Fee Collection, Guarantee & Client Retention
Every placement produces a correct invoice on time, the guarantee period is tracked with early-attrition risk visible, and the client relationship continues past the placement.
- Tier
- Flagship
- Build order
- 6th of 7 for executive search
- Shape of it
- 9 steps, 1 escalation rule
- At launch
- Built against your stages, then proven before it runs alone
The problem this solves
Three failures after the hard part is done.
Collection. The fee is earned and the invoice is wrong or late. Wrong billing entity, missing purchase order, disputed start date, unclear fee trigger, no named owner. Days sales outstanding stretches while the firm has already paid its consultants.
The guarantee. The placed executive leaves inside the fallback period. The firm owes a replacement search, which consumes a consultant and a researcher for weeks at zero revenue. The original search's profitability was an illusion the whole time, and nobody saw the risk building.
Retention. The relationship stops at the placement. The client's next search goes to whoever called them in the interim, despite a successful placement, because nobody maintained the relationship after the invoice cleared.
How it works, step by step
Every wait, threshold and branch below is a value we set with you during the build, against your stages and your language. None of it is a default we impose.
- What starts it
- It escalates to a person
Step 1Trigger
On acceptance, the invoice is generated from the mandate's recorded commercial terms rather than reconstructed.
Step 2
A pre-invoice checklist runs: correct billing entity, purchase order if required, confirmed start date, agreed fee trigger, and the right contact.
Step 3Escalation
Collections have a named owner and an ageing view. Overdue invoices escalate on a schedule.
Step 4
The guarantee period is tracked from the start date, with the expiry visible and the exposure valued.
Step 5
Structured onboarding contact happens with the placed executive at agreed intervals through the guarantee period, which is both a service and an early warning system.
Step 6
Attrition risk flags are raised from those conversations: role differing from the spec, manager relationship, integration difficulty, compensation disappointment, family or relocation issues.
Step 7
Risk flagged early goes to the partner while it is still fixable by a conversation rather than by a replacement search.
Step 8
Client relationship contact continues past the guarantee on a schedule: the placement anniversary, market intelligence relevant to their sector, and a check on their broader hiring plans.
Step 9
Placement outcomes feed back into the disposition analysis from System 5.
How it gets built
Built inside what you already run
- Clockwork
- Invenias
- Thrive
- Loxo
- Bullhorn
- Crelate
- PCRecruiter
- or whatever your office already runs on
Nothing to log into and nothing to license. If a system needs a record your platform does not hold, we add the field to your platform rather than starting a second one beside it.
This is the actual build order, in the phases its own steps fall into. It runs in supervised mode first, with you approving what goes out, until you are happy with the tone.
- 1
Build
Build invoice generation from the mandate terms.
Built inside the software you already run, against your stages and your language.
- 2
Build
Build the pre-invoice checklist and make it blocking.
- 3
Agree
Name the collections owner and build the ageing view and escalation.
The thresholds, the wording and the names are yours. We write them down with you and get the consequential ones signed off.
- 4
Build
Build guarantee tracking with valued exposure.
- 5
Build
Design the onboarding contact cadence with the partners. Tone matters: this is a service to the executive, not surveillance of them.
- 6
Build
Build the risk flags and the partner escalation.
- 7
Build
Build the post-guarantee client cadence.
- 8
Build
Connect outcomes back to System 5's analysis.
What changes after it goes live
How it runs today
Three failures after the hard part is done.
After this one is live
Invoices go out correctly the first time. Days sales outstanding falls because the disputes that cause delay are prevented rather than resolved. Guarantee exposure becomes a number the partners can see rather than a periodic shock. And a placement becomes the start of a client relationship rather than the end of a transaction.
How to measure whether it worked
Your arithmeticRun with your numbers, not ours
Four numbers the firm has: days sales outstanding, invoices disputed or corrected, placements that left inside the guarantee and the hours the replacement consumed, and repeat mandate rate from placed clients. The replacement hours are the number that usually surprises partners, because they were never costed against the original fee.
We agree the baseline before anything is built, and we do not take credit for things that were going to happen anyway. There is no figure on this page claiming what we have produced for somebody else, because there is no verified figure to publish.
What we will not do
This is from the same delivery document as everything above it. It is on the page because a supplier who has not thought about it will not tell you, and you would find out later.
This trade carries no clinical or insurance regulation, but it handles personal data about senior individuals who have not applied for anything, which is its own serious exposure.
Candidate data.
- Candidates in a search are almost always passive and confidential. Their current employer must not learn they are in a process. Any automation that could reveal a candidacy, including a misdirected message, an over-broad notification or a shared calendar entry, is a career-level harm to a real person.
- No candidate name, current employer or compensation detail in any demonstration, template or marketing asset. Synthetic data only.
- Reference checks are conducted with the candidate's explicit permission and at the point in the process they agreed to, never automatically.
- Records must support deletion and correction requests. Several US states and most other jurisdictions the firm may work in grant those rights, and a search database is exactly the kind of record they apply to.
Client confidentiality.
- Mandate details, compensation ranges, org structures and the fact of a search existing at all are frequently confidential, sometimes contractually.
- Off-limits agreements are contractual obligations, and a breach is a commercial and reputational event. System 5's automated off-limits check is a compliance control, not a convenience.
Messaging.
- Automated outreach to candidates and clients sits inside the TCPA for calls and texts, and inside CAN-SPAM for email. Classify service and marketing separately, honour opt-outs immediately, and keep suppression synchronised across every system.
- Candidate outreach in particular should default to a human sender, because a senior executive who realises they received an automated approach will not engage, and may tell others.
Nothing here is legal advice. Employment law, data protection law and contract terms with clients can each add requirements, and firms working across borders carry more.
Nothing here is legal advice. Rules in this area have moved more than once recently, and every template that states a commercial term or a guarantee goes to your own counsel before it goes live.
Seven systems forexecutive search.
We build one at a time and prove it moved before starting the next. The tiers are the dependency order, not a price list.
Tier 1Foundational
Nothing arrives late or unowned. These come first because everything above them assumes they are true.
Tier 2Growth
The recoverable money. These work the pools the foundational systems have made visible for the first time.
Tier 3Flagship
One connected system end to end, plus what the owner reads on a Monday. Only once the pieces are proven individually.
- 5The Complete Search SystemThe flagship, once the pieces are proven.
- 6Fee Collection, Guarantee & Client Retentionyou are hereCommercial close, and it depends on the mandate terms System 5 starts recording properly.
- 7The Partner's Morning BriefOnly meaningful once there are systems to report on.
The tiers are the dependency order for executive search, not a price list. Most firms do not start at the first one, because the order is a default and the call is where it gets changed.
A note on sequencing this trade
Sequencing note. Systems 1 and 2 together are the entire pitch for this vertical. A firm that can see which searches are waiting on the client, and that agrees a feedback window at kickoff, has already recovered most of the value in this playbook. Do not lead with the flagship.
Back to the executive search overview for the stage map and where these fit.
Is this the oneyou need first?
Often it is not. On the call we look at what is actually costing you most right now, which is frequently a different system from the one that brought you to this page. If there is nothing worth building yet, we will say so.