Charm builds and runs outbound for
+ others
+ others
On our call you said the quiet part of this business out loud: your buyer decides on timing you do not control. A COO takes the coffee in March and calls about a search in November. The meeting is never the deal. The meeting is the position, and the position goes to whoever that executive already knows, understands and trusts when the moment lands. You win that call nearly every time it comes. The bottleneck was never the pitch. It is how many of the right people know you exist.
You also told us what you have already proven. The word tracks work. The emails book meetings. You know this audience the way you know your own family, because you are one of them. What broke was never the message, it was the machine around it: the inboxes, the rotation, the LinkedIn layer, what people find when they google you, and the person who runs it all. This document is that machine, run by people who already paid for every lesson it takes to run it well, with your word tracks loaded in.
+ others
Math major, finance MBA from a top program, management consulting, then fourteen years placing CFOs and COOs for private equity and growth companies. Your audience is credential-literate and, in your own words, a little elitist about it. That is not a problem, it is the targeting model. Cold outreach written in your voice carries a why-me that no recruiter can fake, because the other people who share your resume are your clients, not your competitors.
Most engagements spend months finding what you already own: segments mapped by city, title, industry and background, word tracks tested against real replies, and whole clients won off a batch of emails. You even know which angles fire for an MBA versus an ex-consultant versus an engineer running operations. We are not starting a search for the message. We are loading a proven one into a bigger gun.
Nobody retains a search firm the day a cold email arrives. They file you away, and when the seat opens or the project lands, they call whoever is already in their head. Most agencies treat that as the weakness of outbound in this category. It is actually the strategy: a low-pressure, peer-voiced motion that builds the mental rolodex is exactly what wins timing-based deals, and it is the one motion your competitors, who all chase the live requisition, are not running.
Blow up in Scottsdale, come home to LA an A-lister. You have watched concentrated city presence outperform scattered national effort with your own calendar: meetings stack when the market feels like you are around. What the model has been missing is air support. Campaigns that land three to five weeks before you do turn a flight into a full dance card, and six cities where you already hold anchor relationships are waiting for exactly that.
Your deals are exclusive and retained in an industry that is 98 percent contingency, and your clients repeat: you told us about the client whose one project became four. A single retained engagement carries this entire engine for a long stretch, and every relationship the machine starts keeps paying for years. Very few businesses we work with have this much room between cost per meeting and value per client.
Everything that separates SEA from the firms your buyers tolerate happens in the first five minutes of hearing you talk. The photo does not carry it, the site cannot fully say it, and the buyer's default picture of a retained search founder is not you. Video is the one asset that closes that gap before the call, and right now it mostly does not exist. Section 03 makes it a deliverable, not a someday.
Reply.io, Smartlead, Clay, Phantom Buster and Apollo, stitched together by hand while your chief of staff holds the rest of the company at 5am. The teammate who learned it beside you just took an offer he had earned. And the seven-to-two slide in reply rates was never a message problem. It is an infrastructure problem, which is the part of this trade nobody sees and the part we consider our actual product.
Your model works precisely because you sell around HR to the COO, CFO and CEO, the people who can approve a premium and an exclusive. That rules out lazy spray. C-suite inboxes are the hardest deliverability target in outbound, the copy has to sound like a peer or it dies on arrival, and one careless campaign can cost a city. The bar is high. Good. The bar is the moat.
Your call, and we think the right one for this audience. That puts all the weight on email and LinkedIn working as one choreographed motion: the email opens the door, the LinkedIn note puts a face on it a day later. Send the same AI-smelling message on both and your buyer, who receives that exact combination weekly, files you with the recruiters they hate. The choreography is the craft, and it is most of what section 03 describes.
Every meeting lands on the calendar that also runs the searches, hosts the dinners and holds the client relationships. So the machine has to deliver meetings batched to cities, qualified before they reach you, with the table-of-five format turning one evening into five relationships. Set up and show up is the design constraint, and this entire proposal is built around it.
Your buyer cannot be rushed into needing a search. They can be guaranteed to think of you first when they do. Everything below is that one sentence, industrialized.
First, you. Your LinkedIn seat and one for your team, run human-paced and proxied, in copy written to sound like you on a good day. The email opens the door at scale, and inside a day or two the LinkedIn note puts your face on it. Two channels, one motion, never the same words twice.
Second, the signals. Executive seats opening, sponsors closing platforms, leadership teams turning over, and your own travel schedule, which is the best signal in this entire build. Each campaign pulls its data fresh when we build it. And alongside the signal plays, straight-volume campaigns run your proven word tracks against the wider universe, because sometimes the winning campaign is the right offer said plainly to everyone in the segment.
Third, the rooms. The table of five, conference floors walked with a scored map instead of a lanyard and luck, and a research page with you on film, so the executive who wants to check you out before replying finds the version of you that closes. The digital machine exists to feed the rooms, because the rooms are where SEA wins.
Then all of it runs at full volume from day one, in two-week campaign cycles that sharpen with every round.
Two LinkedIn seats live in week one, one of them yours. Founder-led copy with the automation smell stripped out, choreographed behind the email layer so every touch feels like a person, because it is one.
