Our people

Judgment is a human capability.

Search quality is a direct function of who conducts it. Our consultants remain personally engaged from briefing to transition.

Founder

Adrian Vale

Founder & Managing Partner

New York & London

I built Vellaris because I kept watching organizations choose the known candidate over the right one.

Adrian founded Vellaris in 2016 after eighteen years advising boards on chief executive succession across the United States and Europe — with a research desk, one mandate, and a rule he still keeps: no name reaches a client without evidence behind it. He works between New York and London, and wherever a mandate takes him.

Founded: 2016 — New York & London
Senior mandates led: 200+
Markets covered: Europe, Americas, Gulf, Africa, APAC
Practice focus: CEO succession & board appointments

1998 — 2006
Learning the market from the inside
Adrian began his career in financial services in New York, moving from corporate banking into group strategy, where he sat in the room during succession discussions. He watched capable organizations appoint familiar leaders over better ones — not from carelessness, but because no one had done the evidence work. That gap became his life's work.
2006 — 2016
Eighteen years of board work
Over the next decade he advised chairs and nomination committees across New York, Boston, London, and Frankfurt on chief executive succession in regulated and family-controlled organizations. More than two hundred senior mandates taught him the same lesson: the searches that fail are the ones that start with candidates instead of evidence. He began writing down what the good ones did differently — the method that would become Vellaris's.
2016
Founding Vellaris
Frustrated by a search industry rewarded for speed rather than accuracy, Adrian founded Vellaris Search Group on a different economics: research first, fee transparency, and a published standard of practice. The first mandate was a chief executive succession for a mid-cap industrial group; the appointee remains in post.
Today
The standard, kept
Adrian still leads the firm's most sensitive mandates, chairs its appointment quality review, and personally signs off every shortlist that leaves the practice. Vellaris now works across Europe, the Americas, the Gulf, Africa, and Asia-Pacific under the same eight-stage method it started with — and Adrian's rule from day one still stands: if you cannot defend the shortlist, you do not present it.

“The appointment is never the end of the work. It is the moment the client finds out how well the work was done. I sign every shortlist personally because that accountability has to live somewhere.”