Tickford is looking for a commercially savvy CEO with sporting, but not necessarily motorsport, experience to take over from Tim Edwards.
The Ford squad is about to formally begin its search to replace Edwards, who will step out of the CEO and team principal roles at the end of the current season.
His exit, following a near two-decade stint, comes amid significant restricting for Tickford as it scales back from four cars to two.
According to co-owner Rod Nash, that restructuring has left the team on the look-out for a new style of CEO that’s more commercially driven.
“We’ve had an agency working away, gathering all their paraphernalia to go on the sell to any he or she prospective person,” Nash told the Speedcafe Newscast.
“Like any business, it keeps changing its ways and Tim has very much been part of what we need next. We’ve got heaps of technical [people], and these businesses are certainly twisted a lot to commercial, so we’ll end up with a more commercialised style of CEO to lead us going forward.”
Nash also hinted that the CEO and team principal roles could well be split, similar to the model now used by Dick Johnson Racing, which has ex-AFL coach David Noble in the CEO role, and the technically-minded Ben Croke in the team principal role.
“It’s interesting. If you look at different structures between teams, one team principal is not the same as another team principal,” said Nash.
“It’s just the structure of your business. There are CEOs. There are MDs. Our structure always was Tim headed up Prodrive, so it had always been the same. We’re just making those adjustments now in a number of ways.
“Part of that is because we’re changing the structure of our team. It might seem like we’re just going from four cars to two cars, but there is a lot of infrastructural change that goes with that.
“And another part of what is going on with the business is, with Gen3, our business has always had a lot of one-stop shop engineering. We’ve converted all of that into what we’re calling Tickford Engineering, and that’s going to be a commercial business in its own right.
“It’s a freshen up for us across the board. And hence why it circles back to the type of CEO we’re after is to commercialise.”
With all that in mind, Nash indicated that head hunters have been instructed to look for someone with sporting experience, but not necessarily motorsport experience.
“You leave it to the experts,” he added. “You don’t want to dictate where you want a person from.
“In an ideal world you need someone from a sporting parameter. Sport has got a funding model with sponsors and partners. You’d expect that someone needs to come from sport.
“But I’m really open that it doesn’t need to be anything near motorsport. It could be someone from any sport out there.”
