About TFG

Over the past 30 years, John Ferneborg has excelled in the field of Executive Search. His expertise and track record in the industry have created a myriad of successful leadership teams in a broad range of industries. Already named one of “North America’s Top Executive Recruiters” in the book The Career Makers, John has more recently been named one of the “World’s Most Influential Headhunters” by Businessweek.com and was recently featured in Money Magazine.

Prior to founding the Ferneborg Group, John served as a Senior Vice President at Heidrick & Struggles and was a founding partner of Smith, Goerss & Ferneborg. He also recently served as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC), which represents retained executive search consulting firms worldwide.

Education

John graduated from North Park University in Chicago, Illinois, with a Bachelor of Science degree. He attended graduate school at Northwestern University.

John Ferneborg is an accomplished executive search professional with twenty-four years of strategy, operations, and executive acquisition experience. He has demonstrated the ability to build mid-level and senior-level executive teams for a broad range of regional, national, private, and public companies.

Throughout his search career, Mr. Ferneborg has partnered with entrepreneurs, founders, investors and board members, helping them attract leadership talent across a wide range of executive functions. A key to John’s success has been consistency through deep industry research, strong insight, and analytically-driven decision making. 

John graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Social Science and Communications.  While at USC John worked as an intern with USC Alumni Relations officers on a broad range of networking and fundraising events for the school.

In 1994 John was recruited to join his father’s West Coast-based executive search firm, Smith, Goerss & Ferneborg.  While learning the executive search business as a second-generation recruiter, John developed a new database system and brought in search capabilities which helped the firm reduce search completion time by over forty percent.

In 1995, with the passing of a partner, the firm rebranded as The Ferneborg Group.  Over the years, John grew into the Managing Partner role through his ability to bring a systematic and quantitative approach to the increasingly challenging and competitive world of executive search. Always seeking better solutions for their clients, John continued to enhance the firm's website, ATS database and IT infrastructure, resulting in a faster and more thorough search process than many of their competitors. Following the completion of hundreds of executive searches, and the firm's decision to move into a virtual environment, John is seeking an opportunity to work more closely with corporate, non-profit and other organizations to help them achieve their human resources goals.

John is married, father of three children. Outside of work John enjoys family vacations, futures trading, woodcraft, classic board games, reading, and golf.

Education:

John earned his Bachelor's degree in Communications from the University of Southern California.

Peter Engler strongly believes people should “Look for meaningful work, not just a job,”and has created a unique senior executive transition program, “Career Keys." Specifically, Peter works with each client carefully to assess strengths and weaknesses, make adjustments as necessary, and to move forward with vigor and confidence, realizing new career goals and objectives. His program is highly-valued by clients throughout the U.S. as a realistic and effective transition program that has led to new employment and career shifts for many executives.

Peter's experience includes thirty years of senior marketing management experience at major advertising agencies in New York and San Francisco, ten years as a retained senior executive search partner, eight years of senior executive career coaching expertise at major firms, and his own personal coaching and search consultancy, Engler Career Group Inc.

A decorated Navy pilot during the Vietnam Conflict, Peter is married with five children and seven grandchildren. He enjoys water sports, tennis, skiing and reading a broad range of fiction and non-fiction. He is also at work on two novels, and is teaching himself to paint acrylics.

Dick Selmeier spent the first 20 some years of his career honing his skills in consumer packaged goods marketing and sales with Procter & Gamble, Foote, Cone & Belding Advertising, and American Express financial services, before launching a CEO career.  Over the next 20 years he led several successful enterprises as President/CEO for Sandaro Industries, a high-tech company sold to Total, Ltd.; GM of DTS Decision Support, a financial data modeling firm; President/COO of Tele Atlas North America, the Dutch-owned digital mapping company; and President/CEO of Aserta Sports, designer of revolutionary sports equipment.

Sandwiched between these CEO assignments, he developed and operated a management consulting practice providing strategic planning, branding, and sales management expertise to a “who’s who” of clients including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, GE Capital, Bank of America, McKesson, Clorox, Monsanto and The American Red Cross.  Just before joining Stanton Chase in 2009, Dick spent a year recruiting top professional talent in San Francisco with a national consulting firm.

Dick has an MBA and BBA from the University of Michigan. 

He served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and is recognized for distinguished service in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.