Laurence Ashby

“You do not make something and then try to find someone to sell it to: you ask someone what their problem is, and then you make them something that solves it.”

Laurence Ashby's working day is measured in conversations rather than call volume: six or seven chief executives, four or five operating partners. As a Partner at Hanover, he builds, replaces and future-proofs the executive teams inside private equity backed software, technology and cybersecurity assets, work he has done alongside Carlyle, Hg, Silver Lake, Nordic Capital and Vista. His remit runs from large cap in the United States to mid-market and large cap across Europe and mid-cap in the UK.

What makes that position unusual is where it came from. Laurence never served an apprenticeship on a high-street recruitment desk. He arrived at senior search having already spent two decades selling to boardrooms in an entirely different industry, and he brought the habits of that industry with him: understand the client's problem first, build the answer second.

Laurence spent years in advertising, latterly as one of the client leaders for the American out of home business Clear Channel. His accounts were some of the largest namely: Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Masterfoods, and any client spending $5 million or more across the G8 markets in Europe, plus the emerging markets they were moving into. He dealt with chief executives and media directors on both sides of the Atlantic, and the discipline he took from it was blunt. Establish the need before you sell anything. Most salespeople, he argues, get that backwards.

By his early forties he could read the industry's own arithmetic. Advertising, he notes, has a well-worn change model: replace one forty-year-old with two twenty-year-olds at half the cost. Facebook had launched, YouTube had arrived, and platforms were beginning to trade directly with advertisers through digital planning interfaces. So he moved into technology consulting, advising clients on how to use and maximise those systems, and joined a listed business selling marketing resource management platforms into organisations including Royal Bank of Scotland. The sell was conceptual rather than transactional, and it suited him.

The search firm that had placed him on that board eventually turned the tables and asked him to join. The decision was sharpened by a departing chief executive who told him plainly that he could stay and stagnate, or take a settlement and go and become what he was capable of becoming. He left, and was handed a blank sheet: build an advertising practice. Working with the big networks including Omnicom and WPP, he improvised the mechanics as he went, relying on a strong network and one deceptively simple filter. Would he want this person in his own team? If the answer was no, the conversation ended there.

From advertising he moved laterally into the firm's industrial and software engineering clients, mining existing relationships rather than chasing new logos. When those technology businesses turned out to be private equity backed, the funds began asking who was standing up their centres of excellence in Krakow, Ukraine and India. The answer was Laurence, and the work escalated accordingly: from hiring Python engineers to appointing CIOs, CTOs, CROs and, in some cases, chief executives.

Today his ecosystem is chairs, chief executives, operating partners and M&A advisors, and his work maps neatly onto the life of an asset. Before a transaction, he places domain experts alongside chairs so the asset can be properly evaluated. Once the investment lands, he builds the team for value creation and growth alignment. Roughly two years out from exit, he installs succession, because, as he puts it, nobody sells an empty business. The next investor needs a team ready to take it through the following turn.

He is candid that this level suits him. There are no questions about whether a candidate will turn up or how they will present. He also remains a determined student: when he does not know something, he says, the answer is to find five people who have done it and ask them. The entrepreneur he rates most highly, the founder and chief executive who built NP Group and for whom Laurence worked directly, taught him that visionary thinking and commercial discipline are not opposites. He describes him as one of the best bosses he has ever had.

Laurence is an early adopter with a governor fitted. His framework: 20 percent is framing the question, 60 percent is the heavy lifting done by the machine, and the final 20 percent is iteration and critical thought. The test he applies to any output is whether he could stand up, defend it and admit to knowing it. At 55, with a classical education and a degree in mathematics behind him, he describes the technology as the ability to consult a thousand people of his own vintage, each differently educated, and get a distilled answer in seconds.

The applications have been practical and wide. He has used it to model blood tests and diet while losing 10 kilograms in four months, to assess whether a contract was as enforceable in France as it is in the UK, and to populate a complex RFI aligned to a job description and credentials whilst away from the office on a phone. Six to eighteen months ago, he says, none of that was possible.

He is equally clear about the limits. Recipients now recognise machine-written outreach, and the market is quietly rejecting it. A handwritten, personally crafted mailout he sent to 70 contacts returned a 50 percent response rate. An AI-generated campaign to 900 contacts produced three replies. Where he sees genuine value is workflow management: a system that surfaces the ten people he needs to engage with today, with the engagement still done by him.

His counsel for the year ahead is a single instruction with a long tail. Do not be the solution to the problem a client thinks they already have. Be an advisor on the business and the challenges ahead of it. In practice that means asking senior leaders what they believe their problems are, how they know, and whether insight from comparable organisations run by comparable leaders would give them an advantage. Then it means working backwards from the ambition they wrote into the strategy when the investment was made.

He reaches for German car manufacturing to make the point. Porsche sells a dream first and engineers backwards to a cost. The alternative approach, he says, is to assemble something you think is clever, add ten percent, then go hunting for an audience and not be surprised when nobody wants it. Clients who are told you can move them closer to where they want to be tend not to argue about the invoice. As Laurence summarises it: go and ask, then find the solution together.