at the subsidiary level, then building commercial infrastructure at the group level. We closed both searches.

Phase 1 - Adding Operational Leadership to a Legacy Software Subsidiary

‍September 2025 → December 2025 | Digital Transformation Phase

The subsidiary came into this search as an independent, founder-linked business inside the group, provider of a transport management platform and a warehouse management suite used by freight forwarders and logistics operators. It had entered a period of active product modernisation, expanding into cloud services and AI-driven features, and needed additional senior operational leadership to support that push alongside its existing management team.

The mandate required someone who could combine credible technology and transformation experience with the commercial instinct to support a modernising product business, while fitting into a founder-linked leadership culture built over more than 40 years rather than displacing it.

Executive Search Across German and DACH Logistics Technology Leadership

The hunting strategy targeted leaders with direct or adjacent logistics and transport technology experience who had led genuine platform or operating-model transformations, sourced across three pools: logistics and transport technology executives, broader enterprise software leaders with on-premise-to-cloud transition experience, and candidates with existing familiarity with the parent group.

Profile criteria included:

• General management or senior operating experience with a demonstrated technology or platform modernisation on the CV
• Direct or adjacent experience in logistics, transport, freight, or fleet technology
• Comfort operating inside a founder-linked business as part of an existing leadership team, not as a sole decision-maker
• Ability to support commercial momentum alongside product and platform change
• German language fluency and DACH market familiarity

We undertook an exhaustive mapping exercise across Germany and the wider DACH region, identifying 74 candidates.

Days to first shortlist delivery: 4 days from kick-off

⏱ Days to first shortlist delivery: 4 days from kick-off

Of the 74 candidates mapped, 67 were rejected, 6 sat on an active Tier 2 longlist as genuine alternates, and 1 was hired. First candidates entered the pipeline 4 days after the search opened. The funnel reflects how specific the combination of transformation credibility and logistics-sector familiarity proved to be in practice: a narrow field, converted carefully rather than quickly.

The Placed Candidate: A Transformation Leader With Two Decades Inside a Global Logistics Group

They came into the process with more than two decades in logistics technology and transformation leadership, most of it built inside a large global freight and logistics group, where they held a series of increasingly senior programme and transformation roles, including work standardising transport management systems and operating processes across dozens of European countries. In the period immediately before this search, they had been working as an independent consultant, advising logistics and mobility businesses on operating model design and technology platform selection, work that gave them a pre-formed, informed view of exactly the kind of problem the subsidiary needed solved.

Why they fit:

🏗️ Multi-country transport management standardisation experience: led programmes harmonising systems and processes across a large European logistics footprint, the exact discipline the subsidiary needed for its own platform work

🔧 Technical and commercial range in one profile: comfortable owning both the operational technology side of a transformation and the commercial execution needed to support it

🧭 Recent, direct exposure to the specific problem: spent the period immediately prior advising logistics and mobility companies on technology platform strategy

🤝 A collaborative leadership style suited to a founder-linked business: favoured structure and shared ownership over top-down control, a fit for stepping into an established leadership team rather than replacing it

Phase 2 - Unifying Commercial Execution Across the Group's European Footprint: VP Commercial Strategy & Excellence

‍March 2026 → June 2026 | Commercial Infrastructure Phase

With the subsidiary's leadership capacity addressed, the client turned to a gap at the group level. Commercial execution across its European footprint had scaled market by market without a single owner for governance, CRM discipline, or a standardised sales operating rhythm, a familiar pattern in large B2B platforms that grow country by country rather than through one centralised commercial build.

The mandate called for someone who had built commercial excellence or revenue operations infrastructure from a genuine greenfield starting point inside a large, multi-country B2B organisation, not someone who had only maintained an existing function.

Executive Search Across European B2B Commercial Excellence and RevOps Leadership

The hunting strategy targeted commercial operations and revenue operations leaders who had built governance frameworks, CRM standards, and territory models from scratch, sourced across three pools: enterprise B2B SaaS and payments companies of comparable scale, commercial excellence functions inside large corporate groups, and RevOps leaders who had built the function during rapid multi-country expansion.

Profile criteria included:

• Direct experience building, not just running, a commercial excellence or RevOps function inside a sizeable B2B organisation
• Multi-country governance experience: standardising KPI definitions, sales processes, or CRM standards across several markets simultaneously
• CRM and commercial infrastructure ownership, including integration with finance systems for pipeline visibility
• Comfort operating as a cross-functional influencer without direct line authority over the sales organisations they were setting standards for
• B2B commercial depth, ideally in payments, fintech, or another comparably complex enterprise sales environment

We undertook an exhaustive mapping exercise across Europe, identifying 110 candidates.

Days to first shortlist delivery: Same day

⏱ Days to first shortlist delivery: Same day

Of the 110 candidates mapped, 103 were rejected, 1 sat on an inactive Tier 2 longlist, 5 reached recruiter interview stage, and 1 was hired. First candidates entered the pipeline the same day the search opened. Five candidates reaching recruiter interview on a single-hire mandate gave the client genuine comparative depth, ranging from commercial excellence leaders inside large European platforms to RevOps builders who had run the "build the function from zero" exercise more than once.

The Placed Candidate: A Commercial Infrastructure Builder Who Had Done This Twice, in Two Different Industries

They came into the process having built the same kind of function, from the same kind of starting point, in two different environments. Early in their career, they built and scaled a retention and commercial infrastructure organisation inside a global remote-connectivity SaaS company, eventually owning a retention book worth hundreds of millions of euros in annual recurring revenue while reporting directly to the CEO. They then moved to a publicly listed, multi-country IT services and technology group operating through a deliberately federated structure of independently managed entities, where they were brought in to build a central commercial intelligence platform and standardise go-to-market execution without stripping local entities of their autonomy.

That second chapter was the closer parallel to the client's problem: a large, federated organisation where the centre has to earn adoption of new standards rather than impose them. Interviewers on both sides of this process repeatedly asked candidates to present their thinking for the first 100 days, a detail that shaped how the eventual hire framed their pitch: make the centre useful before making it mandatory.

Why they fit:

🏗️ Built the same kind of function twice, in different sectors: scaled a commercial retention organisation inside a global SaaS company, then built a group-wide commercial intelligence platform inside a federated, multi-country technology group, both from a genuine greenfield starting point

🌍 Direct experience standardising execution across a federated, multi-entity structure: navigated exactly the tension the client needed solved, aligning independently managed entities around shared commercial standards without removing local ownership

💰 A track record with measurable commercial impact: delivered a repricing initiative that generated tens of millions of euros in incremental net revenue in a single year in a prior role

🤝 Structural proof of influence without direct authority: operated as a function head reporting directly to a CEO in one role, and navigated a culture of local P&L owners resisting centralisation in another

Large B2B platforms rarely have one clean leadership gap. This client's two problems looked unrelated on the surface, adding operational capacity at a subsidiary and building commercial governance at the group level, but both required someone who could earn authority inside a structure they didn't control outright, rather than someone arriving with a playbook and no scar tissue for that specific tension.

The Big Search closed both mandates between September 2025 and June 2026, mapping 184 candidates across the two searches and converting each into a hire whose prior experience mirrored the client's own structural challenge closely.

If your organisation has more than one leadership gap surfacing on different timelines, treating each as its own search rather than one generic hiring exercise is usually what separates a good fit from the right one.