Gregory Dohnt Managing Partner
Gregory has been bringing exceptional people together for over twenty-five years.
His extensive experience with listed search firms both in Australia and internationally makes Gregory one of Australia’s pre-eminent board and executive search practitioners. He has an exceptional track record of assisting ASX-listed and foreign multinational companies with a full suite of board, executive and corporate officer appointments.
Gregory entered the executive search profession in the mid-1990s and has worked as partner with three publicly listed firms across Melbourne, Sydney and the Middle East.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Monash University.
How I reached this point in my career has been unpredictable, to say the least.
At university, my passion was literature and history, and during those years I authored a sadly un-read bibliographical exploration of the writings of JRR Tolkien. With First Class Honours clasped firmly in hand, I neatly timed entering the workforce with an economic recession. So, like any sensible person, I decided to go backpacking.
After a year of travelling the globe (highlights included meeting the South African cricket team in Harare Airport, and walking through Heathrow Terminal 4 while it was shelled by the IRA) a job interview with Morgan & Banks sealed my fate. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I would eventually work with them in Melbourne, Sydney and Dubai, and find myself in CFO recruitment.
With accounting in my genes I should have been set; however, at the time I didn’t really feel the joy of what I was doing. But then I experienced a couple of lightbulb moments on my return from the Middle East when I joined Chandler Macleod.
I still remember the first time I felt the true thrill of search — the ‘it’ moment. I’d received hundreds of applications for a divisional CFO role, many from unemployed executives. As I’d personally experienced unemployment, I could really empathise with the candidates. So I decided to call every single applicant to tell them personally what had happened with their application. And I felt ‘it’ — that I was making a real difference to real people. The second time was at a very large construction company. When visiting on a post-placement follow-up, I realised I had placed nearly everyone there. I felt ‘it’ again, and I knew I wanted to keep chasing that feeling.
In the years that followed, I eventually found that traditional recruitment wasn’t really challenging me to find the right leaders for my clients — only a search firm would let me do that properly. So, I joined Watermark Search. There I met great people and learned (belatedly) that I couldn’t do everything myself, and that being part of a great team made for better results. Now I found myself walking through engineering firms, manufacturers, utilities and infrastructure owners and operators, and knowing everyone.
Fast forward a few years and ...
If you were to ask me what it’s like to create a search firm, I’d tell you I have never spent so much time thinking about the future. About how I intend to take that first moment I felt ‘it’ and replicate it to make a difference for lots of people. The phrase ‘exceptional together’ isn’t just a corporate tagline — it’s how I really feel about the future.
I believe it’s a search practitioner’s role to know people better than they know themselves, and to bring exceptional people together.
Gregory Dohnt
That’s our mission at Dohnt & Co.