Creating a culture of success.

Recognizing and supporting personalities and potentials – a matter of attitude.

Our focus on people shapes the way we work. With our expertise for industries and people, we methodically gain insight on companies and top talents. In numerous intensive, assignment-independent interviews, we explore and discover each individual’s potential and in which company culture they can best unfold their skills. We support and help develop outstanding leadership personalities with a long-term perspective over many years. Each assignment, each consultation, has a single purpose: To deliver customized solutions that add value and ensure long term success.

An organically growing network – based on recommendations.

Dynamic, holistic, creative: our network of connectedness is continuously expanding – internationally as well as nationally – based on trusted recommendations from people we view as friends. These recommendations are our key to success. They ensure quality, connectedness, and discretion. Moreover, they help us win personalities with the kind of potential that guarantees the solution to challenges and change.

Executive Search

CAPITALENT Executive Search stands for the highest quality in placing senior executives: A consulting service with a systematic approach for successfully filling executive positions. With a proven track record over many years, methodological competence, and outstanding industry expertise, we are a reliable and trustworthy partner. Our focus:

Top management

Placements at the highest level in executive bodies: for example, Management Boards, CEOs and Presidents or Directors in academic institutions.

Functional management

Placements into positions with operational and management responsibility: for example, Department Managers, Business Unit Managers, highly specialized professors or other strategically important company functions.

Board placements

Placements into supervisory bodies: for example, members of supervisory boards, advisory boards, administrative councils or advisory committees.

Benchmarks

Internal and external comparison of benchmarks – in cases where decisions must be made concerning a major appointment, and there is uncertainty regarding the right choice.

Interim

Interim solutions to bridge gaps in management – in order to reduce time pressure in the placement procedure and gain sufficient leeway to prepare and find the right solution.

Our dynamically growing leadership network

Top talents, sourced in the market via recommendation, supported on their way to success.

Talent recommendation
by clients or experts

1/7

Pro-active
contact
with recommended
candidates

2/7

Interview with candidate,
independent of assignment
and subsequent career
consultations

3/7

Assignment
for a top
position

4/7

Executive search
in exclusive network
for matching candidate

5/7

Interviews with
candidates
for specific position
to be filled

6/7

Successful placement
for assignment

7/7

Management Diagnostics

Management Diagnostics are services designed to assess the performance potential of an individual executive leader and/or an entire management team in a manner that is as precise, fair, appropriate, and acceptable to all sides as possible. For example, if your company is facing critical, transformative changes or if you need to know whether your executive team or single executives are set up to meet the challenges successfully.

With a carefully orchestrated methodology, we diagnose how competent and well-prepared your management is for handling challenges or processes like stock market listings, a new CEO, mergers and acquisitions, legislative issues, market changes, and company reorganizations or turn-arounds.

Proprietary competence model

CAPITALENT has developed its own competence model based on an empirical procedure and tested in hundreds of interviews. Our model delivers a stable basis for precise and appropriate competence assessment. We look at factors such as qualifications but give equal emphasis to measurable results the particular manager has achieved in the past. We take these into consideration with, for example, the social competence of the person involved and possible areas in which they might be effectively assigned in the future. We can supplement this with psychometric procedures in order to more closely examine specific aspects and substantiate certain prognoses.

Leadership Advisory

You are facing a special challenge? Leadership Advisory is our consulting service providing support at crucial moments in top executives’ careers.
Whenever there is a challenging scenario such as a key management board position which needs to be filled, a critical phase for the company, a time of great personal stress, a new beginning or change in roles, our individually tailored advisory service offers valuable support in these times of transformation.

Our team of selected leadership advisors are highly qualified consultants, psychologists, psychoanalysts, doctors or human resource specialists with a great wealth of experience and expertise that reliably stand by your side to successfully master the challenge together.

Our services in this area include:

Individual counseling of top executives
Executive development
Crisis prevention or intervention

Executive Consulting strategy

Our Executive Consulting strategy

CAPITALENT Insights

Facilitating Insights. Reflecting Decisions.

We live in transformative times—rapid, unpredictable, and marked by constant change. What was true yesterday may no longer hold today. Familiar rules and long-standing norms are dissolving. In the midst of this disruption, the search for meaningful answers is more urgent than ever.

In response, many of CAPITALENT’s friends and clients have approached us with a clear request: to contribute thoughtful perspectives on the pressing questions of our era and their strategic and operational implications. Often, the issues raised are highly practical—yet they unfold within a broader, evolving societal context that demands reflection as much as action.

We respond with two formats:

INSIGHTS

We offer a new kind of exchange—among peers. Especially at times when advisors and internal teams have already prepared every decision down to the last detail. Not just another network, but a collaborative community of sharp minds. Empowered. Committed to thinking.

Managing the NEXT SOCIETY

An initiative circle within an international, self-sustaining, high-level network of exceptional individuals—dedicated to generating new insights into current and future societal developments. And to taking a clear stance.

Members of both INSIGHTS and NEXT SOCIETY are appointed by CAPITALENT as Fellows.

Sector Focus: Insights, Leadership Advisory

Karen Engelhardt knows the tricks of the trade and understands how businesses truly function. Whether as a poised moderator or as a trusted advisor in the circle of friends and clients, she has an ability to connect and guide. Her counsel is highly valued, particularly in times of continuous transformation.

