Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
"The thing you think is missing is usually not the thing that's missing. The work tends to start when we find that out together." I ran a company before I did this. I've sat in the chief executive's chair and carried the accountability, and I've sat on the other side of the table as a director and chair. So I don't arrive as a vendor with a method to sell, but as someone who has done both jobs, and spent the years since learning how to be useful in the room without taking over. My instinct, trained over a career of running things, is to fix: spot the gap, supply the missing piece. I treat that instinct as a warning light, not a strength, because the gap I'm itching to fill is usually not the real problem, and filling it just makes you need me again next quarter. In practice there are three things you might be hiring me to do, and the skill is knowing which one a moment calls for. Bring something in: when something genuinely is missing, a discipline, a decision no one is making, a capability the team can't improvise. I'll say so plainly and we'll build it. It's the smallest part of what I do. Draw something out: when the capacity is already there but stuck under old habits, unspoken tensions, a history no one has dealt with. Here I add nothing; I set the conditions so it can do its work. This is where the real leverage usually is. Find something neither of us had: when neither of us knows the answer going in, and we work it out together. Most advisors avoid this, because it means admitting I didn't arrive with the answer. I think it matters most. These aren't stages. All three are live in any serious piece of work: One-to-one, the answer is usually already in the person; with a team or board, genuine gaps surface more often. One last thing, and it's not incidental: I never stopped being a student of this. I'm coached myself, and I treat every engagement as something I'll be changed by, not just something I'll deliver. If that's the kind of partner you're looking for when the stakes are high, let's talk.
I coach and advise founders, CEOs and boards through the moments that decide a company's direction: transitions, restructurings, CEO and ownership change, and increasingly, governance and shareholder conflict. The work I'm trusted with most, and the work most advisors would rather not touch, sits at the top of the house: shareholder and boardroom conflict, CEO succession, ownership transition. These are the moments a Chair can't delegate and can't look up. It's where the stakes are relational as much as financial, and where the wrong intervention does lasting damage. I stay in until they're genuinely resolved, not until the meeting ends. What's said in that room stays in it. How I work takes three forms, and the skill is knowing which a situation calls for: - bringing in a discipline or decision that is genuinely missing; - drawing out capability a team already has but can't reach; or - working out together an answer neither of us had going in. I've sat in the CEO's chair and on the board's side of the table, so I'm not selling a method in search of a problem. I have rigorous method when a situation needs it, but it's never the point. The aim is always the same: leave the leader and the team more capable, not more dependent on me. What that looks like in practice: - A founder who did everything himself the moment anything felt uncertain, and couldn't tell the difference between understanding a problem and solving it. A year on, he had stepped back from operations and the company ran without him in the machine room, by his own decision. - A leadership team that had mistaken constant motion for performance. The intervention wasn't another tool; it was making it safe to stop, think, and decide. Execution improved once the busyness was no longer doing a job no one had named. - A board and a CEO weeks away from open rupture. We found a settlement both could live with; a year later both were still in their seats and the company had its strategy back.
Scaling Up is the method I reach for when a company needs an operating system under its growth what, in my own terms, is "bringing something in." People, Strategy, Execution, Cash, so that adding customers, people and locations builds value instead of weight. But the tools only land once the human side is dealt with, and that's the larger part of the work. The point is never to install a method; it's to give a leadership team the clarity and disciplines to run without me. I work in French, English, German and Luxembourgish.
The German-speaking arm of the same practice. With owners, investors and management teams across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, I turn the abstract - culture, strategy, execution - into something a team actually executes, calmly and without the usual stress of scaling. Focus: tech and deep-tech founders and Mittelstand SMEs.
Board member of Luxembourg's national research funder, which invests public and private funds across the sciences and humanities and advises the government on research policy. It keeps me close to how research becomes capability and gives me a board-level vantage I bring to the executive teams I coach.
Independent director in the holding companies of major alternative-asset and infrastructure investments such as transportation, data centers, utilities and energy related assets. Sitting in the holding structures is oversight at a remove: my job is to keep the whole sound and make sure no angle goes uncovered, not to run what sits below me. It's the same discipline I bring to a leadership team: close enough to see the whole picture, far enough not to take the wheel.