Gentry Ferguson launched a new executive search firm with his business partner John Doherty in February of 2020. A few weeks later the world shut down. Companies stopped hiring, people stayed put, and the product they had just built had nowhere to land. Instead of folding, Gentry pivoted into career transition services and spent the rest of the year helping laid-off employees find their next role. He sits down with Sam to walk through the long arc that got him there, from waiting tables at Jack Stack, to a decade at Garmin, to a brand-new partnerships role at AMC, to co-founding Talent Solutions Partners in Kansas City.
What You'll Hear
- What outplacement actually is, and why roughly half of companies still don't offer it
- How a massive box-office delay led to Gentry's role being eliminated at AMC at the end of 2019
- The cold call that turned into a partnership offer instead of a job lead
- Why launching an executive search firm in February 2020 became a quick pivot into career transition
- How AI-driven layoffs are reshaping the demand for outplacement heading into 2027
- What senior-level recruiting still gets done the old-fashioned way
- How Kansas City B2B grew from small post-lockdown gatherings into a room of over 100 people each month
- The rule of thumb Gentry has leaned on through every stage of his career
From Jack Stack waiter to a decade at Garmin
Gentry didn't have a clean career map coming out of high school. His father was diagnosed with a grade four glioblastoma at the end of his freshman year and was given six months to live. He lived seven more. Through that long stretch, Gentry leaned on the families of his friends as second and third parents, waited tables at Jack Stack Barbecue, and became a requested waiter whose regulars would wait an extra 30 or 40 minutes just to sit in his section.
He loved people, but he didn't love the restaurant industry. When Jack Stack offered him a management track and he started hospitality coursework at a local juco, he realized quickly it wasn't where he belonged. In 2007 he landed an entry-level associate buyer role at Garmin, his first corporate job, and stayed for a decade.
Those ten years were a classroom. He rotated through a few different operations roles, made friends with the HR team that sat near the associate buyers, and soaked up business acumen on the job while finishing his degree at night. The pattern that showed up early, and that would define the rest of his career, was simple. People kept advocating for him. Mentors kept pushing him into the next opportunity. He kept showing up hungry.
In early 2012, one of those advocates introduced him to a newly formed three-person team at Garmin focused on what the company called engineering business development. In the rest of the world that's strategic partnerships. Gentry fell in love with it. Building something between two companies that didn't exist before scratched an itch the earlier roles hadn't.
The AMC partnerships role and a quiet end-of-2019 layoff
In early 2017, Gentry got a random phone call about a brand-new role at AMC Theaters. AMC had just been backed by a Chinese conglomerate, had just become the largest theater chain in the world, and was on a hiring spree out of its Leawood headquarters. The role was leadership of strategic partnerships, and it was his to build from the ground up.
He loved the work. He traveled constantly, sat in early conversations with companies like Facebook about a movies widget that would have surfaced showtimes and tickets inside their app, and pushed AMC tickets into more third-party surfaces through the company's existing API. The role also taught him the practical cost of partnerships at scale. Every integration pulled on IT, finance, and program management. Contracts were long. Royalty tracking needed its own team. A big organization that wasn't a technology company was trying hard to act like one.
Late in 2019, the math got ugly. Avatar 2, slated for 2020 and counted on as a multi-billion-dollar driver, was pushed out with no equivalent title moving in. AMC made operational and personnel cuts. Gentry's group, as one of the newest, was exposed. His role was eliminated. He was part of a roughly 50-person reduction at the end of 2019, months before most of the country had heard the word COVID.
One of the things he left with was a career transition services benefit as part of his severance. That was his first time experiencing outplacement from the inside, and the first time he understood what a good one-to-one career coach actually does.
A cold coffee that turned into a partnership
Gentry didn't stay idle long. By October 1 of 2019 he had spun up his own LLC, picked up consulting work with a couple of brands in the movie space, and started interviewing in earnest. He got close on a role in Lenexa and turned it down. He apologized to the recruiter who had worked his file, and the recruiter did something unusual. She introduced him to someone else.
