[Top Giver Series] Crafting Winning Teams for Growth With Patrick Ropella

Patrick Ropella is the Founder and Chairman of Ropella 360, a global executive search and advisory firm specializing in connecting transformational leaders with private equity and mid-market companies. With over 35 years of experience, he has contributed to the growth of major global corporations such as Dow, General Electric, BASF, Nike, and Johnson & Johnson. As the author of The Right Hire and Pathways to Private Equity Partnerships, Patrick’s C-suite and investor insights are featured in hundreds of publications worldwide. His strategic vision and expertise have made him a trusted advisor to leaders across industries.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:35] Patrick Ropella shares how he started in executive search and the importance of specialization
• [6:35] Patrick’s top book recommendations for leadership and business mastery
• [9:17] Key relationship-building principles behind exceptional sales outcomes
• [15:29] How the Smart Search System helps companies attract and keep A-players
• [18:28] The story of Nike’s expert-driven innovation think tank
• [24:33] A look into the private equity “buy and build” model and how it works
• [31:22] Why water treatment matters for both human health and acquisition strategy
• [38:22] Breaking down the Action Leadership Formula — accountability, communication, trust
• [50:26] Patrick’s take on how fusion energy could transform the global power landscape

In this episode…

The path to extraordinary success often starts in unexpected places — from humble beginnings to high-stakes boardrooms. Some people manage to rise without the usual credentials, building influence, trust, and transformative relationships along the way. What enables someone to become a connector who impacts leaders, industries, and entire organizations?

According to Patrick Ropella, a renowned leadership strategist, the real advantage comes from mastering human connection rather than relying on traditional qualifications. He highlights how deep listening, specialization, and long-term trust outperform transactional sales and recruiting. This approach creates lasting impact by aligning the right leaders with the right missions. Over decades, he developed a system for identifying A-players, ensuring cultural fit, and supporting leadership transformation across complex industries. His stories — from helping global brands innovate to supporting frontier-technology teams — show how clarity, accountability, and relationship-building shape high-performance outcomes.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Patrick Ropella, Founder and Chairman of Ropella 360, to discuss building elite teams through authentic leadership. They explore how to identify A-players, the principles behind his Smart Search System, and what drives lasting transformation in organizations. Patrick also shares insights on trust, communication, and scaling through strong relationships.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Patrick Ropella on LinkedIn
• Ropella 360
• The Smart Search System
• System to Streamline Executive Searches with Precision
• Patrick Ropella’s Books on Hiring and PE Insights
• Ropella Gallery D’arte
• Commonwealth Fusion Systems
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Good to Great: A Study of Management Strategies of Companies with Lasting Growth by Jim Collins
• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Ram Charan, Larry Bossidy, and Charles Burck
• The Right Hire by Patrick B. Ropella
• What Color Is Your Parachute?: Your Guide to a Lifetime of Meaningful Work and Career Success by Richard N. Bolles
• Buy & Build CEO: Leveraging Private Equity to Build a Winning Global Business by Ted Clark
• Pathways to Private Equity Partnerships by Patrick B. Ropella
• The Private Equity Playbook: Management’s Guide To Working With Private Equity By Adam Coffey
• Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take A Chance On You by Suneel Gupta
• Deconstructing Conflict: Understanding Family Business, Shared Wealth and Power by Doug Baumoel and Blaire Trippe

Related episodes:

• “P90X: Earning Food & Rent Money as a Mime to over $500 million in Sales- with Tony Horton [Business Inspiration]” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[One Question] Dealing With Grief While Running A Startup with Wade Foster of Zapier” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Craft a Compensation Plan that Attracts and Motivates the Right People For Your Company With Verne Harnish, Owner Scaling Up” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building Wealth and Scaling Strategies With Richard Wilson of Family Office Club” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Sales is a conclusion of relationship building. Relationship building is the core of everything I am.”
• “If you focus on hiring A players, you’re never going to have problems with execution.”
• “We’re not headhunters or acquisition hunters. We are super connectors — it’s all about building relationships and creating opportunity intersections.”
• “The less you know about the desk you’re working, the more questions you’ll ask — and the more they’ll love you.”
• “Accountability, communication, and trust — those are what keep relationships together and make them last.”

