We built two briefs this week that I want to walk you through, because they're a clean illustration of the two situations Waypoint actually gets used for. One client is making a move she's never made before, with no network on the ground. The other is making a move that looks small from the outside but is, in reality, very high-stakes and very political.
Names changed, both clients green-lit me sharing the work. Numbers and outcomes are real. Let's go.
Sarah, finance director, London → Dubai
Sarah's husband got an offer in Dubai. Senior tech role, three-year package, the kind of money you don't say no to. Sarah herself has been Finance Director at a PE-backed mid-market business for three years, carrying P&L responsibility for a £180m turnover. She's good at what she does. She also had no contacts in Dubai. None.
Here's the thing about senior moves to a new market. Most career advice tells you to "build your network." That's six months of LinkedIn DMs, stale coffee meetings, and at the end of it you've got a slightly bigger LinkedIn graph and not a single seat on a shortlist. Sarah didn't have six months. The husband's role started in 90 days. So the network advice was useless.
"Build your network" is six months of LinkedIn DMs and stale coffee meetings. At the end of it your LinkedIn graph is bigger and you still don't have a seat on a shortlist.
What we actually did
We mapped 32 finance-leadership seats across DIFC and the free zones. PE-backed mid-market businesses (her sweet spot). A couple of family offices. Regional offices of European fund managers. Two fintechs that were past Series B and starting to professionalise their finance function. We deliberately skipped the obvious LinkedIn-listed ones — those have already been scraped by every recruiter in the region by Tuesday morning. We went one layer deeper.
For each company, we named the people. CFO, COO, head of HR, in some cases the founding partner. Verified emails. Verified that the named contact was still actually in the seat (people move; if the data is two months old it's wrong). We don't ship contacts that resolve to marketing@ addresses. That's not a brief, that's a list.
Then the signals layer. This is where Waypoint earns its keep. We don't claim insider intelligence — nobody is whispering in our ear about which CFOs are about to resign. What we do is read public signal patterns at scale and surface the companies where the patterns suggest an opening is forming. Three of the 32 fit that profile:
- One regional bank had publicly announced a strategic restructure the prior quarter and the trade press had quoted the CEO talking about needing to "rebuild commercial finance discipline." That's not a job ad. It's a pattern that, in the regional banking sector, almost always pulls a new finance hire behind it inside two quarters.
- One PE-backed logistics business had just announced a bolt-on acquisition. Post-acquisition finance reshuffles inside 12 months are statistically the rule, not the exception. The seat may not exist yet, but the conditions for the seat exist.
- One family office had hired a new chief investment officer in the previous quarter (announced on their site). New CIOs in family-office structures almost always pull in a CFO-grade finance lead inside 6-9 months. The pattern's repeatable.
None of those is a tip-off. They're publicly observable signals that, taken together, suggest pressure is building on the finance function. The point of Waypoint isn't to know things you can't — it's to read the signals you don't have time to read yourself, across 32 companies, in the time it takes to do five days' research.
What we didn't do
We didn't write Sarah a new CV. Hers was fine. We didn't tell her to fly out to Dubai for "exploratory coffees." She doesn't have time and neither does anyone she'd want to meet. We didn't tell her to "start engaging on Dubai LinkedIn" because that broadcasts intent without producing meetings, and at her level it can sometimes get back to her current employer faster than she'd want.
What happened
Brief delivered Friday. Outreach went out the following Monday, using the playbook we'd drafted for her — specific to each company, referencing the actual public context, asking for a 20-minute conversation rather than a job. By the end of the week, two of the three flagged companies had replied. One scheduled a call. That's not a placement and we'd never claim it is — what it is, is access. Three named contacts, three sets of public context, and a structured way in. Conversations happening. The rest is up to her.
That's how senior moves to a new market actually happen at speed. Not "build a network." Read the public signals, find the companies where pressure is building, and reach out as a peer before the role hits a job board.
Tom, creative director, London (sideways)
Different situation entirely. Tom is a Creative Director at one of the well-known London ad agencies. 11 years in. Well-paid. Reel that wins awards. On paper, no one would say he needs a job change.
Here's what he told me on intake. The agency had been quietly losing pitches for 18 months. The newest Creative Director hire (Tom's peer) had been put in charge of the two biggest accounts. The succession path Tom had been planning around — moving up to ECD when the current ECD retired — had been quietly handed to someone else through internal politics he hadn't seen coming. He needed to leave but he couldn't be seen looking. Especially not by the recruiter community, half of whom take referees from his current ECD.
