Executive recruitment for consumer brands
Chief Growth Officer Executive Search
for DTC and Consumer Brands
Most chief growth officer searches start with a title borrowed from big CPG and no P&L behind it. We define what the seat owns first, then introduce growth leaders who have scaled consumer brands from $100M to $500M+.
First interviews in 10 business days. Retained search.
Successful placements at top ecommerce and consumer brands
Chief Growth Officer vs. CMO vs. VP of Growth vs. Head of Growth
These titles sit close together on an org chart and lead to very different hires. What separates them is which revenue levers move to this person. It might be pricing and new markets, or it might only be the marketing budget. Get it wrong and the search fails in one of two ways. You hire a CMO with a new title when you needed someone to own the growth P&L. Or you hire a CGO when you needed a VP of growth to run customer acquisition and build the team.
If retail accounts and trade spend are the real gap, you need a chief commercial officer search instead. We settle the scope on the intake call, before we contact any candidates.
Why Chief Growth Officer searches
stall at consumer brands
CGO searches stall because growth already has several owners. Marketing holds acquisition, finance holds pricing, and the CEO holds the big bets.
Nobody has written down which of those move to the new seat.
Six problems come up most often.
A CMO job under a CGO title
The job description is the CMO role with "growth" swapped in, while pricing stays with finance and the budget stays with marketing. You pay a C-suite salary for a reporting job, and your new executive leaves inside 18 months.
A head of growth with a bigger title
The candidate ran Meta and Google well at a $30M brand but has never managed a CMO or set a plan across categories. At $150M, the job is deciding what the team works on, not doing the work.
Big CPG pedigree, no team behind them
The candidate ran growth for a global brand with a 40-person team and an insights function behind every decision. At a $150M brand they inherit eight people and a Shopify export, and the playbook stalls without the support it was built on.
Built 0 to 1, hired to scale
Founding-stage growth leaders are good at finding the first engine. A $200M brand needs someone who keeps that engine compounding while finding the second one.
A SaaS growth model on a physical product
The candidate talks fluently about CAC, LTV, and CRO funnels, but their LTV never had COGS, returns, or inventory in it. The math holds up until the first quarter of real margin data.
The CEO keeps the final call
You hire a CGO to decide where the next $100M comes from, then approve every new category and market yourself. The role shrinks to execution oversight.
Coca-Cola created a chief growth officer seat in 2017 by combining global marketing, corporate strategy, and customer and commercial leadership into one team. When that CGO retired in 2019, the company split the job back up. Marketing went to a new CMO, strategy to the CFO, and commercial to the COO. The lesson holds at a $150M consumer brand. A CGO seat is a bundle of levers, and if you can't name what's in the bundle, it comes apart.
First interviews in 10 business days. Retained search.
Which growth leadership tier does your brand need?
Revenue stage, the team the hire inherits, and what they answer for tell you more than the title does.
Scaling an engine that works, or finding the next one: which CGO fits?
Where your next stage of growth comes from changes the CGO job more than revenue does.
A chief growth officer who has only done one of these will misread the other in the first two quarters.
What a great DTC and CPG chief growth officer looks like
At this level the job is choosing where growth comes from and getting the rest of the leadership team to plan against it.
We vet for the decisions a candidate owned and the numbers that moved, then look at title history.
What separates a good CGO from a great one at a consumer brand
How a CGO strengthens the leadership team you already have
A strong chief growth officer gives the rest of the C-suite one growth number to plan against,
in the same units the P&L uses.
Your CMO gets a clear brief
Brand and demand work arrives with a target customer and the margin it has to earn, so your CMO stops defending the budget line by line.
Your CFO gets a growth plan in P&L units
Every new initiative comes with contribution margin and a break-even date attached, so the forecast your CFO builds matches the growth plan.
Your head of growth gets one set of priorities
Priorities come from one owner, and the team spends the week on execution instead of relitigating the roadmap.
