Your priest knows your sins. Your coach knows your weaknesses. Your barber well, says the bald guy, they know things too. The common thread? Trust.

Without trust, you get surface-level conversations. Safe answers. Polished résumés and rehearsed interview responses. With trust, you get to the truth: the CFO who’s six months from retirement, the sales culture that rewards lone wolves over team players, the margins that have been sliding for three years while everyone pretends it’s just “market conditions.”

After 30 years in the lumber and building materials industry, I can tell you exactly when an executive search will fail: the moment a client holds back the truth because they don’t trust their recruiter enough to share it.

Trust Isn’t Comfortable. It’s Essential.

At Misura Group, we don’t start with job descriptions. We start with a question that makes most executives uncomfortable: Do you trust us enough to tell us what’s really broken?

Because here’s what I know: the problem you’re trying to solve might have simple themes “We need a VP of Sales,” “We need to grow our commercial division” but the sustainable, long-term solution requires a deep understanding of your team and business, both internally and externally.

That level of understanding doesn’t come from a 30-minute intake call and a job posting. It comes from trust-based relationships where leaders feel safe enough to admit, “Our culture is toxic in this department,” or “Our margins don’t support the compensation we’re promising,” or “The real problem is our founder won’t let anyone make decisions.”

Geoff Smart’s book Who: The A Method for Hiring makes this point brilliantly: most hiring failures stem from vague outcomes and a lack of clarity about what success actually looks like. But you can’t get to that clarity without trust. https://whothebook.com/

The Culture Case: Where Most Companies Are Blind

Your recruiter should be effective at understanding all aspects of your culture, not the glossy version on your website, but the real culture that shows up Monday morning when pressure hits.

Culture is easily defined: what you value and how you action those values. A great culture will repel undesirable people and attract the people you need. It might be the area of greatest myopia and the lowest-hanging fruit when trying to attract top talent.

Here’s the question that reveals everything: Do you have an open or closed culture?

An open culture shares financial data, encourages questions, tolerates failure as learning, promotes from within based on potential, and trusts people with information. A closed culture operates on need-to-know, punishes mistakes, promotes based on tenure, and keeps the “real” information in the C-suite.

Neither is inherently wrong, but you must be honest about which one you have, because A-players self-select based on culture fit.

Further complicating this: Are you tenure-based or performance-based? Culture is constantly evolving, and you want all new hires to be on the leading edge of where you want your future-state culture to be, not reinforcing where you’ve been.

Culture is measured by retention and the number of people recruited, trained, and promoted each year. Counterintuitively, low-to-no turnover with no one being trained, developed, and promoted is often a sign of a highly troubled team. It means you’re keeping people who’ve stopped growing and you’ve stopped investing in development.

The Business Case: What Problem Are We Actually Solving?

“We need a VP of Sales” isn’t a problem statement. It’s a symptom.

The foundational first question that must be understood precisely is: What is the problem we’re trying to solve?

Your recruiter should be excited to roll up their sleeves and learn the history of your company, where you are today, and your future state plans. They should map your company’s trajectory against the macroeconomic measures of your industry segment.

Why? Because high tides raise all boats. High market demand can drive sales revenue peaks that cover serious problem areas. I’ve seen companies hire “rockstar” VPs of Sales during market booms, only to discover two years later that the VP was riding the wave, not creating it.

The right recruiter digs deeper: Is this a lead generation problem? A closing problem? A compensation structure problem? A product-market fit problem? A founder-won’t-delegate problem?

The Financial Case: Show Me the Scoreboard

Your recruiter better feel comfortable asking for three years of financials around the role in question.

The scoreboard and stats don’t lie, in business or basketball. Who wants to play a game and not keep score? It takes courage to embrace the reality of any situation that needs improvement. Keen financial awareness is the first step to solving the problem.

Smart’s Power Score framework is instructive here: the power to hire successfully comes from clarity about outcomes, constraints, and resources. Financial transparency provides that clarity.

The Talent Intelligence Case: A Nose for Where Great People Are Hidden

Here’s where most recruiting firms reveal their limitations: they run the same nationwide search, post on the same job boards, and fish in the same depleted talent pools as everyone else. Then they wonder why they’re presenting you with the same three candidates who’ve been making the rounds for the past six months.

Your recruiting firm should be effective at going beyond a nationwide geographic search. Knowing what industry subsegments or expanded non-core industry talent pools will possess the right mix of competencies and experience at the best compensation value separates great recruiters from order-takers.

Let me be blunt: The best recruiters will lower your costs and increase the financial impact talent will deliver.

This requires deep industry knowledge – not just of your specific segment, but of the competency DNA that translates across adjacent sectors. At Misura Group, we’ve built a database of 25,000+ executives across five distinct LBM industry segments: dealers, truss and components (BCMC), wholesale lumber (NAWLA), millwork (WMA), and home services. But more importantly, we’ve mapped the competency bridges between these segments and industries outside LBM entirely.

For LBM sales leadership, we look at commercial HVAC distribution, electrical wholesale, plumbing supply, and building services anywhere that require consultative selling to contractors, project-based sales cycles, and the ability to balance showroom retail with commercial bid work.

For operational leadership, we hunt in concrete and aggregates, prefab construction, specialty manufacturing, and logistics-intensive industries where the physics of moving heavy products with tight delivery windows is the daily reality.

Sometimes the best talent is in markets where your competitors aren’t looking. The Southeast is rich with building materials talent due to consolidation creating displaced leaders. Midwest has operators who know how to run efficient businesses in secondary markets. Mountain West has growth-market leaders who understand scaling in boom conditions.

I’ve placed VPs of Sales from the concrete industry into lumber, CFOs from food distribution into building materials, and operational leaders from manufacturing into LBM retail. In each case, the client initially resisted: “They don’t have lumber experience.”

My response: “You’re not hiring lumber experience. You’re hiring sales process design experience. You’re hiring margin management experience. You’re hiring operational excellence. The lumber part they’ll learn in 90 days. The competencies they brought took 20 years to develop.”

The Misura Group Approach: Systematic and Surgical

Here are the effective key steps we will take to reduce compensation costs while increasing the probability of financial and cultural success:

1. Identify WHO is the best leader to lead the search. Not the busiest executive or the one with the biggest title – the one who best represents where your culture is going. A-Players want to work with A-Mentors.

2. Develop a Scorecard. What are the five-ranked crucial skills, talents, and expertise needed in this role? Not “nice to haves” – the actual make-or-break competencies. This is straight from Smart’s Who methodology.

3. Organizational Bias Awareness. Teams overvalue people with skills and traits like them. Financial teams that need sales leadership hire finance people. Product-focused teams hire engineers when they need salespeople. Individual contributors get promoted into leadership roles they’re not wired for. Leaders are measured first by their ability to attract and develop talent – not by their technical expertise.

4. Execute with eyes wide open. Leverage every strength of the company and team while embracing the reality of the situation. Make sure everyone understands what’s at stake and how we win.

Why This Matters

I’m passionate about Misura Group’s value proposition built on this foundation. And I’m very proud of the team we have today executing these tactics helping leaders grow their companies and professionals reach their personal and professional goals.

But it all starts with trust. Trust that your recruiter will tell you the truth. Trust that you can tell them the truth. Trust that together, you’re solving the real problem – not just filling a seat.

Ready for a recruiting partner who asks the hard questions?

Let’s start with an honest conversation about what’s really broken – and how to fix it.

Reach out to Misura Group.

Hire Smarter™

Tony Misura