I fell into recruiting by accident, as most people do. For most of my career, what I knew was building companies from the inside. I conceived and built from scratch the first-ever LTL agent program at GlobalTranz, then took BlueGrace from zero sold to 56 franchisees in just two years. I figured that was the type of work I’d do for the rest of my life.
What hit me, though, was that I had grown two companies from $8M to $120M and $60M to $125M, respectively, and there just wasn’t any long-term incentive for me. I was still cashing someone else’s check.
So, I packed up and moved back to Arizona with my wife and two young daughters to start a recruitment agency. I figured that was what I was good at…getting someone to quit their job and become an Agent or Franchisee, or to find a new career. Boy did I have a lot to learn, as I had never worked at a Recruitment firm before.
After a number of years of building my firm, I got a call from project44’s CEO, Jett McCandless. They had just secured $202M from Goldman Sachs, and the company was going to scale like crazy. He didn’t need anyone emailing him resumes; he needed someone he could inherently trust and someone who could be fully embedded in the org and run the whole Talent Acquisition function. I flew up the next day, signed on, spun up a 34-person Global Team, and spent the next two years running project44’s entire talent team, globally. The thing is, I had never done it at that type of scale. However, just like at GlobalTranz and BlueGrace, I had no choice but to figure it out quickly.
That stretch of experience taught me what great genuinely looks like, and it’s the reason 10 Point Partners doesn’t work like the firms currently blowing up your inbox looking for business.
So, the plain answer to the question in the title? 10 Point Partners is an executive retained recruitment firm for VC and PE-backed startups. We work across industries rather than camping out in one. We go deep on your role before we send you a single profile. We bring you five or six people who can genuinely crush the job instead of 50 who can’t.
And whether I'm running your search or one of my partners is, it gets the same senior attention from start to finish.
The Fundamentals: How Retained Recruitment Actually Works
Two years inside project44 taught me where the recruiting industry fails the companies paying for it. The fix isn’t complicated, but it runs against how most recruitment firms make money. Start with the model, the cost of getting it wrong, and why the stakes are higher now than ever before.
You Already Know What the Other Guys Do
Almost every founder I talk to has only ever dealt with contingent recruiters, so the whole category blurs into one thing for them. A contingent recruiter only gets paid if you hire someone they send over, and that one detail explains everything that drives you nuts about them. When getting a placement is the only thing you care about, your job becomes throwing bodies at the wall, fast, and hoping one sticks. The research puts it more politely: contingent search is built for speed, not depth, with recruiters racing to present candidates rather than learn what the role actually needs. You get a giant stack of resumes and LinkedIn profiles, and none of them are the right person.
What Retained Truly Means
Retained flips the incentive. You hire one firm, it works on your search exclusively, and it gets paid to research and think instead of rushing and cutting corners. We map the market, sit you down for a calibration call so you can see we get the role, then provide you with a short list of A-players that hold up in the boardroom.
The serious money already runs this way too. Retained work is close to 63% of a roughly $64 billion global search market this year, and those buyers aren’t paying for a bigger pile of resumes. They’re paying to get it done right, once.
About one of every 100 people we place ever needs replacing, against an industry that runs closer to 25-50% +. That’s the whole argument right there.
A Bad Hire Is the Most Expensive Thing on Your Books
People badly underrate what a wrong senior hire costs. Hire the wrong VP, and you torch the quarter. A failed executive can run 10 to 15 times their salary once you’ve paid the severance, eaten the lost months, missed deadlines, and watched a team that was flying start second-guessing everything. The HR chiefs who’ve lived it don’t soften the number either. Almost half peg the real cost of a failed outside hire at $2 million to $5 million.
When I quote a fee, I’m pricing the outcome. One client told me we'd done the job so well and so quickly that he figured he should pay us less, which is exactly the trap. It wasn’t easy; we just nailed it. Get it right and the seven-figure mistake you just avoided never quite feels real.