Executives verified to the actual city, never a metro-area tag. Open CFO and COO seats, fresh platform deals, leadership turnover, all resolved to the named decision-maker with a verified direct contact.
Campaigns aimed at each city three to five weeks before you land. Coffees stack, the table of five fills, and conference trips get the full intelligence treatment: every speaker, sponsor, vendor and attendee scored before you fly.
Eight a month, each a permutation of city, title, segment and angle. When a search lands, slots flip from business development to candidate sourcing and back, on an allocation you set monthly.
Every line here is a starting position, not a decision. The kickoff session exists so you can move these numbers before anything is built.
Each row is a different person, a different moment, and a different version of the ask. The same engine, the same infrastructure and the same two-week cycles serve all four.
This table is the heart of the engagement, not the whole of it. The signal plays run next to straight-volume campaigns carrying your proven word tracks to the wider universe of executives in your four industries, and the two race each other. Nothing about SEA needs repositioning. Your offer needs to be put in front of the right people, in the right cities, at the right moments, and that is a campaign-count problem.
It is also the honest frame for the tier question in section 08. Eight campaigns a month runs the Pitbull rotation and the strongest signal play properly. Sixteen runs all four motions in parallel and puts the dinners and conference intelligence on rails. Either way, by month three you own a ranked answer to which motion fills your calendar best, and that answer outlives this contract.
Two LinkedIn seats, run human-paced and proxied, one of them yours. The choreography is the one you asked for on the call: the email lands first, and within a day or two a short LinkedIn note follows from you, putting a face to the email they already have. Never the same message on both channels, because your buyer sees that lazy pairing weekly and has learned exactly what it means about the sender's effort.
And because this audience checks before it replies, the click has somewhere to land: the research page. One recorded hour with you becomes a short film and a one-page site that answers the question every prospect is quietly asking, which is whether you are like the recruiters they already ignore. You are not. Right now they have no fast way to find that out. We make it a ninety-second job.
Your travel schedule, because a campaign that lands three to five weeks before you land turns presence into meetings, and it is the one signal your competitors cannot copy. Open executive seats, departures, postings and interim tags that mark a live need with a meter running on it. Sponsor deal flow, platform closings and add-ons that put a date on the next leadership question. Leadership turnover, the new CEO who rebuilds a team in the first two quarters.
How the data actually works, said plainly. A campaign pulls its records at the moment we build it: city lists verified to the actual city rather than a metro-area tag, seats and deals resolved to the named decision-maker with a verified direct contact. The campaign runs, we score it, and the plays that earn it get promoted to a standing pull so they keep feeding themselves. That promotion is a decision we make together off the numbers, usually around week six.
The phone is out because you called it: for CFOs and COOs being cold-called by a search firm, the channel itself is the wrong message. The written channels carry the motion, and the meetings the machine books become the calls, on calendars, where you are at your best.
And HR is never the target, in any campaign, in any city. Your entire model is built on reaching the executive who can approve a premium, an exclusive and a different way of doing this, before the process gets handed to the department most likely to file you alphabetically with everyone else. The one exception you named, the HR leader with a legal or operations background who actually gets it, is a kickoff decision you make deliberately, never a list-building accident.
This is our opening thinking: some of these plays will ship as written, some will change at kickoff once your word tracks load in, and some may not go to market at all. The data and your instincts decide. Real copy, not placeholder. Every email play is three touches: first fresh, second threaded, third a fresh angle. One ask, held word for word across all three. Values in {{braces}} populate from the signal that selected the person. These are the signal plays; straight-volume campaigns on your proven word tracks run alongside them out of the same campaign count.
The play the whole engagement is shaped around. Three to five weeks before you land in a city, a campaign goes to the CFOs and COOs who are actually based there, in your voice, offering the one thing this audience rarely gets: a peer passing through who wants nothing from them this quarter. The trip creates real, honest urgency with a date on it, the ask is small, and every meeting it books feeds the network that feeds everything else. When the machine proves a city, the next trip gets planned around the machine instead of the other way round.
The one moment in your market where the need is live and the urgency is real: an open CFO or COO seat. A departure announcement, an executive posting, an interim tag on LinkedIn. The buyer is the CEO, the board or the sponsor, the clock is already running, and almost every competitor reaching them right now is a contingency shop sending resumes. A retained peer voice, arriving in that window with a genuinely different model, is the sharpest contrast this document can draw.
SEA's origin story, run as a campaign. A sponsor closes a platform or announces an add-on, and somewhere in the first hundred days the leadership question gets asked: is the team we inherited the team the thesis needs? You have been answering that exact question since a private equity firm founded your practice on it in 2012. The sponsor is also the single best client shape in your book, because one relationship covers a whole portfolio of future seats, and this play is how those relationships start.
The community you asked us to structure, started at the size where it actually works: one table, five seats, one city, timed to your trip. Finance and operations leaders from non-competing companies, no vendors, no agenda past the conversation. You told us people would come, and that what has been missing is the person who organizes it, confirms it and makes it happen while you show up and host. That person is now us. This runs from your profile, in your voice, and it is written fresh every time, because an invitation that smells merged is not an invitation.
