Building Before Founding: Why I Started Mayson James
By Elliot Jackson · Founder & Managing Director, Mayson James
I founded Mayson James in July 2025, but the honest version of that story starts long before then. For seventeen years I built things for other people — desks, practices, entire market entries — inside businesses that were never going to be mine.
Mayson James is the first thing I've built that is.
A career spent building
I started out a long way from executive search, as a sports journalist and football writer, of all things. It taught me more about this industry than people expect: how to ask a direct question without losing someone's trust, how to write quickly and clearly under deadline, and how to find the story inside a set of facts.
Those are, it turns out, the same skills a search consultant uses every day — just applied to a boardroom instead of a press box.
The recruitment career that followed was really a series of building projects, though not always the same kind.
Eight years in Singapore with Morgan McKinley, growing the finance recruitment business from the ground up as the market matured around us. Then Robert Walters, where the challenge shifted: first building out a new office in Texas from a standing start in Austin, then stepping in as Director of the Qualified Finance, Commerce & Industry practice in London — an existing business, inherited during a period of real uncertainty and change.
Different starting points, the same underlying task — turn a brief into a functioning, revenue-generating part of someone else's business.
What building teaches you that starting doesn't
There's a particular kind of learning that only comes from building inside someone else's structure.
You inherit their systems, their risk appetite, their brand equity, and your job is to make something new work within those boundaries. It's a genuinely useful apprenticeship — you learn what good infrastructure looks like, what a well-run desk feels like day to day, and just as importantly, what you'd do differently if the constraints were yours to set.
Building out a new office in Texas taught me how much of a new market's success comes down to relationships built before there's anything to sell — you're establishing credibility long before you place your first candidate.
London taught me a different lesson again. I didn't build that Commerce & Industry practice from scratch — I stepped in as Director of an existing business during a period of real uncertainty and unfriendly market conditions.
That's its own kind of apprenticeship: how you stabilise and refocus something that already exists, and the value of depth over breadth in narrowing a mandate until you know a market better than anyone competing for the same brief.
Both experiences are baked into how Mayson James operates today.
“Every business I built belonged to someone else. Mayson James is the first one that's mine.”
Why now, why this
By the time I left London, the pattern I now write about often — the CFO office being asked to do more with a mandate that keeps shifting — was one I'd seen play out from the inside of the search process, deal after deal.
Finance leadership was changing shape faster than most search firms were built to track: data, digital and AI capability were becoming as central to a CFO brief as technical fluency.
I wanted to build a firm around that shift specifically, rather than treat it as one more sector inside a generalist practice.
That's the whole premise behind Mayson James: a boutique, high-touch model built specifically around the CFO and CTO office, insight-led rather than volume-led, with the disciplined methodology I'd spent seventeen years refining and none of the constraints that came with building it for somebody else.
The apprenticeship, applied
None of it would work without everything that came before.
The instinct for a story that started in journalism, the market-building experience from Singapore, the discipline of standing up a new desk from nothing in Texas, the specialism sharpened in London — all of it is in the firm now, just finally assembled on my own terms.
What's different this time is simply ownership of the decisions. Every judgment call I make now — who we work with, how thoroughly we scope a mandate, what "high-touch" actually means in practice — is one I'm accountable for in full, rather than one shaped by someone else's playbook.
That's a small shift on paper and a significant one in practice.
Mayson James isn't a departure from that seventeen-year career. It's the point it was always building towards.
— Elliot Jackson, Founder & Managing Director | Mayson James
Looking for a different approach to executive search?
Mayson James was built around a simple idea: understand the mandate deeply, specialise where it matters, and build relationships for the long term.
If you're considering your next senior finance or technology leadership appointment, we'd welcome the conversation.
