Meet The Team: Tony O’Neil, Highline Outdoor Group’s Founder & President
We’re of the opinion that, if you’re going to blog, you might as well take advantage of the opportunity to introduce the people who make your company what it is today. In our case, that would be the folks who make Highline Outdoor Group (HOG) the executive search firm of choice by the most respected outdoor industry, active lifestyle, and sporting goods companies across the globe.
Today, we’re shining the klieg lights on our President — Tony O’Neill, who speaks fluent executive search, surfing, and Cookie Monster.
Meet Tony:
Highline Outdoor Group: Take us back to the year 2011. What was the inspiration for forming Highline Outdoor Group?
Tony O’Neil: Simply stated, I wanted to combine my passion for human-powered outdoor recreation with my experience in executive search. I saw an opportunity in three areas in which I was most familiar, and I couldn’t pass it up.
The first of those opportunities was healthcare technology, where I built out a channel for Monster.com in that company’s early years. Second, my experience in building startups and understanding the environment was something else I couldn’t ignore. And third was my love for the outdoor industry, travel, and performance gear and accessories.
Many of my associates didn’t think the latter was big enough, pointing out that healthcare technology and startups pay salaries that make them more lucrative. However, I went with my passion and gut and Highline has now been in business for 12 years helping the most respected outdoor industry, active lifestyle, and sporting goods companies across the globe find top talent.
HOG: You mentioned your passion for the outdoors. What is your go-to outdoor activity these days?
Tony: Surfing, which I try to do each morning at my home in the Pacific Northwest of Costa Rica.
HOG: Costa Rica? Tell us about that.
Tony: About 10 years ago, my wife and I had this idea to build a small surf shack that we could visit a few times each year in Nosara, a village on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. After many visits to the area and meetings with architects and builders, our ambitions grew. Nosara, which is best described as a surf town with a yoga problem, was an ideal location for both work and play. Long story short, after years of planning and building — some of which occurred during the global health pandemic — my wife and I ended up with the home of our dreams, located just footsteps away from one of the most well-known surf breaks in all of Costa Rica.
HOG: So, you now reside in Costa Rica. What’s something else most people would be surprised to know about you?
Tony: I am a super curious person, which isn’t something that I sense most people think to attribute to me. But it certainly comes in handy when running an executive search firm. Part of my job is to do a deep dive on the client companies we serve, and even deeper dives into the candidates we end up recommending to our client companies. That’s all fueled by my own sense of curiosity, which often extends into personal research projects on topics like wine, art, and cooking.
HOG: Okay, so tell us about your latest cooking-related adventures.
Tony: My passion for cooking initially started when a friend in college became head chef at a local country club. I credit him with his patience in teaching me how to cook healthy dishes and meals from scratch. These days, I’m really into Thai curries. In fact, I grow my own Kaffir Lime leaves, Thai Bird’s eye chili, Thai basil, and Galangal, which is ginger’s more citrusy cousin. All four are essential to the Thai curries that I’ve been experimenting with.
HOG: You mentioned your friend in college who taught you to cook. Where did you grow up, what college did you attend, and what was your major?
Tony: I grew up on the south side of Chicago, and when I was 10 my family moved to Indianapolis. When it came time to choose a college, I attended Indiana University in Bloomington. That’s where I received a Bachelor of Arts in New Media Marketing.
HOG: Switching gears to whimsy for a moment, if you moved to Sesame Street, who would you want as your neighbor and why?
Tony: Seriously? Cookie Monster, of course! Think about all those cookies he’d be baking up and sharing. As an aside, people often confuse Cookie Monster with Oscar the Grouch, because of their voices. Make no mistake about it — Cookie Monster would absolutely share his cookies, especially if I were his neighbor. Once he tried my Thai curries, he’d be hooked. And if his cookies are anything like the bulky ones handcrafted at Carol’s Cookies, I may never leave.
HOG: Earlier, when asked about your motivation for starting Highline Outdoor Group, you mentioned that you worked in healthcare-related tech. Can you tell us more about that?
Tony: Sure. Prior to starting Highline, I helped build a number of tech-based startups that were interested in solving a challenge that has long perplexed the executive search industry. Namely, how do you identify and evaluate difficult-to-locate candidates for C-suite positions? I say difficult because these select and highly effective nose-to-the-grindstone executives often don’t promote themselves or their wildly successful achievements.
I’ve worked alongside a team of Industrial/Organizational PhDs to develop psychological, critical thinking, and personality assessment solutions that measured executive fit and provided reliable performance predictions. I’ve also helped create proprietary algorithms that took real-time data points about someone’s credentials and their company’s financial performance to locate executives who do not have big public profiles. In both cases, I was able to see how my previous experience and role would serve me and my clients well in a niche executive search firm of my own.
HOG: Last question: What didn’t we ask you about what you want folks to know about you as it relates to Highline Outdoor Group?
Tony: I want people to know that Mike Martin and I (Mike is Highline’s VP of Executive Search) personally interact with all of our client companies and the executives we evaluate. Highline is a small firm by design, and unlike other firms that outsource some or all of their executive search activities, Mike and I use a structured approach to recruitment that matches exceptionally qualified candidates with the most respected outdoor industry, active lifestyle, and sporting goods companies and brands. By working our way through the full lifecycle of each search, Mike and I are comfortable staking the firm’s reputation against the results we’re known to deliver.