Action steps:

1. Specialize in a niche to maximize impact: Focus on one industry or expertise area to build deeper credibility and attract higher-value opportunities.
2. Prioritize relationships over transactions: Connect with people on a genuine level to create long-lasting partnerships rather than one-off interactions.
3. Ask great questions and listen with curiosity: Use thoughtful questions to uncover insights, build trust, and turn knowledge gaps into opportunities to learn.
4. Surround yourself with A-players and lead with clarity: Build teams of high performers and support them with strong communication, trust, and accountability.
5. Invest in continuous learning and mentorship: Grow through books, mentors, and ongoing education to avoid stagnation and stay ahead in your field.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Patrick Ropella. You can check him out at Ropella360.com and Patrick, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. You know, it’s interesting we were talking before about Tony Horton, and Tony Horton was one of my favorite interviews because he was so down to earth. And what I like hearing about some of these stories are not like just the successes, but the challenges. Right? And he talks about how he was, I won’t even ruin it. People go watch Tony Horton, see some of the stuff he had to go through to get to where he was. Another good one was the co-founder of Zapier and their journey with Wade Foster. And it’s also interesting, some of these companies I had the one of the co-founders of Pipedrive at the time, I think they were 10,000 customers. Now they have over 100,000 customers. So to see their growth through that and just a lot of great stories on InspiredInsider.com, you can check it out. 

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution and production. Number two, we’re an easy button for companies gifting, so we make gifting and staying top of mind. Your clients, partners, prospects, even, you know, really gifts to staff from a culture perspective. And Patrick is the ultimate expert on this. And, you know, people just give us a list of their addresses. 

There are people, we do everything else, and it’s not like we send one off gifts. We like to send a campaign of gifts. So think of a gift every 3 to 4 months for 3 to 4 years. Right. And so, you know, Patrick, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it stress free for companies to help them build amazing relationships. And really, that’s the number one thing in my life.

I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships, and personally, I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I admire, share with the world what they’re working on on the podcast, and then send them sweet treats in the mail. So check out Rise25.com, email [email protected]. 

I am really excited to introduce Patrick Ropella. He’s over 35 years of experience in founding and steering a global leading executive search firm, a private equity services firm, and an information research firm. You can check all that Ropella360.com. He established Ropella Equity Ventures as his own PE investment firm, as I was saying. But Patrick has really contributed to the growth of some major, major global corporate technology organizations such as General Electric, Georgia-Pacific, Sony, Tyco, Nike, Clorox, Revlon, Baxter Labs, Johnson & Johnson. I mean, I can keep going on and on. But, you know, Patrick, thank you for joining me.

Patrick Ropella: 03:21

Thank you for having me. And much appreciated, and looking forward to this.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:24

Let’s just start off and you have a really fascinating background. But let’s start off with Ropella 360. And I know you have different arms to it and what you’re doing there.

Patrick Ropella: 03:35

Yeah. So we started executive search 40 years ago, started Ropella as a company about 35 years ago when I first got into the business. The mentor that hired me, I went to a recruiting firm and said, hey, I’m looking to do something else. I’ve been a serial entrepreneur most of my career and I’m now interested in doing something different, but I want to stay in sales and marketing. Can you get me some interviews? He says, sure, we can do that. He said, how about being a headhunter? And I said, no, you don’t understand. I want to be in sales and marketing. And he says, well, that’s the same thing. You don’t get it. This is all we do. Sales and marketing. I said, okay, that’s interesting. So I joined the firm, but it took me a few months to start because I had to wind down some of the other businesses that I owned. 

And when I showed up the first day of work, he says, well, what desk do you want to work? And what do you mean, what desk do I want to work? He said, well, you need to be a specialist if you want to be hugely successful. Specialize. Well, that makes a lot of sense to me. So I said, all right, I’ll think about it. And he said, why don’t you just take one of these desks that we have the chemical industry, for example, and start there? And I said, what are you talking? I don’t know nothing about chemicals. That’s ridiculous. I never took any chemistry in high school or college. I’d be clueless. And he says, perfect. The less you know about the desk you’re working, The more questions you’ll ask, the more questions you ask of the executives you’re recruiting or the clients you’re serving, the more they’ll love you. 

Basically, how to win friends and influence people. You talked about gifting. That’s a powerful way to do it. If you apply that in connection at the hip to asking people to talk about what they want to talk about most, which is usually themselves, that’s the winning recipe. So that’s that’s how I got started. And now, 35 years later, you know, five years of working with this first firm and then 35 years of working on my own, we’ve become the world’s largest, most well recognized £400 gorilla of the chemical industry, executive search. So that’s where we do most of our work. But we also do a lot of our work in what you would describe as general industrials. With a lot of those companies you mentioned, they’re not necessarily into chemicals, but they’re involved in manufacturing something. So general industrials corporate technology manufacturers as their core.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:55

You know, you mentioned a couple of things here, which I think are really instructive. One, I wish someone told me that early on about really specializing in niching. That’s such an important lesson. I still talk to a lot of people. I’m sure you do too, about still struggling with that and how important that is.