With 25 years of experience in various international companies, including many years as Managing Director and CEO, she has the expertise to show—both with charm and determination—how we can create the right structures for our work in the age of hybrid working, leading to successful outcomes. Her energy and creativity seem inexhaustible.

Trained at the Palo Alto Institute for Systemic Coaching and the Tavistock Institute, Karen Engelhardt has been a long-standing partner of CAPITALENT as an Executive Coach and Leadership Advisor.

**Prof. Dr. Hanns-Ferdinand Müller** Fellow

Sector Focus: Insights, Leadership Advisory, Mentoring

It’s a fortunate coincidence that “HF” — as he is known to most — after years at the highest echelons of management, has now found his path in coaching and mentoring with his company adcompanium. As an accredited Executive Coach and Systemic Team Coach, he draws not only on his formal training but also on a rich reservoir of real-world experience: early years as an officer, successful roles on executive and supervisory boards, consultancy work, and stints as a startup entrepreneur. He’s an insider who understands the dynamics between governance levels — having sat at the table from every side.

What connects him with CAPITALENT is the conviction that personality lies at the heart of leadership: it shapes leadership style and decision-making, fosters trust and inspiration, and nurtures corporate culture.

Another passion of his is music. A trained pianist, he has released a CD featuring his own compositions. And his next album is already in the works.

Sector Focus: Industry, Energy & Resources, Finance

Michael Preisler, a globally connected expert in raw materials markets, mining, mechanical engineering, and the manufacturing sector, brings deep technical and operational insight. At the beginning of 2025, he stepped down from his role as Partner and Shareholder at CAPITALENT as part of a planned transition after a distinguished career. Since then, he has continued to support the firm as a Senior Advisor. Known for his reliability, focus, and straightforward approach, the multilingual and personable industry veteran continues to serve selected clients. With 40 years of leadership experience—as Managing Director, board member, and consultant, including as General Manager in North Africa and CFO at Aurubis—his expertise is both broad and profound.

Sector Focus: Insights, CEO Branding, Social Media Personal Branding

With her agency CHEF/NSACHE, Katrin Toeller literally makes the person behind the position shine. As a personal branding specialist, she advises medium-sized companies on the strategic positioning of their management. The media business economist draws on her extensive expertise in digital marketing and 18 years of professional and management experience in a large media corporation.

Her philosophy? "People talk to people, not brands." She transforms anonymous CEOs into authentic and likeable brand ambassadors, putting people back at the center of communication. With equal professionalism, charm, and humor, she prepares her clients for the digital world.

At CAPITALENT, she is a friend and trusted advisor on digital communication issues.

Sector Focus: Insights

Wikipedia describes him as a German energy manager and consultant. In his latest book, "Faktencheck Nachhaltigkeit" (Fact-Checking Sustainability), he analyzes the global ecological challenges of our time and reaches a number of surprising conclusions.

Unnerstall studied physics, mathematics, and philosophy at the universities of Göttingen, Cornell (USA), Freiburg, and Tübingen, and earned his Ph.D. from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Tübingen between 1987 and 1989. He began his career as a personal advisor to Environment Minister Harald B. Schäfer in the then Baden-Württemberg state government (Cabinet Teufel II). He went on to spend years as a manager, CEO, and board member in the energy sector.

Since 2016, he has worked as a freelance writer, author, speaker, and consultant. Dr. Unnerstall has been involved with CAPITALENT from the very beginning, helping to launch the "Insights" concept.

Sector Focus: Insights

Dr. Peter Vest is something of an "energy whisperer" in the German power industry: a PhD economist, marketing magician, and innovation driver who has electrified everything from the halls of Mainz University to the boardroom of Yello Strom and international solar projects, pretty much anything that isn’t bolted to a transmission tower.

As the original "man in the yellow jacket" (Yello!), he not only made the brand shine but also proved that electricity tariffs can, in fact, be sexy, at least when sold by someone with this much energy. After his time as the face of Yello, he turned to wind and solar, helping to push the energy transition forward in leadership roles at Wircon and other companies. Now, as co-founder and CEO of PARQ energy — a company he built with two trusted partners — he’s once again rethinking the future of the energy sector.

Privately, he lives in Kronberg, and chances are, there's still a yellow lightning bolt flashing somewhere in his CV. Because when Dr. Vest is around, things always seem to get a little brighter.

Sector Focus: Leadership Advisory, Transformation

Always attuned to people, Nadja Well is a go-to expert when it comes to driving transformation with clarity and consistency, unlocking stubborn efficiency reserves or enabling bold growth ambitions. She leverages the power of leadership across strategic and operational cores, shapes digital process landscapes, and equips organizations for the age of AI.

A PhD in Education, seasoned management consultant, and top executive, Nadja Well has honed her craft across diverse environments — from corporate giants like Lufthansa, Allianz, VW, and Audi, to mid-sized innovators such as TecAlliance and PSI AG, as well as in founding ventures. She knows the complexities of multi-layered holding structures just as well as the agility of flatter organizations, from heritage companies to fast-scaling start-ups.

Navigating these contrasts, she crafts tailored solutions, steers organizations, and builds the foundations for long-term resilience and success.

At CAPITALENT, she advises on leadership and transformation, supporting change initiatives in roles such as Interim COO or CTRO.

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