Luminary ExecutiveWe engage at the moments that decide the outcome: pre-deal, post-close, through rapid scaling, and into exit or IPO preparation. The brief is never simply to fill a seat — it is to close the gap between the leadership you have and the plan you have committed to.
Our process is consultative and evidence-led. Market intelligence tells us who exists; structured assessment and behavioural insight tell us who will actually perform in your specific situation — a founder-led business absorbing its third acquisition is a different proposition from a carve-out standing up its first standalone team, and the same CV succeeds in one and fails in the other. We assess for that difference and we tell you what we find, including when the answer is that your incumbent is the right person and you do not need us.
Every shortlist we present is one we can defend line by line.
CEO · CFO · CCO · CMO · COO · CPO · CSO · CBO. Managing Directors and Country Leads · Board Chairs and Non-Executive Directors
Shortlist within 3–5 weeks of brief.
Luminary AdvisoryBefore you commit capital, we assess whether the management team can deliver the plan you are underwriting. We map the existing team against the value creation thesis, identify where capability runs out, and quantify what the leadership build will cost in time and money — so it sits in your model rather than surfacing in month nine. Where the answer is that a key person needs replacing, we have the successor mapped before you close.
Mergers create two of everything. Carve-outs inherit products and people but no C-suite, because finance, quality, regulatory and commercial all lived at group level. We design the structure that should exist, assess who in the business can fill it, and appoint against what is left — usually against a TSA clock.
Independent, evidenced assessment of an existing leadership team: complementarity, behavioural fit against the plan, single points of failure, and who is ready for the next stage versus who has already outgrown their seat. Delivered as a board-usable document, not a personality report.
We support data partnerships through our network across real world evidence, real world data and AI businesses in the US and Europe; facilitate commercial collaborations with biotechnology firms; and advise through M&A where leadership capability is part of the thesis. Our HR advisory covers organisational design, restructuring, reward benchmarking and culture.
Pre-deal diligence · Post-merger and carve-out organisation design · Leadership team assessment · Succession planning · Data and commercial partnerships · M&A leadership advisory
Luminary TeamsOnce leadership is in place, the plan lives or dies on the layer beneath it. We build out functional teams and business units so that structure, capability and sequencing match the strategy the leadership team has just committed to — not the org chart the business happened to have.
The work blends change management with functional depth. We advise on how a team should be structured and in what order to hire before we start hiring, because a commercial team built in the wrong sequence burns twelve months and a lot of goodwill.
Teams built to execute a go-to-market strategy, enter new geographies and scale revenue — from sales leadership through business development to field and account teams.
From R&D through digital infrastructure: product development, operations leadership, data science and machine learning, epidemiology, computational biology and engineering.
Medical affairs, regulatory affairs, quality assurance and pharmacovigilance leadership — the functions that determine whether a product reaches market and stays there.
The backbone: financial control and FP&A, HR and people leadership, and the planning capability that makes decisions executable.
Chosen by the large majority of our clients — delivers a first shortlist within ten working days. Every shortlist is built on evidenced achievement, behavioural and cultural alignment, commercial relevance, diversity and location fit.
3–4 weeks per appointment. Multi-role programmes of twenty or more scoped and delivered in 12–14 weeks.
Luminary InterimSome capability is needed within weeks, for a defined period, or at a cost point that does not justify permanent headcount. We deploy proven interim leaders and specialists into client teams — sourced, vetted and managed by us, accountable to you.
When a seat is empty and the plan cannot wait, an interim executive buys you time without losing momentum. We place interim CFOs, COOs, CCOs, Managing Directors and integration leads into the situations where they earn their day rate: the gap between a departure and the permanent successor, day one of a carve-out with no standalone team, a post-merger integration nobody owns, a finance function that has to be exit-ready in two quarters, or a business where performance has slipped and the board needs an experienced pair of hands in the building this month rather than next.
Our interim leaders have run the situation before. Many go on to take the role permanently or join the board — and where they do not, they hand over to the successor we have been searching for in parallel.
Below the leadership layer, we deploy experienced contract professionals across the functions life sciences businesses most often run short of:
Sales and business development leadership, market access and pricing specialists, launch and go-to-market cover during a scale-up or a gap.
Financial controllers, FP&A, technical accounting and reporting support through audit, transaction and integration workloads.
Programme and project leadership, supply chain, manufacturing and site operations, and change delivery during transformation.
Medical writing for clinical study reports, regulatory documentation and publications; regulatory strategy and submission preparation across US and European frameworks; quality audit, QMS design and remediation; and pharmacovigilance from case processing and signal detection through to QPPV cover.
Embedded data scientists, statistical programmers and analytics capability for organisations building evidence functions faster than they can hire them.
We work across the US and Europe, with the regulatory and cultural fluency each market requires.
Interim CFO, COO, CCO & Managing Director · Integration and turnaround leadership · Commercial & market access · Finance and FP&A · Operations, supply chain & programme delivery · Medical writing · Regulatory affairs & submissions · Quality assurance · Pharmacovigilance & QPPV · Biometrics & data science