Senior finance and operations leaders for industrial mid-market and the companies building America's defense industrial base.
Founder-led retained search out of California's Central Valley, run by Ruben Rodriguez — USMC veteran, eight-year executive recruiter and Founder of Lone Wolf Search — and powered by OVERWATCH, the proprietary recon system Ruben built to map markets in days, not weeks, and surface the operators traditional search doesn't reach.
Where the work has lived.
Eight years of executive search across six verticals. Industrial finance is the deepest book, defense tech is the fastest-growing, and the rest reflect where the operator vocabulary translated cleanly across the years.
Two specialties. Four supporting practices.
Each vertical speaks a different visual and operational dialect. We don't pretend otherwise. Our depth runs in finance and defense; our reach extends where the math, the cadence, and the operator vocabulary translate cleanly.
Plant Controllers, FP&A Directors, Divisional CFOs, and VP Finance leaders for sponsor-backed, multi-site, mid-market industrial businesses. Food & ag processing, light manufacturing, packaging, building products, industrial distribution. Wall Street rigor, factory-floor fluency. Central Valley roots.
Engineers, program managers, BD leads, and operations leadership for Series A through pre-IPO defense hardware and software firms moving from prototype to production tempo — the non-cleared defense tech peer set across Southern California and Texas. A vertical Ruben runs with the credibility of a Marine.
VP Operations, Plant Managers, Continuous Improvement Directors, Supply Chain leaders for discrete & process manufacturers. OEE, uptime, lean, asset reliability.
CFO, Controller, COO roles for tree nut, citrus, dairy, poultry, berry, and grain operators. Cold chain, packing house, agronomy. Industrial register — no mason jars.
Capture leads, program managers, and modernization PMs for federal civilian and DoD contractor programs. GovCon fluency. Cleared and non-cleared.
VP Engineering, Heads of Platform, Product leaders for Series B through growth-stage infrastructure and developer-tools companies. ARR, NRR, PLG fluency.
We don't sell AI. We use it to find people you couldn't reach without us.
Structured market mapping in a vertical — days, not weeks. OVERWATCH's recon layer ingests an open req and surfaces the addressable universe: target companies, role-shape variants, comp benchmarks, peer-set adjacencies. Every search begins with a map you can audit.
Every candidate arrives with backchannel reference paths surfaced. A multi-pass screening protocol builds the dossier, scorecard, and client handoff in a single audit trail. Hiring teams spend their time on the conversations that matter, not the formatting.
Every conversation comes from Ruben. No bots in the inbox, no templated blasts, no auto-sequences. OVERWATCH does the research underneath — so when Ruben reaches out, the message lands prepared, vertical-fluent, and operator-to-operator.
Marine. Recruiter. Operator.
Ruben Rodriguez served six years in the United States Marine Corps as an Infantry Machine Gunner (0331) with 3rd Battalion 4th Marines, Twentynine Palms — deployed to Iraq (2008) and Afghanistan (2009), and later mentored 2nd Lieutenants in machinegun employment at Infantry Officer Course, Quantico.
He came home and built an executive search career across eight years and six verticals — Accounting and Finance, Aerospace and Defense, Technology, Manufacturing, Agriculture, and Government — at agencies ranging from generalist national platforms to specialist tech recruiters, then as Recruiting Lead at The Judge Group, where he built and managed a multi-search team across development, project management, business analysis, product, creative, marketing, accounting, and finance searches.
Now, as Founder of Lone Wolf Search, he runs founder-led retained search powered by OVERWATCH — the proprietary recon and outreach system he built to map markets in days and surface the operators traditional search misses.
"Building mission-ready teams across Government, Aerospace & Defense, Technology, Manufacturing, and Accounting/Finance — from developers and engineers to controllers, senior accountants, and operations leadership."
Two ways to open a search.
The model you choose sets the cadence, exclusivity, and depth of the search — not the quality of the work. Both come with the same operator at the helm and the same replacement guarantee.
For senior hires where quality is the premium and a deeper dive matters. The client commits to the relationship upfront; Lone Wolf Search matches the commitment with a higher service level, deeper assessment, and full data transparency through the search.
For mid-level finance, ops, engineering, and program-management hires where the client wants responsive sourcing without long-term retainer exclusivity. Lone Wolf Search earns the engagement on results — same operator, same replacement guarantee.
How OVERWATCH searches actually run.
Two illustrative engagement patterns drawn from the role-shapes Ruben searches every week. Specific firm names withheld, day counts deliberately not claimed. The point is the mechanism of the search, not the trophy.
Plant Controller for a PE-backed industrial rollup at a sponsor's nth platform.
The recurring stall pattern: shortlists wash out at the standard-costing depth stage of sponsor diligence. Off-the-shelf LinkedIn keyword searches surface model-rigorous FP&A people, but the costed-bill-of-materials operator the sponsor needs for the add-on integration is buried inside other portfolios under non-solicit.
OVERWATCH approach: a structured, source-attributed recon pass across the cost-accounting / FP&A axis. Pre-filter on portfolio-page costing evidence and audit-firm references — not keyword matches. Reframe the offer narrative around inflection economics rather than "at-market base." Ruben opens every conversation himself — vertical-fluent, operator-to-operator.
BD or program lead at a Series A–B defense hardware firm, non-cleared.
The talent surface is thin: every relevant operator is already inside one of the dominant non-cleared defense firms or a Tier-1 prime. Generic agency outreach pattern-matches as recruiter noise and gets filtered. The clearance gate is also routinely misread — most early-stage defense roles are non-cleared with cleared adjacency.
OVERWATCH approach: vertical signal scan across the peer-firm set, surface passive operators not on the public market, and lead with operator-credible language (USMC machinegunner instructing IOC — the vertical talks to the recruiter). Ruben makes the first call himself — mission first, never a template. The mission is the conversation.
How we work differently.
Four hard commitments. No exceptions.
A field-grade comp survey across Plant Controller through Divisional CFO roles in PE-backed and family-held Central Valley industrial businesses — food & ag processing, packaging, building products. 312 data points, 18 sub-vertical cuts, source-cited. Released annually. Free for hiring teams.
Open a Confidential Search.
25-minute discovery call. You walk out with a target map for the role-shape, a comp framing read, and a clear sense of whether OVERWATCH-backed retained search is the right cadence for the engagement.
Talk to us before you're looking.
Most operators we place weren't actively searching. A 20-minute confidential intro gets you on the LWS map — when the right mandate lands, you're the first call, not the cold reach-out.