Kea Evolving: Kadeem Houson’s Rise from Intern to CEO

We asked our founder, Caroline Sage, if, in 2012 when she hired Kadeem Houson as an intern, she thought he would become Kea’s next CEO. She first laughed and then immediately said no:

“If you had asked me to put money on who would run the company in the future, I wouldn’t have put it on him. That said, I don’t think I would have put my money on anyone. I’d never envisioned someone else sitting in the CEO spot, but, fast forward 12 years later, Kea has been growing and scaling to a different place, and he’s now running the company, as the best person to do it.”

Kadeem is one of the 75% of employees at Kea today who were hired as university graduates. When we asked him, he’d echoed the same reflective laughter. He too had no idea that 10 promotions later, he would be here. His journey speaks to Kea’s commitment to developing leaders from within.

This article is the first in our series examining the evolution of Kea Consultants and its leadership team. We spoke with Kadeem, our Chief Executive Officer, and Caroline, our Founder and Chair, to take a closer look at what drove, enabled, and developed Houson’s career: humanity, mentorship, and a commitment to going beyond the surface-level.

In a resource-scarce environment like Kea’s startup days, the impact of such support cannot be overstated. With limited financial assets, personnel, and infrastructure, startups must rely heavily on the strength and resilience of their team. Backing people through mentorship, clear guidance, and a culture of learning enables individuals to maximize their potential and contribute effectively. This safety net fosters innovation, encourages risk-taking, and helps team members navigate challenges, ultimately driving the startup’s growth and success despite resource constraints. In many ways, the start-up environment mirrors the one Kadeem grew up in where the presence of additional supportive figures can make the difference between locking and unlocking someone’s potential.

However, support in resource scarce situations has to be intentional to activate lasting growth. When Kadeem struggled to integrate at school, several counsellors tried to work with him, but none were able to unlock his potential. However, a new counsellor joined who decided to think outside of the box. She stepped outside of the academic setting, both literally and figuratively, by taking Kadeem for a drive. They drove past a prestigious school: it looked like a historic castle and it sat atop a lush, green hill. Kadeem compared it to Hogwarts – a detail the counsellor realized had revealed his interest in reading. It was atypical and set him apart from his peers. Recognizing this minor detail and its vast implications set off a series of verbal and nonverbal reasoning tests – mock versions of that very school’s entrance exam. Kadeem eventually took the entrance exam, received a full-ride scholarship, and went on to study at UCL. Where other guiding figures were quick to write integration issues off as permanent character deficiencies, this counsellor discerned the difference between issues with academic output and issues with the child himself. These early experiences instilled a deep understanding of the importance of humanity and going beyond surface-level assessments. The counsellor’s astute recognition profoundly influenced Kadeem’s leadership style, solidifying his commitment to maintaining empathetic and nuanced mentorship even in the most time-pressed, resource-scarce of settings.

At Kea Consultants, these regular check-ins (at times on long walks or in cafés) are the same as stepping out of that school and into the car. The relationship between mentor and mentee were similarly instrumental when he inevitably hit growing pains. He’d been pulled into a boardroom meeting with a blue-chip client, entering a room with “a table bigger than anything I’d seen before,” he recounted. He’d prepared the longlist just two months into the role, and it had a typo and a duplicated entry. The clients not only saw those but pointed them out and clearly expressed their dissatisfaction. Kadeem and his consultant debriefed afterwards, but he wasn’t harshly reprimanded further or left alone to unpick what had happened. His consultant saw the need to counterbalance the situation with encouraging and constructive feedback. She acknowledged his efforts, saying, “Well done, firstly. It was a big client, and you held your own. Next time, just make sure you keep the longlist tight”. The discerning approach to this mistake was one example of many. She made sure the focus remained on the issue in his work rather than in him and recognized the greater value in balancing the clients’ harsher reaction with more support.  Admin errors are embarrassing, but not catastrophic. Receiving both the client’s direct reaction and the balancing commentary from his consultant ingrained in Kadeem a meticulous eye for detail. Reflecting on that time, Kadeem recalled how Kea paired significant responsibility with robust support, enabling its high-exposure culture.

