The business
Hivestack was building a global programmatic digital out-of-home business at pace. The technology had clear international potential, but turning that into a global company meant establishing credible leadership and commercial teams in one market after another, and the expansion accelerated sharply through 2020 and 2021. Ultimate Asset was selected to support it following a global pitch.
The challenge: building leadership before building the market
Many of the searches took place before Hivestack had an established local team, employer brand or meaningful presence in the market. The business needed senior people who could open a market, create relationships, build revenue and represent Hivestack locally, frequently with little or no team around them yet. Roles ranged from VP Sales through to Managing Directors and Country Managers, and they were being hired across very different talent markets.
An embedded search partnership
The scale and speed of the project needed a different way of working. Ultimate Asset's founders, Matt Bolshaw and James Lyon, became embedded with Hivestack's leadership team, each leading the searches in different markets, working closely with the CEO, CRO, COO and CPO, and operated as an extension of the business. That meant helping to shape briefs, sense-checking compensation, providing competitor intelligence, mapping each market and advising on where the strongest talent was likely to come from.
Commercially, the partnership ran on a monthly retainer alongside a reduced success fee. That gave Hivestack dedicated international search capacity and let both teams work across several markets at once.
One global brief, fifteen different talent markets
The programme covered China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, the United States and Mexico.
Each market needed its own search strategy. Compensation varied, candidate expectations varied, competitor sets changed and the maturity of the local programmatic and DOOH ecosystem differed considerably. What stayed constant was the need for senior commercial people capable of building, which meant an approach that worked in one country could rarely be copied straight into the next.
Moving at the speed of the business
Much of the project happened during COVID. International travel was heavily restricted, face-to-face interviewing was limited, and many candidates were understandably cautious about changing jobs during an uncertain period, while Hivestack kept expanding regardless. The search relied heavily on direct market mapping, passive candidate engagement and constant contact with Hivestack's senior leadership. We fed back from each market as the searches developed, covering candidate availability, compensation expectations, competitor activity and where the original brief needed adjusting, which kept hiring decisions moving despite the wider environment.
23 senior appointments in seven months
Across the project, Ultimate Asset delivered 23 senior placements across 15 international markets in seven months. The appointments were predominantly VP Sales level and above, including Managing Directors and Country Managers responsible for establishing and scaling Hivestack's presence locally. At that level, each appointment had the potential to shape the performance of an entire market.
From project to long-term partnership
The initial expansion programme developed into a broader relationship, with Ultimate Asset continuing to support Hivestack through Contingent Search across Europe and Asia once the core programme had been delivered. That continuity mattered. By then we understood the business, its proposition, its leadership team and the kind of people who succeeded inside it, so each new search started with real market context.
What happened next
Hivestack continued its international expansion, and its platform was ultimately deployed across more than 30 countries. In December 2023, Hivestack was acquired by Perion Network. That came several years after the search programme, so we would not attribute it to recruitment, though the international leadership structure built during the expansion formed part of the business that went on to scale globally.
What this search taught us
International expansion is usually described in terms of countries, offices and revenue targets, yet much of it comes down to the person leading locally. A company can identify an attractive market, build a commercial plan and invest in the technology, and still find the expansion stays theoretical without the right leader in place. The searches that work tend to rest on an understanding of how the talent market changes from country to country, which backgrounds genuinely transfer, and what it takes to persuade established senior people to join a business that may still be relatively unknown locally.
Related APAC leader or Country Managers? How to structure DOOH expansion