Executive Summary
A PE-backed, third-generation family-owned facilities services company had grown for years through operations and a single Fortune 100 client relationship. With no formal sales team and no outbound pipeline, the mandate changed: build a real sales function from scratch and win 11 new logos in 2026. Risch Results placed a Wisconsin-based sales leader with 19 years of facilities services experience who had done exactly this kind of work before.
About the Client
Our client is a PE-backed, third-generation family-owned facilities services company. Historically, growth came through operational excellence and a dominant relationship with one major Fortune 100 client. As the business entered a new chapter under private equity ownership, leadership recognized that reactive growth was no longer sufficient. The company needed to shift to proactive, outbound revenue generation and build the infrastructure to support it.
The Recruiting Challenge
The client faced three key challenges in finding the right VP of Sales:
- No Existing Sales Infrastructure This was not a role to manage an existing team or inherit a pipeline. The incoming leader needed to build the strategy, execute it personally, hire and scale a team, and carry a quota simultaneously. That combination of builder and operator is rare.
- RFP-Heavy Environment Experience Required Facilities services sales often runs through formal RFP processes. The client needed someone who understood how to navigate and win in that environment specifically, not someone who had only sold in simpler transactional contexts.
- Pattern Recognition Over Proximity The temptation was to hire locally or from adjacent industries. The right decision was to prioritize candidates who had already done this exact job before, building a sales function from zero in a facilities services environment, regardless of where they were located.
The Risch Results Solution
Risch Results pushed the client to think differently in three key ways:
- Hire a Builder, Not a Maintainer We reframed the search around candidates who had built sales functions from scratch rather than those who had managed established teams. That distinction drove every targeting and screening decision throughout the process.
- Expand Beyond Geography Rather than limiting the search to candidates within a convenient radius, we opened the search nationally to find the right experience profile. That decision proved critical to the outcome.
- Prioritize Pattern Recognition We focused exclusively on candidates who had already navigated this specific challenge in a comparable environment, building and scaling a sales team in facilities services, not candidates with adjacent or transferable experience who would be learning on the job.
The Outcome & Results
Risch Results placed a Wisconsin-based VP of Sales who:
- Brought 19 years of experience at a larger facilities services company, including direct experience building and scaling a sales team from scratch.
- Had a consistent track record of exceeding new business targets in RFP-driven environments.
- Came with a clear vision for integrating AI into the sales process, positioning the company to build a modern and scalable revenue engine.
The placement gave the client a leader who could design the sales function and execute within it from day one, without a ramp-up period the business could not afford.
Why It Matters for Other Companies
For founder-led or family-owned businesses making their first true sales leadership hire, the stakes are unusually high. This is not a backfill. It is a strategic inflection point. The right hire builds a growth engine. The wrong one stalls the business before it ever scales. Getting it right requires clarity on what kind of leader the moment actually demands, the willingness to look beyond geography and industry convention, and a search process built around proven pattern recognition rather than resume proximity.
Need to Hire Your First Sales Leader?
If your organization is ready to build a real sales function and needs the right leader to drive it, Risch Results can help. Contact us today to learn more!