Supply, Demand, and Disruption: Clark Beecher on AI, Private Equity, and the Executive Talent Market
Beecher Reagan Co-Founder and Global Managing Partner Clark Beecher recently joined host Rob Adams on Talent Talks, the Hunt Scanlon Media podcast, for a conversation on the forces reshaping executive talent: tight supply, private equity's growing pull on demand, and why AI may be more of an enabler than a job killer. Here are Clark’s answers to the most pressing questions leaders in professional services are facing.
The short version
Supply is the constraint, not demand. There is a real shortage of leaders who are willing and able to step into these roles, and it is getting worse as more capital chases the same executives.
Private equity has changed who competes for talent. Partnerships and public companies now compete directly with PE-backed firms for the same people, which was not the case five years ago.
AI is an enabler, not a job killer. Clark's view runs against the loudest voices: AI is a productivity multiplier, and the leaders in demand are the ones who can use it to transform growth, cost, and enablement.
The most valuable role has shifted. The Chief Commercial Officer has replaced the CFO as the number one ask from PE-backed portfolio companies, because organic growth went from a nice-to-have to a must-have.
Click the image to listen to the full conversation.
How would you describe the current state of the executive talent market?
There is a persistent shortage of good supply, and it is not closing.
As growth rates climb, especially in private companies, and more money flows into private investment, the talent market simply is not keeping up. Part of that is people coming off campus not developing fast enough. Part of it is professionals retiring. So you are going to keep seeing a gap between demand and supply.
I want to be precise about what I mean by supply, because it gets misused. Supply is not the number of people who exist. We can target map an industry and tell you exactly how many people hold a given title. Supply is the number of people who are willing and able to go take on that task in a new role. That is a much smaller pool, and it is the one that actually matters.
How is private equity specifically reshaping demand?
It has put a whole new bidder at the table for the same leaders.
Five years ago, our clients that were partnership owned or publicly traded did not compete much with private equity. As PE pours more capital into private investment, and those firms outpace public companies and partnerships on growth, that has changed. Now everyone is competing for the same executives.
You also see it in how candidates think. More people are willing to move from big partnerships or public companies into investor-backed businesses, and the trend line is growing for leaders who want a smaller environment where they can get their hands around the whole organization and actually drive it. I make the analogy all the time: do you want to turn a bass boat or a battleship? A private equity backed company is a bass boat. A multibillion dollar partnership or public company is a battleship. More leaders want the bass boat.
AI dominates every boardroom. What are you actually seeing in AI leadership demand?
Clients want leaders who can transform the business with AI, and I am more optimistic than most about what that means for jobs.
We recently ran a leadership succession assessment with our sister business, Kinavic, for a $600M PE-backed accounting firm, interviewing the sponsors and the CEO. The consistent theme was that they need someone who can transform the business with AI.
Here is where I differ from a lot of the people pontificating on AI. I do not think it eliminates as many careers or jobs as people claim. I think it is an enabler. It is a superpower. It is Clark Kent turning into Superman. It lets productivity per professional increase significantly, and we should get an uptick in GDP because of it. For leaders, that means having a real perspective, in your industry and your business, on how to transform the organization with AI. That transformation shows up in one of three places: growth, cost, or enablement. Those are the executives in demand today, the ones with a point of view on AI who can actually execute it inside the organization they already have.
“AI is not going to eliminate as many jobs as people think. It is an enabler. It is a superpower, Clark Kent turning into Superman, and it should drive a real uptick in productivity and GDP.”
Clark Beecher, Co-Founder and Global Managing Partner, Beecher Reagan
You draw a line between AI-native and AI-enablement leaders. What is the difference, and where is the real gap?
The talent pool is still bifurcated, and almost no one can span the whole enterprise yet.
I get the call constantly: find me someone who can do end to end AI, either as an operating partner in a PE firm or as a chief technology or chief AI officer. The reality is that the current version of AI has only been around 18 to 24 months, and it is changing fast, so we really have two different profiles.
On one side is AI enablement talent, often out of data, analytics, and machine learning backgrounds. They are not native to the technology and they are lighter on the cutting edge, but they know how to translate AI into business outcomes across different functions. On the other side are the AI natives who grew up in AI-first organizations. They come from a technology background and know exactly what the models can and cannot do, but they often lack the business insight to translate that into outcomes. Many of them also have lucrative reasons to stay where they are.