That someone was John Doherty. John had owned a Kansas City talent management company for years, sold it in 2015, and signed a five-year non-compete that sent him to Iowa. The non-compete ended at the end of 2019. Gentry walked into the coffee expecting help finding a job. John offered him a partnership instead.
The pitch was direct. John needed someone to help him rebuild in Kansas City. Gentry's objection was that he didn't know talent management. John's answer was that the rest of what Gentry knew mattered more, and he would teach the parts Gentry didn't. In February 2020 they relaunched John's LLC as CMA Midwest and opened the doors as an executive search firm focused on senior hires.
They were weeks in when the country shut down. Kids were sent home, gyms closed, companies froze. An executive search firm that helps people change senior roles had no market, because no one was changing senior roles. Gentry's internal take, as he tells it, was simple. Let's figure it out, or go back to corporate.
Pivoting into career transition services
The pivot came in April of 2020. With John's guidance, CMA Midwest moved into career transition services, which Gentry had experienced firsthand from the other side of the table just months earlier. Big employers were cutting large chunks of their workforce, and many of them offered outplacement as part of severance. The firm started winning that work, and over the course of 2020 they transitioned a couple hundred people.
What Gentry is careful to explain is what career transition actually looks like. The laid-off employee gets a one-to-one coach, typically someone with an HR background or years of executive coaching experience. Programs run one, three, or six months depending on what the employer has bought. On top of the coach sits a portal with real resources for what to do the moment your badge stops working, how to talk about a former employer online, resume help, interview prep, and offer negotiation. The one-to-one coaching is the part clients value most. Gentry is clear that the technology supports the coach, it doesn't replace them.
2021 and 2022 looked completely different. Government stimulus fueled hiring sprees at the largest tech companies in the country, and placements came through in volume. 2023 was the dust settling. Gentry and a new business partner, John Copeland, took that moment to rebrand CMA Midwest as Talent Solutions Partners and sharpen the focus. John Doherty stepped into a board role. Career transition became the flagship product, sitting alongside executive search and talent development under a full-cycle, hire-to-fire positioning.
AI, layoffs, and why outplacement is back
Gentry sees the next few years driving more demand for outplacement, not less. Companies that over-hired in 2021 and 2022 are still working through talent reviews and correcting. On top of that, AI is beginning to reshape headcount plans inside a lot of industries. He cites reporting that by 2027 more than 41 percent of companies expect to reduce their employment numbers specifically because of AI disruption. Half of all companies still don't use outplacement at all, which means there is meaningful market left for a firm that does it well.
At the senior end of the search business, he says, the work is still deeply personal. Talent Solutions Partners is typically poaching passive candidates on behalf of client companies, which means relationships and trust do most of the work. On the high-volume staffing side, tooling is changing quickly. He sits on the board of the Missouri Kansas Search and Staffing Association, MKSSA, which gathers search and staffing firms from western Kansas to eastern St. Louis to compare notes on exactly that kind of disruption.
The other half of his week is Kansas City B2B, the networking group he co-founded with his business partner Susan shortly after lockdown lifted. The premise was that people needed to be retrained on how to be in the same room again. They started small. Twenty people at a time. Deep conversations. Four years in, monthly events draw well over 100 attendees, and roughly half the room is new every time. His working rule there is one he repeats in his core business too. Don't come to sell. Come to build a real relationship, and sell through the people in your network.
Asked for one rule of thumb that keeps proving true, Gentry keeps it plain. Treat people the way you want to be treated. He has mentors he can lean on, his father-in-law in particular, for the business conversations he never got to have with his own dad. The through-line from the Jack Stack dining room to Talent Solutions Partners is the same. People, treated well, open doors.
About Gentry Ferguson
Gentry is managing partner and co-owner of Talent Solutions Partners, a Kansas City full-cycle talent management firm that helps companies hire, develop, and transition employees. He spent a decade at Garmin, moved into strategic partnerships leadership at AMC Theaters, and co-founded CMA Midwest before rebranding it as Talent Solutions Partners with his partner John Copeland. He also co-founded Kansas City B2B, a monthly networking group that draws over 100 business professionals.