ABOUT
The Onboarding Issue Is Clear
After more than 30 years leading a large executive search firm, Stéfan Danis noticed a troubling pattern. Too many highly qualified, motivated executives were failing within their first months—derailing careers and disrupting the organizations that hired them.
After an immense investment into recruitment process, the problem wasn’t the calibre of the talent — it's what happened after the hire. This includes flawed onboarding, weak integration, and the common mistakes that new leaders make early on. Market data reinforces this reality:
“40% of senior executives hired are pushed out, fail, or quit within 18 months.”
– Kevin Kelly, Heidrick & Struggles
The cost to the search firm to replace was enormous since replacements are typically at no charge. To the hiring organization, it’s even worse.
“Replacing an executive can cost between 2.5x to 10x their salary.”
– HBR & Forbes
Determined to reduce these risks, Stéfan began building a better way. Ted Nation joined him, and together they launched FASTFORWARD Onboarding—a process designed to set executives up for success from day one.
MANAGEMENT
FASTFORWARD Better Onboarding is led by the founders, Stéfan Danis and Ted Nation along with collaborators who support the business with guiding, IT support, design and administration.
Stéfan Danis
Stéfan is a corporate leader, best-selling author, TEDx speaker, and humanitarian. As CEO at Mandrake, a firm that successfully completed over 10,000 executive searches, Stéfan gained valuable insights on how organizations onboard their executive recruits. This revealing look at the industry seeded a desire to create an approach that would streamline executive success with better onboarding and a shortened time to contribution.
Outside of work, Stéfan is an enthusiastic athlete, running four 250km ultramarathons in the deserts of China, Egypt, Chile, and Antarctica. These experiences led to the writing of two books, Gobi Runner and Gobi Bold and seventy-five TEDx talks around the world. Both books offer strategies to build resilience.
Stéfan was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Legends of Canada for his ongoing executive coaching and earned the Paul Mulvihill humanitarian award for his contributions to help jobless executives gain employment. He started his career in marketing at P&G and is fluently bilingual.