Those admin errors ended up underpinning the strengths Kadeem went on to develop. Observing and learning from the two women who built Kea Consultants deeply influenced his growth. He watched them navigate the complexities of running a company, gaining insights into commercial aspects and strategic decision-making processes. This exposure provided him with a comprehensive understanding of the business landscape, enhancing his ability to think critically and strategically. These combined experiences equipped Kadeem with a unique blend of attention to detail and commercial acumen. Just a few years after some clerical errors on a longlist, Kadeem had distilled Kea’s unique approach into replicable best practices. Years later as a CEO, the sentiment remains. As the firm scaled, Kadeem’s priority was to never grow at the cost of quality. Truly understanding and creating a framework for Kea’s operations maintained a structured, junior-friendly, high speed-to-contribution onboarding process while keeping the quality bar high. Kadeem leveraged that understanding to translate Kea’s rigorous search practices in Private Equity to build out the firm’s presence in credit and special situations investing. Such commercial and technical understanding eventually positioned him as the leader to drive Kea Consultants’ next stage of growth, all while maintaining the high standards and development-centred culture that are integral to the firm’s success. 

As a result of his upbringing and how Kea has backed his development through the years, Kadeem pays this support forward too. In addition to his eye for detail and grasp on fundamental processes, he also recognized the transformative potential of nuanced coaching, especially through mistakes. Two women in their twenties had founded this business in 2012. Empowering the creativity, ambition, and tenacity of young employees was the only way Kea could operate. It was and continues to be important that the optics of a young team (with Kea’s median age at 27) couldn’t, and wouldn’t, stop anyone’s development. High exposure paired with a robust safety net still uphold Kea’s culture, enabling individual team members’ sustained growth. Benefiting from the personalized approach to his development, Kadeem now navigates shades of grey with agility.  

We spoke with Amy Cook, our Head of Product Strategy and Kadeem’s managee of 8 years, about his leadership style. She noted, “support and humanity has been part of his leadership style from the beginning”. Not just a facet of his own leadership style, they are qualities he coaches her to incorporate as a manager too. Amy recalled: 

Leaning into iterative development and embracing growing pains was and is the only way to stay dynamic and responsive to changing markets and client needs. “The biggest learnings have all been predicated on mistakes in the past,” said Houson. If no one’s making any mistakes, no one is being challenged enough, and, if no one is being challenged enough, no one is learning. A people who have finished learning are a people who will find themselves incompatible with their surroundings. Creating and managing constructive challenge is core to his leadership philosophy. 

Ultimately, the honesty, openness, and commitment to working together in good faith underpin Kadeem and Caroline’s more than 12-year working relationship. When it slowly became apparent that the firm was entering a new stage, Caroline took time to reflect. She has always been quick to act – a crucial entrepreneurial strength. In contrast, Kadeem was naturally thoughtful and had a unique ability to get to an issues’ root and then translate it across the company. His toolkit suited taking what Caroline had started and scaling it to greater heights. Kea was slowly transitioning out of its start-up nature, and Kadeem was the person best-suited to execute that transition. Understanding the core of what makes Kea Consultants tick as a business, Kadeem was the first person Caroline thought to hand the reins to. Kadeem and Caroline swapped between the driver’s seat and the more navigational shotgun seat in September 2022, when Kadeem stepped into the CEO position and Caroline into position of Founder Chair.  

What came next was a turbulent hiring market in a tumultuous political and economic environment denoted by historic American presidential election results, global, industry-agnostic and industry-wide mass layoffs, and disruptive market corrections marked by a steep rise in interest rates. It’s not an unfamiliar market for Kadeem, Caroline, or Kea though, as a team founded in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and seeing its steepest period of growth come through the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. “Volatility brings about opportunity,” Kadeem said in a 2023 article discussing Kea’s view on the hiring market. It is in this volatility that missteps are quickly and abundantly clear, and it creates a nutrient-dense environment for a business structurally prioritizing collaboration, enabling collegial support, and welcoming the deep learnings borne of unavoidable errors. 12 years in and continuing to lean on a practice of collaboratively embracing mistakes as critical opportunities for development, Kadeem leads Kea Consultants with Caroline’s unparalleled guidance and expertise into its next stage, ready to take its core strengths in direct investment recruitment and apply it into new areas of the talent market.