And then, you know, the second piece is just asking questions and caring about the other person. I love the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’m not sure. I’m curious. Any other favorite books resources on your end that you’ve liked throughout the years for leadership or business?

Patrick Ropella: 06:33

Oh, you know, thinking, Think and Grow Rich, you know, and How to Win Friends and Influence People is the foundation that every high school kid in. At a minimum, every college kid should be forced to read. But then as you start growing and developing your career, understanding how to be either a part of helping grow great companies, or being the leader who is responsible for that. It’s going to lead you to, you know, Good to Great. You know for sure. Good to Great by Jim Collins is probably one of the best, most recognized books for, you know, building great companies in that book applies whether you’re building great corporations or nonprofits or teams like NFL teams. 

The teams with the best talent win. That’s a sports metaphor, but it applies in corporate America or in nonprofits, or even in a church just as equally. And so I’ve spent my whole career focusing heavily on reading. Books are all about execution, like Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy incredibly good books. They talk extensively in that book about the power of not strategy. The power of execution and how important people are to the center core of, you know, execution. If you have B players or C players on your team, you’re going to know you’ve got problems with execution very fast. 

But if you focus on hiring a players, you’re never going to have problems with execution. Because a players are masters of execution. They are performance driven results. Stats tell me how I’m doing. I don’t need you to tell me what I’m doing wrong, because I’m smart enough to realize that. Tell me how I can do better. You know, you got eight players when all they’re asking about is, how can I do better? And that’s the power of execution. Having the right people on the team, which goes back to good. To great. Identify the bus. Get the right seats on the bus, then get the right people in the right seats.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:36

Yeah. You know, I’m looking pulling us up. I feel like I’ve heard of this book. I. I need to add this to my audible Patrick, which is Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. That’s a great suggestion. I love that great book. I want to hear about the evolution of your services, and we’ll dig deep into. I know you have a lot of things to talk about hiring a players. You have a lot of things to talk about leadership, transformation and then the acquisition hunting side.

But talk about the evolution of okay, I could see how you started in the executive search. At what point do you add these other service lines and how did that come about?

Patrick Ropella: 09:17

So, I learned very early in life that sales is not sales. Sales is a conclusion of relationship building. Relationship building is the core of everything I am. And you’re going to hear that as we talk about this from the entry level, we all call it sales. Go out and convince the customer they need what you’ve got, and then take them out for dinner and start building a relationship.

No no, no. Focus on building the relationship and the sale will take care of itself. Completely flipping that on its head. It’s easy to say that it’s not easy to do until you mature. Young people are not relationship builders on steroids.

They grow into those roles over time and experience. But when you build relationships in the executive search model, everyone thinks you’re building it with the client, and you’re placing executives into the client’s organization. And the executives you’re placing are just part of the package. They’re the transaction that you’re carrying to the company. No it’s not. Relationships are just as important on the hiring side for the candidates as they are for the clients. And it’s funny how as you evolve from filling entry level roles, sales reps, chemists, engineers in these companies you’re working with and you’re young in the business, you don’t think of the candidates as anything more than the transactional component of, you know, filling the cert. But as you get more experience and you start climbing up the ladder, you’re working with hiring managers as candidates, managers, directors who are also involved in hiring prospective clients. 

So very quickly, you have to wait a minute. I need to treat these people, these hiring candidates, these talented people just like their clients and give them just as much value as I do the clients because guess what? Tomorrow they might be a client. And when I started thinking like that, my approach to treating the candidates was transformational. And it became clear because we kept getting repeat business from the candidates who are saying, you know what? All the headhunters I work with always treated me like I was just a piece of meat, like all the other candidates that they had as alternative pieces of meat. But you made me feel like I was a super important part of this process. You made it clear that it’s important for me to make the right career decision. Just as importantly, it is for the client to make the right hiring decision. So I wrote a book called The Right Hire, and in it I talked heavily about the right career. They’re both hand in glove. 

If you ever read What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles, he nails it. He talks about the importance of understanding where you would fit in best as you go through career transition, especially for middle aged people that are leaving a career that they got trapped into early on because it was just they fell into it, but they didn’t really realize it was never really a good fit for their personality, their skill sets, the location. You know, they just weren’t passionate about it, but they were trapped in it because they kept climbing the ladder. And then they realized they were tired of being trapped and they wanted to do something completely different. The right hire and the right fit are equally important. And so that’s all about relationship building. So how did I transfer from all of that on the executive search side to these other businesses? When I realized Realize that we’re dealing with people, whether we’re looking for executives to put into corporations, or we’re looking for board members to put into private equity firms, or we’re looking for subject matter expert consultants who can serve in interim consulting roles for either corporations or private equity, or we’re looking for people to do acquisition, hunting and more. 

