Mick Hawk

Background

About Mick Hawk

Mick has helped build renowned media, entertainment, and marketing brands for over 35 years. His team-centric, globally-minded business vision has been shaped by living outside the US and enabling employees to share in his companies’ successes throughout his career. He now splits his time between Prague and San Francisco in his leadership roles in two companies. An avid music lover and design/art aficionado, he’s an Ohio native, a graduate of Ohio State University, and a recipient of the prestigious Global Leadership Alumni Award from his MBA program at UNC-Chapel Hill (Kenan Flagler). For 20 years of his prolific career, Mick helped build Prague-based Bonton, Central Europe’s first private entertainment company, from the ground up post-Communism. Recognized by the World Economic Forum as a top-performing growth company in 1997 with USD 200 million in annual revenues, Bonton earned the #1 market share in all of its sectors: Music; Film and Video Production and Distribution; Book and Magazine Publishing; Retail; and Radio. Employees who helped achieve these remarkable results were awarded shares in the company – a form of recognition virtually unheard of in the Czech Republic at the time and one that Mick considers to be one of Bonton’s most important milestones. After Bonton successfully divested each division by 2011, Mick teamed up with his friend and Czech business partner to buy back Bontonfilm in 2013. The company has reemerged as a market powerhouse with a string of Czech and Slovak box office hits and a digital business unit that has become Central Europe’s largest digital distributor. In 2016, through Mick’s role as a Board Director of the San Francisco-based corporate swag company CreativeMC, he saw a natural fit between Bontonfilm’s and CreativeMC’s businesses. This resulted in a joint venture between the companies that included the creation of Bontonfilm Promotions (BFP). The teams’ shared vision was to reimagine the swag business as Brand Styling for multinational corporations and entertainment entities, providing a more consultative, trend-driven, and comprehensive approach across continents. Mick became CEO of CreativeMC in 2018 and initiated the company’s transition to employee ownership in 2020. 100% of the business was sold to employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), which is a tax-free retirement plan that grants free shares to employees through a multi-year vesting program.