3
ventures built from zero to operating company
Executive mandates
Interim leadership for strategic reset, turnaround and venture building.
I step in when owners, boards or CEOs need executive accountability and a fast path to results. Many mandates begin with a focused strategic reset or diagnostic sprint before moving to interim CEO / MD / COO responsibility, venture leadership, or board-level sparring.
Best fit: performance drift, leadership gaps, turnaround pressure, venture ambiguity, or holding-model questions where strategy and implementation have come apart.
2
successful exits completed
€65m
largest exit
5 months
to cash-flow break-even in a turnaround mandate
Mandate types
Three mandate types. One operating logic.
Read reality fast. Clarify decision rights. Install execution rhythm. Carry responsibility through to visible outcomes.
Interim leadership
Interim CEO / MD / COO.
- Stabilise cash, delivery and management cadence.
- Make organisation, process and people decisions.
- Translate board intent into a working operating model.
Venture building
Corporate venture CEO / build lead.
- Define the venture logic, MVP and go-live path.
- Separate deliverables from real venture readiness.
- Install entrepreneurial decision rights and momentum.
Strategic reset and board support
Diagnostic sprint, reset mandate, board sparring.
- Focused 4–12 week mandate to read reality and define the path forward.
- Stress-test strategic options, assumptions and priorities.
- Often the first step before a full interim leadership mandate.
Operating model
How I work in a mandate.
This is a decision-and-execution model built for speed, precision and governance.
01
Read reality fast.
Separate commercial, operational and organisational reality from narrative and reporting comfort. Establish a fact base in days, not months.
02
Define the real mandate.
Clarify objective, authority, governance and non-negotiables. Ambiguity destroys speed; explicit owner and board alignment creates it.
03
Execute a 100-day path.
Install milestones, accountability and communication cadence. Stay flexible on route, not on outcome.
Selected cases
Representative executive cases.
Selected and simplified for confidentiality. The common pattern is executive responsibility, venture judgment, board-level clarity and implementation under pressure.
Interim CEO / turnaround
French automotive-electronics carve-out.
Distressed mid-cap supplier with labour pressure and weak operating discipline.
Situation
Deeply loss-making business, oversized organisation and weak processes. The company needed a turnaround with real operating accountability.
Mandate
Assume operating responsibility, reset the organisation and stabilise delivery and cash quickly.
Result
Workforce action, union negotiations and operational discipline led to cash-flow break-even within five months.
~1/3 workforce reset
5 months to break-even
3 unions managed
Corporate venture reset
Swiss insurance venture leadership.
Appointed by Chairman and CEO to lead a CHF 300m corporate venture that was not yet venture-ready.
Situation
Appointed directly by Chairman and CEO of a major Swiss insurer to lead their most significant corporate venture (CHF 300m investment trajectory). The initiative had seven months of consulting workstreams but lacked committed team, clear authority and validated go-live logic.
Mandate
Apply a startup and private-equity lens, assess reality quickly and redesign the path to launch.
Result
Delivered a lean venture redesign and a clear reset recommendation within three months. The recommendation to fundamentally rethink the approach was not adopted — CHF 300m was later spent on the original path.
3 months
Lean redesign
Reset before scale
Board-level strategic reset
Industrial holding and value-creation logic.
Board and CEO agenda across multiple businesses with different market logics and maturity profiles.
Situation
Without a clearer structure, capital allocation, governance and leadership choices remained fuzzy.
Mandate
Designed an AI-supported strategy to reshape the group into three focused industrial clusters, eight business units and four aggressive venture units — each with entrepreneurial leadership, external capital logic and a flat, agile operating culture.
Result
Directional path toward ~€1.3bn revenue, ~7x EBIT and ~10x EV logic. The key levers: entrepreneurial culture, right people, and venture-unit autonomy with external capital discipline.
3 clusters
€1.3bn revenue path
7x EBIT / 10x EV
Founder-CEO / venture building
Built from zero.
Direct founder experience across deep tech, software and fintech — not borrowed venture language.
Situation
Build proposition, team, capital, partner ecosystem and go-to-market with far less certainty than in an established corporate setting.
Mandate
Create operating companies from concept to launch and scale them with commercial discipline.
Result
Three ventures built, two exits completed and a largest exit of €65m — the operator perspective is real, not decorative.
3 ventures built
2 exits
€65m largest exit
Profile
One profile. Four operating lenses.
Founder, operator, investor and top-management consultant. That combination is particularly useful when the mandate sits at the intersection of strategy, ownership, operations and execution speed.
Why this works in difficult situations.
Most profiles come from one world. This one was built across venture building, direct operating responsibility, private equity and top-management consulting.
Founder lens
Build from zero, raise capital, win partners and carry uncertainty without hiding behind process.
Operator lens
Run the business, not just the workstream. Cash, customers, people and delivery all matter at once.
Investor lens
Think in value creation, governance, capital allocation and exit quality.
Consulting lens
Structure complexity quickly and move from diagnosis to implementation with discipline.
Next step
Discuss a situation confidentially.
Send a short outline or a one-page brief. I respond personally, confidentially and promptly.