In August 2019, Greg Webb joined Travelport as Chief Executive Officer. The travel technology company, which powers bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide, had recently been taken private and was about to undergo a tremendous digital transformation with the intention of solving some of the biggest problems in travel retailing.

But then, in March 2020, the pandemic hit, and the global travel industry went from all-time highs to a low of only five percent of expected volumes overnight. While travel initially grounded to a halt, the pandemic eventually amplified and accelerated the need for the industry to get modern. Webb used this time to streamline Travelport’s operations, doubling down on the company’s investment in technology to ensure its next-generation platform, Travelport+, was ready when travellers were.

A next-generation platform to simplify travel retailing
Travelport+ is the only modern retailing platform built for travel agencies. It connects buyers (traditional travel agencies, online booking apps, corporate travel management companies, and more) and sellers of travel (airlines, hotels, trains, car rental companies, etc) through a single, independent marketplace. Similar to Amazon, Travelport+ eliminates back-end complexities that cause long, mind-numbing searches for the perfect hotel room or make it difficult to shop and compare flights or car rentals.

The company’s global presence brings a variety of cultures, opinions and ideas to the table daily

Consumers expect digital experiences to be intuitive, frictionless, and fast. Other businesses have pushed the boundaries of digital innovation, but the travel industry has lagged. According to research by Travelport, booking travel is often regarded as tedious as evaluating mortgage or car insurance options. In fact, on average, travellers visit 38 websites before they book a trip. The lack of price transparency, difficulty in comparison shopping and the feeling of hidden costs all further erode consumer trust.

Webb is keen to improve upon the lack of transparency in the travel industry and is a longtime advocate for greater industry collaboration. His focus on transparency extends to Travelport’s corporate culture as well, where he regularly prioritises all-company townhall meetings, direct weekly communication, and more.

Investment in technology
Travelport continues to evolve its modern retailing platform with enhanced tools and new solutions that are designed to be intuitive, frictionless and fast. Additionally, the company is always looking for new areas to expand into, and in March 2023, the company announced the acquisition of Deem, a leading corporate travel management platform. Deem shares a similar goal of modernising a complex industry, more specifically offering the corporate travel landscape a more customer-centric booking tool. Just five months after the acquisition, Travelport had fully integrated the Deem and Travelport+ platforms, allowing shared corporate travel customers to book and manage their work trips in the same way they would their personal trips. This means more self-service, intuitive recommendations, real-time updates and changes that can be made on-the-go.

Supportive, transparent leadership strengthens team output
Webb’s vision and strategic direction have been instrumental in driving Travelport’s growth. His passion for the travel industry and his commitment to excellence have made him an inspirational and respected leader in the sector. It has also made Travelport a company that continues to lead the industry.

The company takes pride in cultivating a diverse and inclusive workplace where employees are encouraged to think differently and try new things. Travelport is committed to equality, prioritising a work environment where all employees can confidently, and comfortably, share their opinions and challenge the norm. The company’s global presence brings a variety of cultures, opinions and ideas to the table daily, something Webb believes is vital to Travelport’s success.

Change is for the brave
Looking to the future, Travelport continues to be committed to simplifying the complexities of the travel industry by inventing new solutions where there currently are none. Webb and the Travelport team work with industry partners who share their passion for delivering exceptional experiences and creating best-in-class technological solutions. The company continues to invest in the latest advancements, such as cloud computing, data-driven intelligence, machine learning and AI capabilities. The result is a more efficient and personalised travel retailing experience, which will continue to drive the industry towards a bold new era.

The global health and wellness market is projected to reach $5.3trn this year – up from $4.9trn in 2022 – according to the Health and Wellness Global Market Report 2023, marking an ever-growing emphasis on wellbeing among consumers.

That translates into several areas. The pandemic accelerated a shift towards remote and hybrid working, putting the emphasis on work-life balance – but not everyone has been able to maintain the equilibrium. A recent study by research firm Gitnux found that a poor work-life balance was damaging family relationships among nearly half of those asked, while 37 percent said it was affecting their physical and emotional health.

