Do you feel like a Ferrari in downtown Manhattan traffic? The Autobahn is just around the corner...

Being ultra-talented in a specific set of skills gives you a lot of advantages in your career. You have the freedom to make decisions that generate real results, you have a strong team of people that trust you, and an unrelenting will to succeed in whatever you do.

Unfortunately, having expendable time is not one of these characteristics. If you’ve been working with a company for a few years, and feel you are ready for your next challenge (since that is what truly exceptional people do, seek out the hardest barriers to overcome), you will naturally be drawn to investment-backed portfolio companies of private equity and venture capital firms. Why? These companies always have an end goal in mind, as well as clear, yet lofty objectives along the way set forth by the investors. What is this end goal, and why does it make it more enticing for you to work within it?

When private equity or venture capital investors decide to invest in a company, they are making a bet that, with their knowledge and guidance, the company will be more valuable at the end of a pre-determined period (3-5 years for private equity and 5-10 years for venture capital). That knowledge and expertise can oftentimes be limited to key strategic decisions, and they will need to call upon you, the ultra-talented industry specialist to come work with the company as an ‘operating expert’. This fits perfectly with your goals because you want the next challenge, in a place where everyone is striving to be and build the best. Being an operator requires a very particular set of soft skills and an unteachable amount of ambition and relentlessness, in addition to industry expertise.

So, you have the talent, the skillset, and the drive, but how do you find these opportunities? For many reasons, these operating roles are rarely posted on your average job boards and were traditionally reserved for the personal network of the investors, as well as a few select executive recruiters handling the full search process.

The issue with a reliance on personal networks is that oftentimes if you aren’t in that ‘circle’ already, you have a very little chance of breaking into it. From an executive recruiter perspective, there is a better chance of being found if the recruiter has a true eye for spotting talent, but if you aren’t fond of responding to tons of Linkedin direct messages daily that you receive, sifting through who is legitimate and who is doing a ‘spray and pray’ automated search will require more effort than its worth.

So what can you do?

Over the past 20 years, the requirement for operating roles has skyrocketed, as they had never been a true necessity rather than a one-off engagement needed for the portfolio company in shambles. Now, it is an industry standard for investors to insert 1-2 of their people to help execute their playbook. However, the process for finding operators has remained stagnant across all this growth - until Flywheel. We are a team of former investors who have solved a very specific approach with a country club-esque exclusivity, ensuring that every person spoken to and ‘greenlit’ is very much a qualified expert on both sides of the platform. After being greenlit to enter the”Flywheel”, you will be among firms looking for a very specific type of talent for help in growing their portfolio companies to new heights, a challenge that never gets any easier, and will be vastly compensated for executing upon that. If what we described in this writing resonates with your skillset and what you would be looking for in the next career step, send us a message below, or request access in the top right corner of this screen. We look forward to hearing from you.

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