This past Father’s Day, Brian Sullivan, chairman and chief of executive recruiting firm CTPartners—and dad of nine-year-old twin girls—was sitting alone in London’s Heathrow Airport. His wife and daughters, sadly, were at home in their London flat. “This whole global C.E.O. thing can be quite taxing,” Sullivan told me via cell phone as he waited to board a 15-hour flight to Singapore.

It wasn’t the first time Sullivan missed out on a little family time, and it probably won’t be the last. Since taking charge in 2004, Sullivan has been transforming U.S.-based CTPartners (formerly Christian & Timbers) into an international recruiting firm by opening offices in London, Paris, Geneva and throughout Asia and Latin America.

But despite his two decades of executive headhunting experience, Sullivan has found that staffing and managing CTPartners’ newest offices has not been easy. His challenges should resonate with any executive trying to manage a growing multinational operation. There’s the endless travel, the dearth of qualified local candidates, confusing cultural nuances, and even nationalistic biases that prevent an office in one country from cooperating with a sister office in another.

Spanning the globe to nurture the company’s nascent offices is essential, says Sullivan. Face-to-face meetings keep up morale in a way that video conferencing simply can’t. That explains why he routinely makes the trek out to Singapore and other CTPartners outposts. For them it is an unbelievable indication of support,” he concedes, “even though it is a pain in the ass for me.” To help minimize the effects of crossing time zones, Sullivan has had to resort to popping the sleep-aid Lunesta to catch an extra bit of rest when he flies.

His pain is not limited to travel. Recently, age-old cultural rivalries have been flaring between his offices in the U.K. and France. “Surprise! The French and English do not get along!” he laughs. “We have strong people in Paris and London, and they get their backs up if one tries to tell the other what to do.” Calls have gone unreturned and executives in one office have refused to travel to help the other with prospective clients. “We could end up losing business,” says Sullivan, who talked to the people in each office separately and hopes a joint meeting this week will help everyone make nice.

When he’s not trying to broker an international intraoffice peace, Sullivan has been busy trying to not get tripped up by the various cultural norms he’s encountering. In London, he explains, one senior recruiter he was trying to hire declined the job offer after listening to Sullivan rave about the firm’s stellar performance on a companywide conference call. “He later told someone I was too ‘rah-rah’ for him.” Sullivan’s lesson? “If an American hits the big numbers, I can whoop it up,” but in Britain, he must celebrate success in a staid tone, and in small groups, and not by email. But the rules are different in Paris, where Sullivan was at first too reserved for his French colleagues. “The hugs and kisses I now give to our French partners I would never give to someone in Asia or America,” he says.

In Asia, his main problem is one of supply. Apparently, there are not many recruiters with experience hiring C.E.O.’s for companies expanding their own offices into China. Says Sullivan of his competition, “Most recruiters’ Asia offices are small, so not only is the sheer number of people we can recruit limited, but each recruiter always knows where the other one is.” Pilfering top performers has become a stealth exercise. Sullivan’s newest recruitment tool: text messaging. “Most emails go through a company’s server,” he explains, “and there is one company in particular that, if I send an email to an employee, the C.E.O. knows about it.”

Finding a qualified candidate is only half the battle; actually recruiting them is the other. When he finally found Kathryn Yap to head up CTPartners’ Singapore office, Sullivan relied on persistence and a personal touch to lure her away from her previous employer. Every evening on his way home from dinner meetings, no matter where he was, Sullivan called Yap’s voicemail and left messages. “I would ask her how she was doing, tell her I was thinking about her, maybe quote something I read about the tech industry,” he recalls. “Finally I [reached] her and she said, ‘My God, I have heard from you more over the last two weeks than I have heard from my boss in the last two years!” She joined CTPartners four weeks later.

“Everyone around the world appreciates being appreciated,” says Sullivan, who adds that CTPartners makes a point of taking a personal approach to recruitment. It may take more time and energy, he admits. But it provides his firm with a competitive advantage. Now if he could only find a way to spend next Father’s Day at home.