By late 2024, Simon Leich's pipeline had gone quiet. In executive search, that is an existential problem.
Simon and CS Partners
Simon is CEO of CS Partners, a specialist executive search firm. He recruits senior leaders into sectors most generalist headhunters steer clear of: climate tech, food tech, life sciences, and environmental businesses.
The mandates are high value and long cycle. Fees sit in the 40 to 50 thousand pound range. A good year used to mean around fifteen active searches running at once.
The business depends on one thing. Getting in front of the right CEOs and founders before they pick up the phone to a competitor.
When the sector went quiet
When Simon and I first sat down in January 2025, he was honest about where things stood. He had been in a desperate spot the previous October. Funding had dried up across his sectors and the usual channels that surfaced buyers had gone silent.
Content blogs were not landing. LinkedIn inbound, despite a big following and a credible profile, had not produced a single serious business development conversation in five years. He was still getting messages from people open to work, but none from the buyers he needed.
Part of the problem was structural. LinkedIn's industry taxonomy does not map cleanly to his sectors. A food tech founder might be tagged under something generic like IT services, so the standard filters returned the wrong people. Manual list building filled the gap, but it was slow and it did not scale.
The playbook Simon ran
We agreed to strip the approach back. Instead of spreading effort across content, ads, and broad outbound, Simon focused on one motion. Warm, signal based outreach, with his podcast as the lead magnet.
The structure is simple. Find a company with a trigger worth referencing, such as a recent funding round, a new product, or a leadership hire. Write a short email that names the signal specifically. Offer a slot on the podcast, not a sales pitch. Only once the conversation was real did the recruitment side come up.
It is the same approach we publish openly in the outreach playbook. Simon tweaked the email copy a couple of times, but the structure held.
By early 2026, Simon had recorded 136 podcast episodes. Open rates on the outreach were sitting around 60%. Replies were landing at 25 to 30%. Even in a thin market, the math worked.
The strategy we put together has been brilliant. The podcast is my lead magnet, and the outreach is landing close to a 25 to 30% reply rate.
Simon Leich, CEO, CS Partners
Where Flow AI fits
Email still works for Simon. But the inbox is getting noisier, and LinkedIn DMs are where his buyers increasingly prefer to talk. The problem on LinkedIn is volume. Building a clean list of the right people in a niche market, warming them up, and keeping the inbox sane takes more time than one person has.
So we opened up Flow AI to him as part of our launch. Four features do the heavy lifting:
- Find Leads. Simon searches across Sales Navigator's dataset without needing a Sales Navigator seat of his own. Keyword filters are tight enough to cut through LinkedIn's loose industry tags, and negative keywords strip out the sectors he does not work.
- Auto-pilot. Once Simon has a list, Flow AI sends connection requests on a safe cadence and turns those leads into first degree connections in the background.
- Unified Inbox. Every LinkedIn thread lands in one place, so replies do not get lost between devices.
- Co-pilot. When Simon opens a message, Flow AI drafts the reply he would likely send. He edits and sends, rather than starting from a blank box.
The aim is not to replace the email workflow. It is to run signal based DM outreach alongside it, on the same principle.
What changed
The market has not fixed itself, and Simon is the first to say so. His sector is still thin. But the shape of his business is different.
He is running five to six active searches at any given time. The podcast has become a durable asset that opens doors the other channels cannot. And the outreach is boringly repeatable now, which is exactly what he wanted. A system that runs week in, week out, without burning him out or sounding like a bot.
For a headhunter in a niche market, that is the difference between guessing and planning.
What is next
The next step for Simon is to widen the signals at the front of the funnel. Recent funding is one trigger. Press releases, leadership changes, and product launches are all worth as much in his market, sometimes more. We are working with him to pipe those straight into Flow AI so the same outreach engine can act on them.
