Karl Aavik
Karl Aavik is the founder and president of Intrepid Consulting Group. He has experience across a wide variety of functions and industries and has consulted with clients in executive search, management appraisal, board of director recruitment and other advisory tasks. His primary focus is on executive search for chief information officers and for senior executives of information technology companies.
Prior to founding Intrepid Consulting Group, Karl spent eight years as a search consultant with two of the leading retained search firms, Spencer Stuart and Egon Zehnder International. At Spencer Stuart, Karl led the firm’s North American Software Practice and was also a member of the CIO practice. At Egon Zehnder, Karl started and led the firm’s global E-Commerce practice.
Although Mr. Aavik has consistently been sought out for his leadership abilities, his primary focus has been on directly serving clients through executive search and management assessment projects. He has worked on CEO, CIO and other senior level searches for such firms as Carestream Health, Cigna, Cisco Systems, Dana, Diebold, Harley Davidson, Motorola, Palm Computing, Rolls Royce, and others.
Before entering the executive search profession, Karl was Vice President of Sales with Blackwell Consulting Services, a start-up technology and Internet consulting firm in Chicago. He began his business career with IBM as a Systems Engineer. During his 14 year IBM career he advanced through various technical, sales and marketing management roles to become Business Unit Executive in IBM’s software organization, leading a large sales and marketing organization in the U.S. He finished his IBM career by running operations for IBM’s global software sales group.
Karl holds an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (Honors) from the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, where he was inducted into the Tau Beta Pi engineering honorary. He resides in the Chicago area with his wife and three children.
