About Us - Founder's Message

Welcome to CEO Worldwide, worldwide executive recruitment: international interim management, executive search and recruitment with investment. We provide a professional C-level executives selection in a matter of days worldwide with a 100% success based fee model.

Founder message:

I founded CEO Worldwide in 2001, because as an entrepreneur, regularly using the services of headhunters and consultants, I had been frustrated by the inadequacy of their answers and timing to solve the international problems I was facing daily.

As co-founder and COO of Vistaprint (www.vistaprint.com; Nasdaq : CMPR), from 1996 to 2001, I spent most of my time and energy developing the business internationally: raising funds, opening subsidiaries or acquiring and restructuring businesses. I was permanently looking urgently for managers in France, UK, Germany, the US… All my problems boiled down to finding quickly the right person, in the right culture, with the right profile, at a reasonable cost, to either help me do things faster and more efficiently, or run a portion of our fast growing business.

While meeting VCs, partners and CXOs, I could clearly see that I was not the only one around wasting time and money in endless, costly and frustrating processes, not adapted to the pace of our international development.

That's why I founded CEO Worldwide and tailored our complete portfolio services with the main objective to be the ideal international C-level resourcing partner for any global business.

CEO Worldwide portfolio services can support operationally any business worldwide, in each of these time-sensitive and critical situations:

• Cross border executive search can be solved quickly with our executive recruitment program Management on Demand. It's mixing interim management and permanent recruitment.
• International business development and local restructuring assignments can be addressed in any of the 182 countries covered with our executive recruitment program.
• Corporate funding can be greatly facilitated and leveraged with our iCEO Investors on Demand service.

Since 2001, CEO Worldwide has managed over 2.5k C-level searches for clients of all sizes and multiple industry sectors in Asia, Europe, Middle East and North America. We have focused successfully on very urgent cross borders C-level executives’ needs on 4 main client situations: International development, turnaround and crisis management, merger and acquisition management or sudden departure of a key executive. Our clients have the possibility to choose from the most adapted contractual service that we offer, going from short e-consulting missions (few days), interim management (few months) to permanent executive recruitment associated with personal investment (average 300K USD) for some of them. A high level of flexibility!

Since 2001, our HR certification team has vetted 24,183 international executives amongst 145,098 applications, growing daily our iCEOs community, covering 182 countries and 84 languages. To date, 17574 (73%) of our iCEOs received at least one worldwide C-level job offer!

However after 16 years’ of operation at CEO Worldwide, I was still frustrated to see that less than 10% of our iCEO certified executives are women – and less than 2% in a CEO or NED position! This is why we decided with the team to launch a dedicated platform to promote female leaders: https://www.female-executive-search.com/

I sincerely hope that by focusing on the value of female executives through Female Executive Search we’ll continue to improve these figures. More importantly I hope to see the number of top executive placements filled by women in the future, for the benefit of the global economy and humanity.

Our clients appreciate our international reactivity to select the right executives in only a couple of days compared to weeks or months using traditional solutions, but also, our portfolio services flexibility and scope going from interim management or permanent recruiting with iCEO Management on Demand and recruitment with investment with iCEO Investors on Demand. Our clients also appreciate the transparency of our success based fee structure with our strong operational and results focus.

CEO Worldwide is shaking up an old fashioned and costly cross-border headhunting and consulting market. It is becoming a "must have" HR global partner for any business, to keep their agility within such geopolitical and economical fast changing international environments.

In conclusion, if you have an urgent search for an executive with specific senior expertise who can be operational in few days as an interim manager, acting or non-acting director with or without personal funding to invest, please don’t hesitate to contact CEO Worldwide. We can solve your needs in a matter of days!

On behalf of CEO Worldwide team, I would like to thank our clients, iCEOs and corporate partners for their loyalty since we first launched our worldwide executive recruitment service, 23 years ago.

Patrick Mataix