Simon Birkenhead

Background

About Simon Birkenhead

I am an entrepreneurial Chief Executive and Independent Board Director with experience across Europe, US, Australia and New Zealand. Specializing in steering VC and PE-owned businesses towards growth and sale, I've served 12 years in top executive roles. I have launched four businesses into Europe, led or supported two company sales and managed multiple business restructurings. My leadership experience spans marketing, sales, strategy and operations roles, with deep hands-on expertise in customer acquisition and e-commerce, particularly performance marketing and sales conversion optimisation. Since July 2025 I have been Group CEO of Travvia, one of Australia and New Zealand's leading tourism businesses. Prior to this, I led HQ Travel Group from 2019 until I stood down in January 2025 after leading the sale of the company from Mercury Capital to private equity fund, Castlerock. While based in Europe, I launched and scaled two other PE/VC funded digital marketing enterprises to multimillion-dollar revenues, and contributed over $1 billion in incremental revenue to Google as global business manager for its largest advertising client. My business book 'Managing People' was published in 2021 as part of Penguin's Business Experts series. It became an Amazon top 40 business book, with a reader rating of 4.9 out of 5. For more information, visit I also wrote the award-winning screenplay,'Zero Day', a feature-length action-thriller movie, which won Best Screenplay at the New York & Los Angeles Film Festival and was subsequently acquired by Playback Motion Pictures.