When we’re looking for these people, we’re just super connectors. We’re not headhunters, we’re not acquisition hunters. We’re not, you know, interim executive placement. No, we are super connectors. And it’s all about just building relationships and getting to know these people and what’s important to them. What they’re interested in as people is what creates opportunity intersections. And when you stop thinking about the fees and the transactions that you’re involved in, you start focusing on, hey, how can I help you? You become a world changer. And that’s what differentiates us significantly from the great majority of people we compete with. The testimonials, the endorsements we get say, hey, you know what is really unique? They’re extremely well connected in the industries that we’re involved in. They have incredible processes for what they deliver, whether it be executive search or company search, etc. but they’re just incredible relationship builders. 

If you want somebody to help connect you to people you can’t get through doors to, these guys are so great at relationship building, they can open up any door to anybody. That’s who you want to work with. And once I figured that all out, it was very easy for me to go. You know what? I can sell executive search services to Nike, Johnson and Johnson, all these big companies. But I can also sell those same services to some really important, really awesome middle market companies that have serial entrepreneurs who are rock stars in their industries and have a lot of fun, too. And often I make a greater impact when I’m serving the middle market companies, then I do the big companies because I’m dealing with CEOs that have incredible world changing capabilities that could, in the next five years, be a public company that could be a private equity acquisition. And with that, you know, funding and support become incredibly great companies. So I love working with small to medium sized companies as well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:55

Patrick, talk about so we’re looking if you’re watching and listening to the audio, there is a video component. And we’re on Ropella360 website. If you want to check out the book you can go to ropella360.com/the-right-hire/. And you can see the book here. And I’d love for you to talk about. And there’s some incredible testimonials here from we have CEO of Proctor and Proctor and Gamble, the CEO/Chairman of Dow Chemical Company. And in the book you do talk about The Smart Search System. Can you talk a little bit about that.

Patrick Ropella: 15:29

Yeah. So the smart search system was a book that took, you know, a system that took me about 15 years to really refine to the level where I now show it, the smart search system to prospective clients who are looking for people for board seats or for senior executive roles. You know, the people that report to the C-suite or the C-suite, leaders who are hiring people around them. And or for interim executives, etc. It’s incredibly unique because I focus it on attracting a players, and that is not something the great majority of people on the planet understand how to do. If you’re an A player, you understand the importance of how you make decisions and how you consider opportunities and how you reject all those opportunities, or you make decisions to pass on things and it’s often on a unique set of circumstances. 

A players will say, I’m interested in making a career change, or I’m interested in hiring another person to help me grow this company based on the relationship building skills of these people. So a lot of soft skills stuff based on their ability to communicate performance and energy, their ability to lead as part of a team, roll up their sleeves and get the team excited to win a Super Bowl. These are all soft skills. You know the how they think about making a career transition or hiring somebody else’s. It’s got to be a cultural fit, not only for me, the person who’s going to be doing that work, but it’s important for the team that’s going to hire me that I’m a cultural fit. But it’s also got to be a cultural fit for me, a leadership fit. 

I’ve got to know that the people I’m going to be working with, I’m going to really enjoy working for, and that I can count on them to get my back and to partner with me on achieving the goals that they want to accomplish there at that new company. This is dramatically different than hiring somebody just to fill a hole. Everyone talks about filling these searches, placing these people. We don’t talk about it. We talk about solving searches. We talk about understanding the ideal leadership profile and having a clear sense of where you want to be five years from now, and what are the types of people that are going to get you there faster with less problems? Those are a players and a players are Super Bowl champions. How do you get them? Good luck with that. If you don’t know how to communicate the way they think.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:03

You know, talk about Nike for a second and what happened with them. And I’m just going to point people to you can check out Ropella360.com, The Smart Search System, if you want to dig a little bit deeper because you can see there’s, you know, sourcing, marketing, assessing recruiting and retention and transformation. And there’s different kind of stages here. But what happened with Nike?