The Stakes Keep Going Up
The odds keep tilting against you. Last year set a record for CEOs leaving their jobs, and the average one now lasts barely seven years in the seat. Leaders churn faster, boards are out of patience, and the cost of missing on your most important hires only climbs. The best founders I know already figured this out, so they don’t blink at the fee. They’ve seen the version where the wrong hire costs them a whole funding round. Stack our fee against an empty seat or a bad one, not against some shop’s 25%.
Where We Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is
Anyone can describe a better model on a blog. But what I’d rather show you is the work itself, the people who’ll vouch for it, and why the market is adjusting toward the way we already operate.
Proof Beats a Pitch
Back to project44, because it's why I trust the model. They did not have a TA function built out to scale like crazy, and the CEO needed someone who could embed and run it, not mail him names. We made 1,053 hires in 12 months, and rebuilt the entire executive team in year two. Four years later, they spun off a new company and just came back to me. This time I'm building it from the ground up. All of that happened in freight tech, an industry plenty of investors underestimate. Prove the model in a market people overlook, and it holds up in any market you put it to.
Founders Stake Their Word on Us
That track record only matters because the founders behind it pick up when I call. Robby Nathan built Envoy AI’s founding team in less than two months, and he’ll tell you straight up that he only signed with us because I was doing the recruiting, not some associate recruiter that I’d hand him off to. Michael Caney watched us close Highway’s CIO, exclusive and on a retainer, a seat other firms wrote off as unfillable based on their requirements and company values. Optym came to us needing a big jolt in their go-to-market strategy, and walked away with three new VPs of sales, out of just one engagement. Same discipline every time, and the market keeps drifting our way: boutique specialists keep winning the searches that matter most away from the global giants.
One Intro, a Whole Portfolio
Those references are also how I reach the people who matter most to the model. My most valuable relationship isn’t with any one founder; it’s with the partner who can introduce me to 15 of them. A VC partner stares at a portfolio full of companies running the identical play, quarter after quarter: raise the money, try to scale a team, hit the same wall. Become the firm that the partner introduces once and then stops worrying about, and every company in that portfolio turns into a warm search, with the intro making the partner look good for making it. The global giants often can’t even chase the best people, since they’re contractually barred from recruiting out of their own clients. We have no such problem.
The Market Left No Room for Error
That channel matters more in a market this tight. Something strange is happening right now, and it cuts in your favor. Q1 2026 set an all-time venture record, nearly $300 billion, but about two-thirds went to just four AI companies. Pull those out and funding for everyone else, adjusted for inflation, fell below where it was in 2020. With less money reaching the rest of the market, you’ll get zero slack for a foundational hire that flops.
PE feels the same squeeze. Deal volume jumped close to 50% last year, and the first 100 days after an acquisition set the whole value-creation plan in motion. Nobody on that clock can afford a vendor mailing 50 resumes.
The Part No Algorithm Can Do
Tight market or not, people ask me constantly whether AI makes a firm like mine skippable. For contingent recruiting, in certain instances, honestly, yes. Two-thirds of search firms already run AI tools, and the generative stuff produces flawless-looking candidates faster than any human can read them. The job flipped from finding people to figuring out which ones are real. None of that closes a hire. A tool can scrape LinkedIn (although not very well in all of the tools I've personally tested) till the servers give out and still can’t ring up the operator who’s happy where she is and only takes the meeting because someone she trusts asked her to. Closing still belongs to people. The executives worth hiring are already placed, and they move when a person they trust calls.
Built for the Next Decade, Not This Cycle
The AI boom is the door we’re walking through, and the firms still standing when it cools will be the ones whose investors kept trusting company after company, because the work held up when it got tested.
That’s the whole point of 10 Point Partners: Executive Retained recruitment for VC- and PE-backed growth companies, across whatever industry needs it. A founding team around someone who just raised. A quiet C-suite swap for a company that can’t afford the leak. Leadership across a whole portfolio for the VC and PE firms behind it. Five or six real candidates instead of 50, a market map before a single resume, and me on the searches that count.
Freight tech is where we proved it. Yours is the next case study.
Tell me about the role. We’ll map the market, and put a short list of people who can actually do the job in front of you, on a retainer. Reach out to 10 Point Partners and let’s get going.