Two Leadership Gaps, One Family-Owned Platform: Hiring Operational and Commercial Leadership for a European B2B Mobility Payments Group

The Challenge

The company is one of Europe's largest B2B platforms for on-the-road payment solutions, serving customers in more than 50 countries through one of the continent's largest energy-independent acceptance networks. Controlled for decades by its founding family, it had recently bought back a private equity investor's minority stake to return to full family ownership, a moment that typically sharpens focus on the leadership layer needed to fund the next phase without an outside investor setting the pace.

Two distinct gaps needed solving:

• A decades-old transport management and freight forwarding software subsidiary, majority-owned by the group but run by its own founder-linked management, needed additional operational leadership capacity as it pushed into cloud and AI-driven product development
• At the group level, commercial execution had scaled market by market across dozens of European countries without a single owner for governance, CRM discipline, or standardised sales rhythm

They turned to The Big Search.

Overview of the two executive searches

Between September 2025 and June 2026, The Big Search partnered with the client to fill two mandates: an additional operational leader for the logistics software subsidiary, and a VP of Commercial Strategy & Excellence to unify commercial governance across the group. The two searches ran sequentially, first stabilising leadership capacity at the subsidiary, then building commercial infrastructure at the group level. We closed both.

Phase 1 - Adding Operational Leadership to the Logistics Software Subsidiary

• September 2025 → December 2025
• Digital Transformation Phase

The subsidiary, a provider of transport management and warehouse management software for freight forwarders and logistics operators, had entered a period of active product modernisation and needed additional senior operational leadership to support that push alongside its existing team. The mandate called for someone who could bring credible transformation and commercial experience while fitting into an established leadership culture rather than displacing it.

Executive Search Across German and DACH Logistics Technology Leadership

The hunting strategy targeted leaders with logistics and transport technology experience who had led genuine platform or operating-model transformations, sourced across logistics and transport technology executives, broader enterprise software leaders with on-premise-to-cloud transition experience, and people with existing familiarity with the parent group.

Profile criteria:

• General management or senior operating experience with a platform modernisation on the CV
• Direct or adjacent experience in logistics, transport, freight, or fleet technology
• Comfort operating inside an existing leadership team rather than as sole decision-maker
• Ability to support commercial momentum alongside product and platform change
• German language fluency and DACH market familiarity

We mapped 74 candidates across Germany and the wider DACH region.

First shortlist

4 days from kick-off

Of the 74, 67 were rejected, 6 sat on an active Tier 2 longlist as genuine alternates, and 1 was hired. The tight funnel reflects how specific the combination of transformation credibility and logistics-sector familiarity proved to be: a narrow field, converted carefully rather than quickly.

The Placed Candidate: A Transformation Leader With Two Decades Inside a Global Logistics Group

They spent more than two decades in logistics technology and transformation leadership, most of it inside a large global freight and logistics group, holding a series of increasingly senior programme and transformation roles, including work standardising transport management systems across dozens of European countries. Immediately before this search, they had been working as an independent consultant, advising logistics and mobility businesses on operating model design and technology platform selection.

• Multi-country standardisation experience — led programmes harmonising systems and processes across a large European logistics footprint, the exact discipline the subsidiary needed for its own platform work.
• Technical and commercial range in one profile — comfortable owning both the operational technology side of a transformation and the commercial execution needed to support it.
• Recent, direct exposure to the problem — spent the period immediately prior advising logistics and mobility companies on technology platform strategy.
• A leadership style suited to a founder-linked business — favoured structure and shared ownership over top-down control, fitting for stepping into an established team rather than replacing it.

Phase 2 - Unifying Commercial Execution Across the Group's European Footprint

• March 2026 → June 2026
• Commercial Infrastructure Phase

With the subsidiary's leadership addressed, the client turned to the group-level gap. Commercial execution had scaled market by market without a single owner for governance, CRM discipline, or a standardised sales operating rhythm, a familiar pattern in large B2B platforms that grow country by country. The mandate called for someone who had built commercial excellence or revenue operations infrastructure from a genuine greenfield starting point, not someone who had only maintained an existing function.

Executive Search Across European B2B Commercial Excellence and RevOps Leadership

The hunting strategy targeted commercial and revenue operations leaders who had built governance frameworks, CRM standards, and territory models from scratch, sourced across enterprise B2B SaaS and payments companies of comparable scale, commercial excellence functions inside large corporate groups, and RevOps leaders who had built the function during rapid multi-country expansion.

Profile criteria:

• Direct experience building, not just running, a commercial excellence or RevOps function inside a sizeable B2B organisation
• Multi-country governance experience: standardising KPI definitions, sales processes, or CRM standards across several markets at once
• CRM and commercial infrastructure ownership, including integration with finance systems for pipeline visibility
• Comfort operating as a cross-functional influencer without direct line authority over the sales organisations they were setting standards for
• B2B commercial depth, ideally in payments, fintech, or another comparably complex enterprise sales environment

We mapped 110 candidates across Europe.

First shortlist

Same day as kick-off

Of the 110, 103 were rejected, 1 sat on an inactive Tier 2 longlist, 5 reached consultant interview, and 1 was hired. Five candidates reaching consultant interview on a single-hire mandate gave the client genuine comparative depth, ranging from commercial excellence leaders inside large European platforms to RevOps builders who had run the "build the function from zero" exercise more than once.

The Placed Candidate: A Commercial Infrastructure Builder Who Had Done This Twice, in Two Industries

Early in their career, they built and scaled a retention and commercial infrastructure organisation inside a global remote-connectivity SaaS company, eventually owning a retention book worth hundreds of millions of euros in annual recurring revenue while reporting directly to the CEO. They then moved to a publicly listed, multi-country IT services group operating through a federated structure of independently managed entities, where they built a central commercial intelligence platform and standardised go-to-market execution without stripping local entities of their autonomy.

That second chapter was the closer parallel to the client's problem: a large, federated organisation where the centre has to earn adoption of new standards rather than impose them. Interviewers on both sides repeatedly asked candidates to present their thinking for the first 100 days, and it shaped how the eventual hire framed their pitch: make the centre useful before making it mandatory.

• Built the same kind of function twice, in different sectors — scaled a commercial retention organisation inside a global SaaS company, then built a group-wide commercial intelligence platform inside a federated technology group, both from a genuine greenfield start.
• Direct experience standardising execution across a federated structure — aligned independently managed entities around shared commercial standards without removing local ownership.
• A track record with measurable commercial impact — delivered a repricing initiative that generated tens of millions of euros in incremental net revenue in a single year in a prior role.
• Structural proof of influence without direct authority — reported directly to a CEO in one role, and navigated a culture of local P&L owners resisting centralisation in another.

Large B2B platforms rarely have one clean leadership gap. This client's two problems looked unrelated on the surface, adding operational capacity at a subsidiary and building commercial governance at the group level, but both needed someone who could earn authority inside a structure they didn't control outright. The Big Search closed both mandates between September 2025 and June 2026, mapping 184 candidates across the two searches and converting each into a hire whose prior experience mirrored the client's own structural challenge.

If your organisation has more than one leadership gap surfacing on different timelines, treating each as its own search is usually what separates a good fit from the right one.

If that's where you are, let's talk.