David Kolade leads retained executive search engagements across financial services, professional services, and emerging growth sectors, supporting the firm's cross-border engagement model.
David's practice focuses on senior commercial leadership appointments — chief commercial officers, country managers, regional commercial directors, and the C-suite roles where commercial credibility and execution capability matter most. His engagements span financial services organizations recruiting senior commercial talent, professional services firms building practice capability, and emerging growth businesses scaling their commercial leadership for the next stage of growth.
He is regularly engaged by boards conducting senior commercial appointments, by sponsors supporting portfolio company commercial leadership, and by founder-led businesses recruiting the experienced commercial leader who will scale the organization from the early growth phase through to institutional maturity. The judgment required to read commercial capability at the senior level — beyond track record into the underlying disciplines that produced it — is the through-line of his engagement portfolio.
David's practice also supports the firm's broader cross-border engagement model, working alongside Victor on international mandates where commercial leadership is the central capability requirement. The combination allows clients to engage Meridian for cross-border searches where the commercial dimension matters as much as the cross-border one.
David's engagement model is built around the discipline of commercial capability assessment. Strong commercial leaders combine several distinct skills — strategic clarity, channel execution, team building, financial discipline, customer relationship building — and his assessment process is structured to surface the specific combinations each client requires rather than the generic 'strong commercial leader' assessment that says little.
He places particular emphasis on the upstream briefing work that defines what success looks like for a given commercial appointment. The most consequential decisions in commercial search are made before the search begins — in the conversations that clarify what the role actually needs to deliver, against whom, and on what timeline — and David invests in this phase disproportionately.
“The strongest commercial leaders make decisions that look obvious in retrospect and were not obvious in advance. Reading that capability before it has been tested is the central judgment of commercial search.”
— David Kolade
