Founder & Managing Consultant
Adam Beverley
Founder of APB Strategy. Runs the firm and personally leads the Freight & Logistics desk.
Adam spent five years in the Australian telecommunications industry before founding APB. He reached Sales Manager during that time — running a team, owning a sales number, and learning the difference between average commercial talent and the operators who actually move the needle.
The decision to leave telco and build a specialist sales-recruitment firm came out of a specific moment: watching the impact a specialist recruiter had on his own sales team. The hires that came through that recruiter stuck and performed. They didn't behave like a generalist agency. They knew the industry, they knew the buyers, and they knew what good looked like for the role. That kind of recruitment — industry-deep, role-specific, focused on the sales function — was the gap Adam wanted to build a firm into.
APB Sales Strategy launched in Sydney in December 2021. The first year was a deliberate test across multiple Australian sales markets, looking for the vertical where the gap was widest. Facilities Services emerged as the clear answer — high demand for sales talent with real industry expertise, and clients who couldn't attract that talent through job ads or generalist agencies. Adam's BDM-shaped telco background turned out to be exactly the lens missing from the facilities sales-hiring market.
Within the first twelve months, client pull drew APB into a second adjacent vertical: Freight & Logistics. The buyer archetype was identical — a P&L owner hiring a revenue-generating sales leader for a contract-services business — and the same gap existed. The firm rebranded from APB Sales Strategy to APB Strategy in 2025 to reflect the shift from sales recruitment into specialist executive search across both verticals.
Today Adam runs the firm and personally leads the International Freight & Logistics desk. Walter Sambrook leads the Facilities Services desk. Each desk's senior consultant owns their searches end to end.
In Adam's Own Words · Why APB Exists
"The gap was industry-deep recruitment for the sales function specifically."
I started APB after noticing what a specialist recruiter did for my own sales team in telco. They didn't behave like a generalist agency. They had a real network in our industry, they understood our buyers, and they knew what a good BDM actually looked like. The hires that came through that recruiter stuck. The ones that came through generalist agencies didn't.
That contrast was the thing. Industry-deep, role-specific recruitment for the sales function — built around a team that speaks the operator's language, maps the market continuously, and cares about the commercial outcome of each placement rather than the placement fee — was what I wanted to build into a firm.
Five years in, that's still the brief. We've gone narrow on purpose. Facilities Services and Freight & Logistics, sales and commercial leadership, retained search as the default and contingent only where the role genuinely calls for it. The discipline is the differentiator.
In Adam's Own Words · What I Look For
"Track-record specificity over deal-size brag."
When I'm screening a senior commercial leader, the first thing I'm listening for is specificity. I'd rather hear a candidate name the procurement panel they sold to, the competing bidders, and why their bid won — than be told they "consistently exceed quota". The leaders who can do the specific version of the story almost always do it again at the next firm.
I'm also listening for operations credibility. The best commercial people in facilities and freight don't just sell — they can hold a credible conversation with a head of operations about labour ratios or modal mix on day one. Buyers in these industries smell pure-sales people instantly. The operators we place don't read that way.
And tenure correlation. Three-plus years on average at past employers, particularly in facilities where sales cycles are long. Short-tenure resumes — under eighteen months across multiple consecutive roles — correlate strongly with under-performance in our verticals.
In Adam's Own Words · How I Work
"Direct, relational, operator-grade — depending on the stage."
Discovery is tight and structured. We do the brief in about an hour, you do most of the talking, and you sign before we go to market. No fluff.
Mid-search the mode shifts. Endorsements come through one at a time, highest quality first. We stay between you and the candidate, surface concerns early, and keep the search on the brief rather than letting it drift. That's the part where most searches either build trust or quietly come apart.
Offer and close I run like a commercial operator. We confirm what closes before drafting anything — that's why our offer-to-acceptance rate runs at around 90%. Counter-offer defence and resignation management sit in the same playbook; that two-week window is where most placements actually break, not in the interviews.
Selected Media
How to Hire the Best Salespeople
Adam joined Episode 134 of the podcast for a conversation on hiring sales talent in the service economy — what separates top-decile commercial operators from the rest, the questions that actually work in interviews, and where most hiring managers misjudge track-record.
Brief Adam on a commercial hire
For Freight & Logistics commercial leadership searches, Adam is the first point of contact. For Facilities Services, Walter Sambrook leads the desk.