Based in Houston, Rob Andrews is Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of Gaines International│Allen Austin. Rob leads Allen Austin’s global CEO, Consumer Packaged Goods & Durables Practice, and is also a member of the firm’s Leadership Advisory, Private Equity, Industrial and Marketing Officer practices. Building on his earlier career experience as an operating president with major convenience store and supermarket chains, Rob conducts searches for board members, CEO and senior officers across a broad range of sectors. He also helped design and helps deliver Allen Austin’s premier Leadership Institute, Organizational Review, Leadership Communications Dynamics, Culture Shaping and Extraordinary Service Leadership Program.
Rob’s passion is long lasting and meaningful relationships. Helping CEOs and boards drive revenues, cut costs, maximize the effectiveness of human and capital resources, and build enterprise value are hallmarks of his practice. Rob’s clients have run the gamut from $6 million privately held enterprises to $75+ billion publicly held multinational corporations, and include companies such as Safeway, 7-11, Maverik Markets, Sonic, Kroger, Sysco, PepsiCo, Kraft, Kmart, Tyson, Nestle, Lindsay Goldberg, Littlejohn and many more.
Prior to launching Allen Austin, Rob’s consulting experience included assignments as President of a national healthcare search firm, and EVP of two boutique generalist search firms. Rob is the author of High Performance Human Capital Leadership and a widely respected consultant focused on what can best be described as “reinventing the search and selection process.”
A former top performing operator, Rob is a strategist, vision and human capital leadership aficionado and lends his passion for facilitating and building high performance teams to boards and CEOs worldwide. Rob has earned a reputation for being able to cause the good numbers to rise and the bad numbers to fall. His experience includes senior operating, marketing and administrative assignments with Kash n’ Karry Food Stores and National Convenience Stores with total P&L responsibility for enterprises with store count up to 516, revenues of up to $2.4 billion and headcount of 10,600. He also led major culture change, service excellence initiatives and major research in choreographing the customer’s shopping experience and extraordinary service excellence.
Rob completed an undergraduate degree in marketing and economics at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, while managing the southwestern division for NCS in 1991, his graduate work in business at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, and Leading Professional Service Firms Program at the Harvard Business School in 2007.