Spotlight: Charles Aris CEO Chad Oakley on 20 years of strategy recruiting

In 2003, Chad Oakley joined his father, Mitch, at Charles Aris Executive Search to recruit talent from an industry that was new to the firm: strategy consulting.

Chad worked in strategy himself prior to joining Charles Aris — first as a consultant for Deloitte, then as a consultant and case team leader for Bain & Company after completing his MBA at The Wharton School in 2000.

By combining his own experience in strategy consulting with the executive search processes Mitch Oakley refined over his first 34 years running the firm, Chad was able to grow the Strategy Practice into the largest and most successful recruiting area at Charles Aris.

In addition to its six other functional recruiting practices, Charles Aris now has over 30 full-time team members focused on finding and placing strategy professionals with clients in private equity and corporate America. But it started as a team of one: Chad.

Mitch Oakley founded Charles Aris Inc in 1969 with a similarly sized team: himself and a secretary. During his first two decades in business, the founder focused on placing manager-level candidates with manufacturing clients across the Southeast. Chad grew up watching his father work long hours to make the business successful, and he found himself taking up similar habits early in his consulting career at Deloitte. At this time, he had no formal plans to join the family business. He enjoyed consulting, and, in 1998, decided to pursue his MBA at Wharton. Here, he met his wife, Mindy, and both went on to continue pursuing high-action careers in consulting.

After completing his MBA, Chad landed at the Boston practice of Bain & Company as a consultant and case team leader. Here, he advised on strategic business solutions for clients across industries, including software, telecommunications, manufacturing and financial services. The Wharton grad says he loved working at Bain because it reinforced the principles of running a successful business. Like Mitch, Chad also found satisfaction in working long hours, even going as far as to have “working dates” with Mindy, where the couple would chip away at their individual consulting projects together late at night.

Living in Boston had its perks, too. Chad enjoyed everything city living had to offer, from high-end museums to nights watching baseball at Fenway Park. But the consultant also kept a rigorous travel schedule for work, which pulled him away from his new home in the Northeast.

While he enjoyed the active lifestyle he led with Bain, Chad began to think about his long-term plan in 2002. Consulting was fulfilling for both him and Mindy, but they imagined a life 10 years down the road where the two could enjoy a family and keep more sustainable schedules. So, Chad reached out to his father to inquire about joining Charles Aris.

At this time, Charles Aris had just undergone a rebrand, and the Bain consultant saw an opportunity to help propel his family’s business into its next growth stage. Chad envisioned a future where the business could apply its industry-leading recruiting process to different functional roles within even larger national and multinational corporations. With six years of strategy experience under his belt, he figured starting a practice dedicated to recruiting consultants would be a good starting place.

The year after initiating conversations with Mitch and developing a gameplan, Chad moved back to his hometown and Charles Aris headquarters of Greensboro, North Carolina to join the firm as a vice president and practice leader. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing the new strategy recruiting practice.

As a new player in the world of strategy recruiting, and a new recruiter himself, it was challenging for Chad to land clients in his early years. He treated every opportunity like “gold.” When he did land his first search with a Fortune 100 consumer goods company, the former consultant vowed to earn his keep by overworking the competition and landing a second search based on his performance during the first. He helped the client find and land a top-performing strategy consultant for its own internal corporate strategy team and was successful in being hired for a second recruiting project.

Chad repeated these steps with each of his early searches and found success, but he knew his process was working when that first client named him “search partner of the year” in 2007, beating out name-brand competitors who had been active in the strategy recruiting space far longer than Charles Aris.

When reflecting on his time spent building a practice, the now chief executive officer admits he had to “kiss quite a few frogs” to land searches, meaning he couldn’t be over-selective about who he contacted to try and develop his business. He also had to pull his team along with him and continuously sell them on his vision for the practice. 20 years in, Chad says the team he built around him now serves as the catalyst for excellence in the Charles Aris Strategy Practice.

Today, the practice includes over 30 full-time team members, including four vice presidents, each with a unique industry focus. From 2003 to 2023, the team placed over 1,200 strategy professionals with a range of client organizations. When Chad started the practice, he focused heavily on recruiting consultants out of mid-level analyst roles. Now, the majority of the practice’s searches are for senior executives who graduated from the nation’s leading consulting firms and have spent significant time developing industry specialties via in-house strategy teams, especially in private equity firms and Fortune 500 corporations.

Chad fully attributes the practice’s ongoing success to the team of individuals who continue to dedicate their professional lives to the vertical he envisioned over 20 years ago. In June, the team gathered in Greensboro to celebrate their practice’s 20th anniversary.

To learn more about the Charles Aris Strategy Practice, visit CharlesAris.com/strategy.