What a Chief Growth Officer costs at a DTC or CPG brand
Published CGO salary data disagrees with itself by more than 3x.
For a $150M consumer brand, none of it describes the seat you are hiring.
Salary sites pull from very different samples. The same title covers a startup's first senior marketing hire and a Fortune 500 executive running a global portfolio, and each site mixes those in different proportions.
Averaging those four gives about $304,000.
That number sits between a startup title and an enterprise one, so it doesn't help you set a budget.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't track chief growth officers as a separate job. Its chief executives line includes C-suite roles such as COOs, and it's the closest match for a CGO who reports to the CEO. Chief executives earned a $213,990 national median in May 2025, with the top 10% above $507,730. BLS wages leave out equity and most bonus pay. Geography moves the number more than most founders expect.
For a CGO search, the 75th to 90th percentile is the range that matters, because that's where we see growth leaders at $100M+ brands land. Chicago and Dallas pay more than New York at the median. At the 90th percentile, New York pulls ahead at $709,670, about $110,000 above Chicago.
Our Chief Growth Officer executive search process
1 Client Intake Call
The intake call scopes the role before sourcing begins. First we settle which version of the seat you need. It might be a VP of growth running acquisition and retention, a CMO carrying the marketing P&L and the brand, a chief growth officer who owns the growth P&L, or a president with a full business mandate. Then we get specific about what transfers with the title. Pricing authority, the growth budget, new market decisions, and authority over the CMO either move to this hire or stay with the CEO. The search changes completely depending on which.
We map your setup: revenue stage, channel mix, the growth model you run today, retention and subscription economics, the reporting lines across marketing and ecommerce, and where you expect the next stage of growth to come from. You bring the business context. We write the executive hiring profile around it before we contact a single candidate.
2 First Interviews in 10 Days
Within 10 business days, your first interviews are on the calendar with growth executives screened against the brief we agreed on. We evaluate each profile on the decisions the candidate owned: growth bets they funded or killed, LTV and payback they moved, and the leadership team they built at a consumer brand near your stage.
We prioritize leaders who have run growth at 9-figure consumer brands over those whose playbooks come from SaaS or financial services. We also search across titles. Many strong CGO candidates currently hold a CMO, VP of growth, or general manager title, and for ARMRA we sourced across all three. Our executive network is how we reach sitting growth leaders at DTC and CPG brands who aren't looking.
3 Weekly Refinement
Executive searches move as your read on the role sharpens. We provide a shared portal that tracks candidates, feedback, and interview stages in one place, and run weekly calls to recalibrate with you and your hiring committee.
Each week we tighten the profile based on what the interviews surfaced. Founders often discover in interview three that they scoped the role one tier too high or too low. It usually comes out when a candidate asks who owns pricing and nobody has a clear answer. Catching that in week two costs far less than catching it after an offer.
4 White-Glove Talent Solutions
We schedule interviews across your leadership team and run structured reference checks with former direct reports as well as former bosses. Those direct-report calls show how the candidate leads other executives when nobody senior is watching. The leadership assessment uses your own business problems. The candidate works through your cohort data, your current growth plan, and the bet you are least sure about.
We run compensation negotiation as an intermediary, including bonus and equity, so you and your incoming CGO never haggle directly in the final week. We stay involved through onboarding so the hire ramps into the leadership team instead of around it.
Chief Growth Officer and growth leadership placements
Why consumer brands choose Constant Hire for
Chief Growth Officer recruitment
DTC, ecommerce, and CPG only
Consumer brands are our entire client list. Generalist executive search firms fit consumer searches in around financial services, healthcare, and SaaS clients.
Consumer brand growth depth
Our executive recruiting team works with 8- and 9-figure consumer brands. We know the difference between a CGO who took a supplement brand past $200M on subscription economics and a SaaS growth executive who has never priced a physical product.
1,000+ consumer brand operators we know personally
We know sitting CGOs, CMOs, and VPs of growth across DTC and CPG personally. Founders come to us for introductions they cannot make themselves.
