Lewis Maleh

From Milan Streetwear to the Bank of England

Maleh studied chemistry at university in Birmingham, four years of it, and then did something almost none of his classmates did: on the day he finished, he set up a fashion distribution company. The instinct went back further than that. From the age of 14 he had worked alongside a cousin who was a ladies wear designer, folding plastic bags and helping sell women's clothes, and he had wanted to build something of his own ever since.

So he signed British streetwear brands, the graffiti and street art labels coming out of the UK, and sold them in Milan, where young Italians could not get enough of them. That was the first two years out of university. Then he met a factory owner in Turkey running two plants making jeans, T-shirts, jumpers and suits, and became his head of sales in the UK, supplying the high street. Three or four years in his early twenties spent learning how commerce actually works.

A friend in recruiting pulled him sideways. Come and look, he said: it is commercial, it is interesting, it is about people. Maleh went to see a few firms and joined a group of about six people with a small recruiting business in the City of London, right by the Bank of England, covering financial services, insurance, banking and asset management. The year was 2005. "I was selling, like, T-shirts before," he says. "Suddenly you have people." People with wants, needs, desires and influences, all of which had to be understood rather than shipped.

London financial services, like New York, is a village. Everyone occupies the same few streets, and the currency is time spent with people. Maleh worked out early that executive search is one of the few professions that compounds with age: the more contacts you have, and the longer you have known them, the better you get.

The Name on the Door

Four and a half years in, the founder itch returned. He was good at recruiting, he thought, though as he points out, you only really find out when you go out on your own. It is easy to open a call by naming a famous firm. It is a different test when you say "Hey, it's Lewis" and wait to hear whether the answer is delight or "Who?"

Resigning to start a business in England carried a social cost that his American relatives in New York and Seattle simply did not recognise. The British question was "what happens if it doesn't work out?" The American question was "what's the worst that can happen?" He went with the Americans.

The name was a small piece of strategy. Lewis is his first name; Bentley is the car, placed in front of it so that the firm did not sound like one man alone. The reality, at first, was one man alone in a small office on the top floor of a building in the West End of London, where the landlord's only demand was that he pay for the cleaning. From there Bentley Lewis grew into a retained executive search firm placing board members and senior leadership one and two levels below the board for major global companies. He opened in the United States in 2019, and today the firm recruits from Dubai to Tokyo to India.

Two Humans and an Agent

Maleh is unusually far down the AI road for a search firm principal, and he has taken the whole business with him rather than keeping it as a founder's hobby. Over the past two years Bentley Lewis has put AI automations and agents into every stage of its recruiting process, built agents on OpenFloor, and worked extensively with Claude while staying deliberately product agnostic and also running Gemini. The firm was accepted into the Anthropic partner program, a $100 million funding initiative that drew roughly 40,000 applicants, and the training that comes with it has gone to the whole team, who now build internal digital products for different stages of the search process themselves.

One consequence is quietly radical for the industry: none of his team are on LinkedIn Recruiter anymore. Another is the standing search configuration of two humans and one AI agent. "It's been transformational," he says, and the ambition behind it is explicit: a search firm with the output of a thousand people and the headcount of almost none.

The work has spilled outward. CHROs and heads of talent started asking what he was up to and whether he could do it for them, and Bentley Lewis now runs what Maleh calls AI deployment as part of its talent advisory practice, helping enterprise clients map their HR and talent workflows and work out where AI actually belongs. A similar engagement with Microsoft is next. He notes, with the eye of someone watching the tier above him, that Anthropic and OpenAI have both stood up deployment consulting arms with private equity backing and billions behind them, which tells you where the value is migrating.

His diagnosis of why most of it stalls is blunt and worth repeating in every boardroom: "The biggest problem isn't the technology, it's the humans."

A Personal Board of Directors

Ask Maleh who shaped him and he does not reach for a single famous name. He credits his early managers, first in the small City firm and then the people around him in the first couple of years of running his own business, on the grounds that when you are young you learn more from the people managing you than from the job itself. School asks what you want to be. Maleh's view is that the real task in your twenties is trying things and collecting experiences, because what you do in five or ten years may look nothing like today, while the lessons in how to behave and how to operate travel with you.

He is a vocal advocate for what he calls building a personal board of directors: surrounding yourself with people from different walks of life and different skill sets who will not simply say yes to you. One of his is Lee, a friend since childhood who built his own business in an entirely different sector. The two have talked through work, life and business for years, which matters, Maleh says, because the game of business goes up and down and left and right, and you can be flying one week and get smacked in the face from a direction you never watched.

The third thing he is grateful for is the job description itself. "My job is to have conversations with people," he says, and those people run very large companies, lead high growth businesses, or are simply interesting, all of them navigating some challenge of their own. Every conversation, he says, gives him something he can take back into his own game. Sixteen years in, that remains his most durable technology.