This is the discreet senior search. It's harder than people think. Senior creative roles in London are filled almost entirely through warm intros. A posted CD role on a public job board is usually a cover — the agency has someone in mind, they're posting to satisfy HR. If you don't know which agencies are quietly looking and who's putting the word out, you're applying into closed shortlists.
The posted CD role is often a cover. The agency has someone in mind. The job board listing exists to satisfy HR.
What we actually did
We mapped 27 mid-to-large agencies across London, plus four production companies that had started staffing CD-grade creative roles in-house. We deliberately excluded the agencies Tom's current shop competes directly with on the same accounts — those are politically off-limits for now. We did include three brand-side roles at consumer companies who'd been pulling creative work in-house. That's a different kind of move and Tom hadn't considered it. Worth raising.
The intelligence layer was different from Sarah's. Less "who's hiring" and more "which agencies are in growth, which are in cuts, who just lost a big account, who just won one." All public signals, but signals most candidates don't have time to read systematically:
- Account moves and pitch wins/losses across the last quarter, all from trade press (Campaign, The Drum, Adweek, Little Black Book).
- Which agencies had hired a new CEO or MD in the last 12 months. Public news. New leadership in the senior chair almost always triggers a creative leadership refresh inside 18 months — new bosses bring in their own creative, it's how the industry works.
- Which independents had been bought by holding companies. Public M&A news. Post-acquisition senior-creative reshuffles tend to follow once the parent starts demanding brand integration.
- Two agencies whose ECDs had moved into "consultant" or "strategic advisor" titles on their public LinkedIn in the last 90 days. That's a soft public signal — sometimes nothing, often the precursor to a quiet exit.
Three of the 27 had what I'd call a clear pre-shake-up pattern visible in public signals. Two more had warm signals but nothing definitive. The brand-side option was the surprise — the brand had been hiring agency creative talent directly for the past 18 months, visible from their LinkedIn People page and from the trade-press coverage of their last few campaigns. A CD-level role hadn't been posted, but the pattern of past hires made one likely inside the next 6-12 months.
The discreet outreach playbook
For outreach, we built him a soft-touch sequence. No "hi, I'm looking for a job." That kind of message gets back to your current employer faster than people think, especially in advertising where the executive creative community is roughly 200 people in London.
Instead, structured around three things:
- "I admire your recent work" — specific piece, specific reaction. Not flattery. A peer-to-peer comment.
- "We have a mutual connection in [name]" — not always present, but used when it was.
- "Would love to hear how you're thinking about [specific thing they shipped]" — an invitation to a craft conversation, not a job conversation.
That kind of message lands in a creative leader's inbox as a peer reaching out, not a job-seeker. It's also defensible if word ever gets back to Tom's current ECD — "I was just having a coffee with a peer" is a normal thing for senior creatives to do.
What happened
He sent six messages. Three replied. Two of those moved to coffee meetings within ten days. Those are conversations, not offers — and that's the honest output of a 5-day brief. You don't get a placement out of one. You get the access that lets you have the conversations that lead to one.
That's a sideways move handled discreetly. Map the right shops. Read the public signals. Reach out as a peer, not an applicant.
What both of these have in common
Two completely different situations. One is moving 5,000 km with no contacts and a hard deadline. The other is staying in the same city, same industry, but needs to move sideways without their employer finding out.
What's the same: the work happens before the job is posted. By the time the role is on LinkedIn, the conversation has already been had with someone else. The seat is functionally filled. You can apply, but you're applying into something that's already been decided.
Waypoint's job is to put you in the conversation that decides the seat, not the application queue that finds out about it after.
What we don't do, and won't sell you
I want to be specific about the things we don't do, because most career services sell exactly these things and they don't move the needle at senior level:
- We didn't write Sarah a new CV. Hers was fine. A better CV doesn't open a door that's already shut.
- We didn't do interview prep with Tom. He's been in this industry 11 years; he knows how to do an interview. He needed access, not coaching.
- We didn't tell either of them to "rebuild their network" or "post more on LinkedIn." Both of them have hard deadlines and senior-level reasons not to broadcast their search publicly.
- We don't promise placement. We can't. Anyone who tells you they can guarantee a senior hire is either lying or working a single mandate they happen to have.
What we do is access. Specifically: which seats are open, who decides, and the playbook for reaching them. Five days for a Pro brief. 48 hours for a Discovery taster if you want to see how the work lands before you commit to the full thing.
If your situation looks like either of these — relocating into a market with no contacts, or moving sideways without your current employer noticing — that's exactly what Waypoint is built for.
Got a move you can't quite see yet?
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See the briefs →