Mr. Karl V Aavik

biography

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 recruitments, and other advisory tasks. His current practice focuses in two areas: recruitment of Chief Information Offficers (CIO’s) and senior IT leaders to Fortune 1000 companies across industries, and general management searches for technology companies.

Prior to founding Intrepid Consulting Group, Karl spent eight years as a search consultant with the two 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 Cigna, Cisco Systems, Federal Mogul, Harley Davidson, KeyBank, Modem Media, Motorola, Palm Computing, Royal Bank of Canada 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 society. He resides in the Chicago area with his wife and three children