Patrick Ropella: 18:26

Yeah. So that’s a really good segue. Nike. Think of them as a recruiting organization. Could recruit anybody. What the heck would they need a headhunter to help them with recruiting for? They’ve got Michael Jordan, they’ve got Tiger Woods, they’ve got some of the best athletes on the planet already as their ambassadors. They’ve got world class talent because it’s very easy for them to recruit. But they were building out a new innovation team, what they were calling an innovation kitchen. They wanted to get beyond t shirts and tennis shoes and get into electronics, wearables, fabrics that are going to adapt to the players temperature and sweat and all those kind of issues.

They wanted to transform their manufacturing globally from kids in sweatshops in Asia, which they were starting to get beat up over, to. Let’s use robotics and technology and bring a lot of those jobs back to the US, which is what they’ve now done. And how do you do that if you don’t have an innovation think tank? Nike didn’t have an innovation think tank. They had some smart people that were developing tennis shoes and t-shirts and clothes and that kind of thing, but they wanted to do a whole new level and they wanted to look at polymers, plastics, specialty chemicals. They wanted to look at electronics. They wanted to look at all of these other technology bases and say, let’s bring the world’s best scientists and innovators from those companies and help us re retrofit our manufacturing, our innovation and our technology. So that took them out of their comfort zone. 

They didn’t have headhunters or recruiters in-house that could go target those companies. So they went out and looked for a search firm that specialized in those industries, and they brought in for evaluation about 15 different firms. Some of the big dogs, like Korn Ferry, Heidrick and Russell Reynolds, got in a few other good boutique firms and a few people they had worked with on other searches internally that were their friends. You know, people they liked working with were all put in the pool and said, okay, why should we hire you to help us build this team? They had just hired one of my clients. Myron was the chief technology officer at Dow, and he was offered this opportunity to come to Nike and run this innovation team and that title that I think he was more like a VP of of innovation for one of the divisions, not the head of Dow’s technology, but, you know, as a division head, that would be a classic title. And so he took that title from Nike and said, great, I’ll run your innovation team. 

And there’s a recruiter you should talk to rubella. He’s done a lot of work for me at Dow. And so that opened up the door. Well, I got in there and I went through the process of showing them the smart search system. I said, listen, you guys can hire anybody, you know how to do it, but let me show you how to do it differently. If you really want world class talent for this innovation team, what we would describe as A-players, you’ve got to communicate them in a highly unique way. And you guys have marketing teams galore. Do you got anything like this you use when you’re recruiting? What we call an opportunity marketing piece, which is part of our smart search system. And we looked at, no, we’ve never seen anything like this before.

I said, well, if you’re going to go after and recruit Super Bowl players to join your team or college football athletes to come join Auburn or leave Auburn and go to another team, everybody knows that. 

You know, Auburn’s head coach is the world’s leading coach, and the success that he and that team have had is because they’re incredible at marketing their opportunity. That’s what we do. We take the best of Nike, and we put it into a presentation that says, this is what it would be like to work at Nike with this type of leadership team, this is what their culture is like, this is what they’re trying to solve, where they want to go. Their performance objectives and metrics. This is how you communicate to A-players. And if you want to get those people interested, you can’t go to them with a black and white position description with a color logo slapped on it and say good enough. It’s not going to cut it. These are busy guys, very successful, and they’re only interested in working with A-players. If they see these opportunity marketing pieces coming from us, they’re going to say Ropella is pretty unique. 

They must be really good at what they do. They must be a-players. I want to learn more. And then we present you in your situation in such a way that now they’re engaged. They want to learn more. They want to come forward. So how you market to a-players is hugely different than how everyone else does. And that’s where it all starts. The smart search system is heavily focused on marketing to the A players and then properly assessing, properly motivating these candidates to stay engaged through to the finish line. If you drag out a long hiring process, that’s bureaucratic. Multiple interviews and you’re interrogating the candidates instead of partnering with them on making the choice together that this is the right fit for both parties. You’ll lose them left and right. So it’s a pretty unique model.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:30

Patrick, you know, I could see the executive search arm, and I want to talk about the acquisition hunting arm for a second. And on the topic, I’m just going to pull up your site again. Here. You have another book. Obviously, we have the right hire, but you have Pathways to Private Equity Partnerships here. So I want to hear about how this arm came about. But I will I do want to point out, you know, the book here. You can get it on Amazon as well if people want to check it out. But you again, have some incredible people endorsing the book. You have Jim Collins of Good to Great. You have some of my favorite authors here. Marshall Goldsmith here. Verne Harnish, he’s been on the podcast. That was a good one. Richard Wilson that was a good episode. Also on the podcast, Sam Reese, CEO of Vistage, Ted Clark. I mean, some incredible people here. Adam Coffey, Mark Thompson, what’s a good story from the book that you can talk about?

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