First interviews in 10 business days
First interviews start within 10 business days of the intake call. Most placements close within 45 to 60 days, and generalist firms typically take 90 to 120.
How Constant Hire compares to other CGO search options
Founders usually weigh two alternatives: a large generalist executive search firm, or an in-house talent team stretched across every function.The reason to hire a search firm is access. The chief growth officer you need is employed somewhere, outside your network, and not answering recruiter InMail.
What DTC experts are saying about us.
If you're looking for a bad ass recruiter for roles like Head of Growth, Director of Performance Creative, Ops, he's your guy.
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What does a chief growth officer executive search firm do?
A chief growth officer executive search firm runs a retained search to hire a CGO. It sources and vets passive candidates, meaning employed C-level executives who aren't applying to roles. A specialist firm also scopes the mandate first: which revenue levers the CGO owns, and which decisions stay with the CEO.
What does a chief growth officer do at a DTC or CPG brand?
A CGO owns where the next stage of revenue comes from. That covers growth strategies across categories, channels, and markets, pricing and offer architecture, and retention and subscription economics. They also decide which growth bets get funded. The CGO sets direction for the CMO and VP of growth rather than running campaigns themselves.
What are the responsibilities of a chief growth officer?
The core responsibilities are the growth P&L, cohort LTV and CAC payback, pricing and offers, and new category or market expansion. Many CGOs also share product development and the innovation pipeline with the product team. They hire the growth leadership team and present the growth plan to the CEO and board.
What is the difference between a CMO and a CGO?
A chief marketing officer owns the marketing P&L, brand, and demand generation. A CGO owns the wider growth P&L, including pricing, retention economics, and new markets, with brand as one input. At brands that have both, the CMO often reports to the CGO. Below $100M in revenue, a strong CMO or VP of growth usually covers the job, depending on whether brand or acquisition is the bigger gap.
Is chief growth officer a real C-suite title?
Yes. Coca-Cola, Mars, and Kimberly-Clark have all used it, and The CMO Survey rates chief growth officer and chief customer officer as the most likely successors to the CMO title. A CGO sits in the C-suite and reports to the CEO. The title only works when real revenue levers come with it.
When does a consumer brand need a chief growth officer?
Usually past $100M in revenue, once growth depends on more than one engine, such as a new category, retail entry, or international markets. The clearest trigger is pricing, retention, and expansion decisions landing on the CEO's desk every week. Below that range, a VP of growth or a CMO usually fits better.
How much does a chief growth officer earn in the US?
Published averages range from $151,203 on ZipRecruiter to $500,294 on Glassdoor, because the title covers very different jobs. BLS has no CGO line. Its chief executives line had a $213,990 national median in May 2025, and New York's 90th percentile reached $709,670. At a $100M+ brand, budget at or above your metro's 75th percentile for base salary.
Should we hire a full-time or fractional CGO?
Full-time when the growth bets, pricing, and retention economics need a permanent owner on the leadership team, usually past $100M. Fractional when you need someone a few days a month to set the growth plan and KPIs and scope your next senior hire. That typically means $10M to $50M in revenue, with a head of growth or VP of growth running execution.
How long does a CGO executive search take?
Generalist firms typically take 90 to 120 days from kickoff to placement. We present a vetted shortlist within 10 business days, and most placements close within 45 to 60 days. Our ARMRA chief growth officer search took 58 days end to end, after the brand had spent close to a year searching on its own.
How do I choose the right executive search firm for a CGO hire?
Look for category depth before firm size. Ask how many growth leadership roles they filled at consumer brands in the last 12 months, and which tier they think you need and why. Also ask whether the person who pitched you runs the search day to day. A firm that can't explain CAC payback will struggle to screen for it.
Let's find the Chief Growth Officer
your brand needs to scale
then put qualified growth executives on your calendar in 10 business days.
15-30 minutes • No Obligation • First interviews in 10 business days • Retained model