For interim and fractional executive firms
Your executive gets an honest read in week one, not month four.
Private voice conversations across the organization, and one written brief on what's actually true inside it — in hand before the first irreversible decision.
The exposure
The risk sits with you, not just the client.
The executive you place walks in with full authority and no history. Everyone they meet is auditioning, protecting a position, or waiting to see which way this goes. The candid conversation tends to happen around month four — after the restructure, after the leadership change, after the call that can't be quietly reversed.
Across roughly 20,000 executive placements, Heidrick & Struggles found a 40% failure rate. CEB, now Gartner, put roughly half of senior leaders as ineffective within eighteen months. That research covers executive hires broadly rather than interim engagements specifically — no one has published a clean interim-only figure. But the mechanism is the same one you already manage around, and you're the one holding the outcome.
The alternative isn't better information. It's a slow, unfocused listening period that reads as indecision — the thing every transition playbook warns against.
Where it fits
Where it sits in a 30/60/90.
Week one
One scoping call with you and your executive. We define what needs to be understood and which population gets invited.
Week one
Your executive sends one email from their own address. The employee list never leaves the company. Askd never sees it, never stores it, never contacts anyone directly.
Weeks two and three
Private five-minute voice conversations, on people's own time. No app, no login, no scheduling.
End of week three
The Askd Read on your executive's desk: what to protect, what to question, and who really has influence.
Everyone in the defined population is invited — this is a census within a scope you set, not a sample of the people who were already going to talk.
Your effort
One call and one introduction.
Commercials
Who pays. Answered first.
This is designed to be passed through to the client at cost as a separate line item, the way any third-party diagnostic in your engagement already is. If you'd rather the client contract Askd directly, that works too. If you'd rather build it into a fixed engagement price, that's your call.
What it should never be is a charge against your margin. That isn't how third-party services move through these agreements, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to make a sale easier.
$5,000–$10,000
Depending on population size. It sits well below the assessment and coaching line items already common in senior transitions.
Scope
The organization, not your executive.
Askd does not assess, rate, or report on the person you placed. The scope is the organization they've inherited. That's written into the engagement rather than left as an assurance.
If the Read surfaces something uncomfortable, it says so — but it says it about the business, in week three, while it's still cheap to act on.
Confidentiality and consent
Candor has to be designed.
- Every participant gives explicit recorded consent before the conversation begins, structured for all-party-consent states.
- Askd operates under your confidentiality terms and the client's. Nothing is retained for other purposes or used to train anything.
- Comments are de-identified. Leaders never receive recordings or a who-said-what file.
- Askd does not recruit from, or solicit, the population it interviews.
Who does the work
No analyst layer. No dashboard.
Ross Kaellner Founder
I spent fifteen years as a pastor and the years since in business development, and all of it rests on one skill: getting people to say the thing that comes after the polite first answer.
I read every conversation and write every Read myself.
I'm working with a small number of charter partners at an introductory rate, in exchange for the right to describe the work — anonymized, with your approval — to the firm after you. That's an introductory rate, not a pilot. The work is the same work.
Thirty minutes is enough to know.
We'll walk one live engagement of yours and decide together whether it fits.
Prefer to ask something first? Email Ross directly.