The other piece is that large language models are still solving smaller, functional problems. You can find someone who knows how to drive the growth agenda with AI, or someone who knows the finance function, or someone on the operations and technology side. I have yet to see one person who can do all of that at an expert level, so today it usually takes multiple people. My expectation is that in roughly 24 to 36 months, we start seeing leaders who bridge both sides and can drive those outcomes in one seat. Functional titles will converge too: CFOs and Chief Commercial Officers evolve into technology-fluent versions of themselves, because AI fluency becomes table stakes for every functional leader.
What does the consulting partner of the future look like?
Someone who sells outcomes, not hours.
The partner of the past sold time and material, billable hours, no different from accounting or legal. As AI gets involved in how consulting firms make the donuts, clients are going to push firms toward outcome-oriented work and outcome-oriented pricing. Clients will expect to share in the savings, and firms will want the upside for delivering the result.
So the partner of the future knows how to structure a deal, work across the client organization, drive to an outcome, and price to that outcome. That is a different breed than it was five or ten years ago. Firms are moving there slowly, some faster than others, but over the next two to three years they will have to embrace AI as part of making the donuts. You cannot walk in and bill a client on time and material when half the work is being done by artificial intelligence. The client will say no way.
You have written a lot about the rise of the "boomerang consultant." What is driving it?
It comes back to outcomes.
A boomerang consultant is someone who grew up in consulting, left for a role in industry, a P&L, a cost center, or a support seat like chief strategy or chief transformation officer, and had to actually drive an outcome for that organization rather than just advise on one. As the world moves toward outcome-oriented leadership, people who have sat in the seat and owned the result are far more transferable to consulting clients than a career consultant.
The demand shift is dramatic. Five or six years ago, maybe 10% of the people we placed into partner roles were boomerangs. In the last 24 months, it has been 50 to 70%. The catch is that most firms are not structured to keep them. If you drop a boomerang back into the same model they left, with the same incentives, they disengage or leave within a year. The credibility that made them valuable gets buried.
Why has the Chief Commercial Officer overtaken the CFO as the number one ask?
Because organic growth went from a nice to have to a must have.
From about 2002 to 2022 we had cheap debt, and most PE firms could execute their growth thesis by bolting on companies. Then rates rose, the cost of capital climbed, and you got a bid ask spread between buyers and sellers: sellers still want the multiple they were shopped at, and buyers cannot pay it. Fewer deals clear. That puts enormous pressure on the portfolio company to grow organically.
So the number one role we get asked for has flipped. It used to be the CFO. In the last 12 to 18 months, the Chief Commercial Officer, call it Chief Revenue or Chief Growth, whatever you want, has taken that spot. These leaders institutionalize and then industrialize an organic growth engine, bringing systems and rigor to revenue. CFOs still matter, but the demand has moved to growth.
On the supply side, it is the same squeeze. More CFOs who have done multiple turns are retiring, and there are not enough proven replacements, so firms are diversifying where they look and increasingly hiring the strong number two into the top seat. Private equity used to love "been there, done that." The growth of the industry is outpacing supply, so they are having to hire trade-up candidates far more often, and they are building more external boards to support and coach those leaders once they are in.
For firms trying to win the talent market right now, what is your message?
It is not a water faucet. Keep the water on and never turn it off.
You control the intake of talent, so be in the market perpetually. If there is a quarter you do not want to hire, that is fine, but you do not leave the market. You keep sourcing and developing, you build a reputation as a destination for talent, and you keep a real pipeline so you can move the moment it is time to pull the trigger on a key executive.
And your advice to the executives who want those roles?
Build a brand and a network outside your own company, and do not wait for the phone to ring.
Most search firms will not say this, but we only get so many mandates. Candidates need to keep building a professional network beyond the organization they work in, and to be known in the industry for something specific. I would still say 60% of jobs, even at the executive level, are transacted privately, and only about 40% come through firms like ours. So build your personal brand, build relationships across the industries you want to grow in, and do it consistently, rather than waiting for a recruiter to call with a mandate.
The bottom line
The through line across all of it is that leadership, not capital and not tools, is now the scarce resource. Supply is tight, private equity keeps raising demand, and AI is rewriting what a great leader needs to be able to do. The firms and executives who win will be the ones who treat talent as a perpetual priority and get ahead of where these roles are heading, not where they are today.
Beecher Reagan and its sister business, Kinavic Leadership Acceleration, form a strategic talent platform that helps leading professional services and private equity firms identify, select, and accelerate the executive talent that drives growth. To talk through your leadership needs, or to join our network through the Candidate Hub, connect with the Beecher Reagan team.