What the US Open Teaches Us About Leadership, Pressure and Picking the Right Partner

Yesterday, I went to the US Open with Codi McCommon, who leads Merraine Growth, our practice focused on helping startups, venture-backed companies and growth-stage businesses build the teams they need to scale.

Watching elite women compete under extraordinary pressure, we kept coming back to something that felt remarkably relevant to the work we do every day:

Everyone on that court is talented.

What separates great performers is what happens when the match gets uncomfortable.

When momentum changes. When the original game plan isn’t working. When thousands of people are watching. When one decision can change the outcome.

Do you panic?

Do you abandon the strategy?

Or do you adjust, trust your preparation and keep competing?

Founders and executives face their own version of these moments constantly.

A company raises a new round and suddenly needs to scale.

A leadership hire that looked right on paper isn’t working.

The organization outgrows the structure that got it this far.

A founder realizes the next stage requires an entirely different caliber of executive leadership.

These are high-pressure moments. And they are exactly when choosing the right people — and the right partners — matters most.

At Merraine Group, we believe executive search should be a partnership, not a transaction.

The goal isn’t simply to fill an open position.

It’s to understand where a company is going, determine what kind of leadership will get it there, and then find the person capable of growing with the business.

That philosophy is particularly important at Merraine Growth, where we work with founders, investors, startups and growth-stage companies navigating periods of rapid change.

There is an understandable instinct in business to change course when things become difficult.

Sometimes that’s exactly what leadership requires.

But there is an important difference between changing the strategy and abandoning the partnership.

Great partnerships aren’t defined by an absence of pressure.

They’re defined by what happens when the pressure arrives.

The best executive search partners challenge your assumptions. They recalibrate when the market tells you something new. They understand your business well enough to tell you when the profile needs to change — and when it doesn’t.

And most importantly, they’re still beside you when the search becomes difficult.

That’s why we think companies should choose their executive search partner as carefully as they choose the executives themselves.

Sitting at the US Open today, Codi and I watched some of the best female athletes in the world manage pressure in real time.

Point after point, the lesson was visible:

Preparation matters.

Talent matters.

Adaptability matters.

But so does conviction.

The same is true when you’re building a company.

You can’t predict every difficult moment. You can’t guarantee that every plan will unfold exactly as expected.

You can choose the people you want beside you when it doesn’t.

That is true on the court.

And after more than 25 years of executive search at Merraine Group, we believe it’s just as true when building great companies.

Merraine Group is a national executive search firm helping organizations identify and hire transformative leaders. Through Merraine Growth, we partner with founders, venture-backed startups, scale-ups and investors to build leadership and operating teams designed for growth — combining more than 25 years of executive search experience with the perspective of founders, operators and investors.

That last paragraph is especially important for Google because it very clearly tells search engines what Merraine is, what Merraine Growth does, and who you serve. It also aligns with Merraine’s existing positioning around founder/operator experience and helping growth-stage companies make leadership hires.  

Today I went to the US Open with Codi McCommon, who leads Merraine Growth.

Watching some of the best women in tennis compete under enormous pressure, we kept coming back to a lesson that applies just as much to building companies:

At the highest level of tennis, everyone has talent.

What separates people is what happens when the match gets uncomfortable — when momentum shifts, the original strategy isn’t working and the pressure is mounting.

Do you panic and change everything?

Or do you adjust, trust your preparation and keep going?

Founders and executives face versions of this every day.

Companies grow. Strategies change. Markets move. The leadership team that got you through one stage may not be the team you need for the next.

And those are exactly the moments when having the right partners matters most.

At Merraine Group, we don’t believe executive search should be transactional.

Whether we’re helping an established organization hire its next CEO or working through Merraine Growth with a venture-backed startup building its leadership team, we want to understand where the organization is going — not simply the position it needs to fill today.

Great partnerships aren’t the ones that never experience pressure.

They’re the ones that get stronger through it.

Walking out of the US Open today, that was the takeaway Codi and I kept coming back to:

That’s true in tennis.

It’s definitely true in business.

And it’s how we think about partnership at Merraine.