Mark Shashoua is a proven business builder and transformation leader with a passion for launching, scaling and reimagining what’s possible. Having co-founded Hyve in 1991 under the name ITE Group, he returned as CEO in 2017 with a bold vision to reinvent it for the future.
At that time, the company was decentralised and heavily focused on emerging markets. Mark spearheaded a full-scale transformation, centralising operations, pivoting to a global model and curating a portfolio of only market-leading events. The results speak for themselves: Hyve’s portfolio has streamlined from ~300 to 30, the average revenue per event has increased almost twenty-fold, while the core business has diversified, digitised, and built a foundation for scalable growth.
Entrepreneurial to his core, Mark is driven by an ambition to reimagine the events industry in line with the evolution of growing customer expectations for return on investment and time, as well as experience; transforming expectations of what events can deliver. Under his leadership, Hyve has launched a diverse list of tech-enabled products which are delivering powerful results to some of the world’s leading companies.
Most recently, Mark led the launch of GO27 - Hyve’s three-year plan for growth and optimisation which aims to more than double the size of the business through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions. Since launching the plan 18 months ago, Hyve has completed six acquisitions, strengthening its presence in change-driven sectors such as edtech, healthcare and ecommerce.
Before re-joining Hyve, Mark was CEO of i2i Events Group, the event arm of Ascential plc, where he led a similarly bold transformation. There, he pioneered a “market-leading events only” strategy that turned a declining business into one of consistent double digit organic growth, backed by headline acquisitions such as Money20/20, which scaled dramatically under his leadership.