The question you asked near the end of the call, answered: yes, the same gun points at delivery. When a search signs, campaign slots flip from business development to sourcing. You hand us the spec the way you calibrate it, the brand manager in luxury beauty, New York, big-brand experience, MBA, and we build the universe and run the approach in SEA's voice. Your site says it plainly: the best operators are not looking and would move for the right opportunity. Reaching people who are not looking is, precisely, our entire trade.
You have been assembling a version of this by hand, tool by tool, learning each one alongside your team. The licenses are the cheap part. The person who runs them well is the expensive part. Both are included.
Plus the person who runs them. You have already paid real tuition on solving this with hires, and the lesson was not that the people were wrong. It is that this is a full trade, not a task.
Every tool above sits on our licenses and is run by our team. At the Engine tier you pay $4,000 a month and the stack behind it lists at more than that on its own, before anybody's time.
The ninety-minute working session: cities sequenced against your travel plans, the four industries and word tracks loaded, the BD-versus-search allocation set. Suppression loaded. Both LinkedIn seats connected and the first notes go out from your profile. Cold domains ordered and warming starts in parallel.
City-verified executive lists for the first two road cities, seat and deal pulls resolved to named decision-makers. First target lists back to you for review before anything sends. And the one recorded hour: we script it, film it and cut it into the research page every campaign will link to.
All sequences written against your word tracks and background cuts, scored line by line, reviewed with you. Low-volume soft launch on the new domains to prove deliverability before anything scales.
Cold plays at full volume, replies routing to you and your team, the first Pitbull city window locked to a real trip. First two-week cycle scored and the next four campaigns built from what it showed. Weekly strategy call through month one, every other week after.
Needed direct contact with decision-makers across thousands of US school districts, a universe no data vendor sells, with the actual humans buried behind institutional entities. And alongside the sales motion, they needed specialists recruited.
Mapped every administrator from public data, resolved each to a verified direct contact, and ran parallel campaigns off that dataset, including recruiting campaigns through the identical machine. That is your candidate engine, already proven: the same build, the same pipes, pointed at both revenue and delivery.
A saturated mid-market category, a sales team stretched thin, and a need for targeting that cut through noise rather than adding volume to it.
Intent-based outbound triggered on firms hiring specific roles and engaging with specific content, multi-touch across email and LinkedIn. Your seat-with-a-meter play is that exact mechanic: an open executive role as the trigger, reached through the same two channels, choreographed the same way.
Owner-operators who ignore generic email, in a category that traditionally closes on a handshake, where the deal happens when the buyer is ready and not before. A different industry with your exact dynamic.
Signal data identified operators at the moment of expansion, with sends timed to when those buyers were actually reachable. The finding that transfers directly to SEA: in categories that close on relationship, when a message arrives moves reply rates more than what the subject line says. Your three-to-five-weeks-before-the-trip cadence is built on it.
Real credibility in the space but no systematic outbound, and no clarity on which of many possible angles would produce pipeline. Your question wears different clothes: cities, seats, sponsors or dinners first?
40+ campaign types A/B tested weekly across email, LinkedIn and inbound-led targeting, doubling down only on what converted. This is the direct answer to the thing you cannot decide from a standing start: which of the four motions should SEA lead with, in which cities? You do not have to pick in advance. Campaign velocity finds out with data instead of an opinion.
Four campaigns every two weeks. Eight a month. The Pitbull rotation and your strongest signal play, run properly.
Eight campaigns every two weeks. Sixteen a month. All four motions in parallel, and the rooms handled for you.
Engine tier: $4,000 × 3 plus the $500 setup. $20,000 at Engine ×2. No tool costs, no per-seat charges on top.
Your average retained fee is the number we need on Tuesday. Against a single search the quarter gets short quickly, and a client who comes back for the second and third seat changes the math entirely.
Set at kickoff, reported weekly.
If the engagement has not returned its cost by the end of month three, we run month four entirely at our cost, full effort, nothing held back, and we will connect you with people we have run that month for so you can hear how it went. And at month three you choose: keep going, or take the campaign matrix, the copy, the signal pulls and the research page and run it yourself. They are yours either way.
Claim your guarantee →The ninety-minute working session. We sequence the cities against your actual travel plans, load the four industries and word tracks, set the BD-versus-search allocation and write the meeting definition. It ends with a target list on screen, not with a follow-up email.
Your LinkedIn seat goes live in the first few days, in your voice, sounding nothing like automation. In parallel, domains warm, the city and signal pulls get built, the research page gets filmed, and suppression loads. You review every target list before a single message sends.
Cold plays live around week four at full volume, timed to your first city window. Every two weeks a fresh cycle of campaigns ships, built from what the last cycle showed. Weekly call through month one, every other week after. At month three, you choose what happens next.
Pick a kickoff date. Week one is the parameter session, the cities sequenced against your travel, your word tracks loaded, and your own profile live in your voice. None of that waits on infrastructure to warm, and the next Pitbull city is three to five weeks out from the day we start.
Pick your kickoff date →