Given these ongoing challenges, it’s perhaps little surprise the concierge sector is booming – last year the industry was valued at $572m, and it’s expected to reach $911m by 2028, according to a report by Industry Research Co, marking an ever-growing demand for busy professionals to better manage their time.

So what’s driving the trend, how is the sector changing, and how is The Life Curators contributing to help its clients strike the right balance? We spoke to Lara Kloosterboer Westphalen, Founder and CEO, to find out.

What’s the premise of The Life Curators and what services do you offer clients?
At The Life Curators, we’re reimagining executive assistance. We offer a wide range of personalised services that cater to the unique needs and preferences of our clientele. Our offerings go beyond traditional virtual assistants to include global concierge services, personal assistance, executive assistance, strategic advice and wellness and lifestyle services.

What’s the story behind the company and what was your motivation in founding it?
During a challenging phase in my life, I was struggling to fulfil my roles as a mother, wife and professional due to the relentless demands I faced daily. This personal journey highlighted the need for a company like The Life Curators. I founded the company in 2013 – and had it renamed and rebranded in 2021 – with the aim of helping busy professionals better harmonise their personal and working lives. I already had a background in luxury lifestyle management and personal assistance, with an extensive network of global connections; these experiences gave me the insights and resources needed to create a unique service that caters to the specific and diverse needs of our clientele.

What are clients looking for when they come to you and what are the key benefits of joining The Life Curators?
Clients come to The Life Curators to find a personalised and streamlined method to better manage their lives, freeing up more time to focus on their families and business endeavours. We take on responsibility for all hiring expenses, including equipping our Personal Assistants with essential tools such as computers and mobile phones, so clients don’t need to manage these logistics themselves.

We’ve noticed growing demand among clients for personalised wellness experiences and lifestyle enhancements

What kind of clients do you work with?
Our clients hail from a diverse array of backgrounds and professions, united by a shared aspiration: the pursuit of a better work-life balance and the chance to enjoy meaningful moments. While our services reach a wide demographic, most of our clients are based in the UK, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Our clients include executives, entrepreneurs and other individuals committed to optimising their personal and professional lives, and most either come to us through recommendations from our existing customers, or they find us online.

How do you ensure privacy and confidentiality?
With the widespread adoption of technology and data-driven services, safeguarding client data’s privacy and security has emerged as a paramount challenge in the concierge industry and beyond. Stringent adherence to data protection regulations is key in building clients’ trust. Privacy and confidentiality are of the utmost importance to us – we have strict protocols in place to ensure the security of our clients’ information and data, and our team is trained to handle sensitive information with care and discretion.

What have been the key challenges in managing the business and how have you overcome them?
Managing the business has presented its share of challenges. The concierge industry is competitive, with new entrants continuously emerging. This has prompted us to put the emphasis on innovation and technological advancements, enabling us to provide cutting-edge solutions to help us retain a loyal client base.

With our global presence spanning multiple time zones and locations, the logistics of operating internationally can also bring challenges. We’ve addressed this by establishing efficient communication and management systems, ensuring seamless operations across these diverse regions.

Identifying and nurturing the right talent can also be a time-intensive process. In response, we’ve made substantial investments in our recruitment processes and offer continuous training programmes. These efforts have helped us to build a highly skilled and adaptable team, capable of accommodating a wide range of requests.

We approach these challenges with a proactive and flexible mindset, and are constantly evolving our business model and operations to effectively meet the dynamic needs of both our clients and the ever-changing market.

What impact did the pandemic have and how have things recovered since?
Covid had a significant impact on our business; like many, we faced an initial disruption as travel restrictions were imposed and clients’ priorities shifted. The demand for certain services, including travel arrangements, declined, so we adapted by offering virtual services that catered to clients who were unable to travel. This included virtual wellness consultations, remote executive assistance and other digital solutions. We also expanded our offerings in other areas, providing fitness routines, mental health support and virtual cultural experiences.

As travel restrictions eased and the world began to recover, there was a resurgence in the demand for our services. Clients were eager to resume their travel plans and book unique experiences, and we were ready to meet those demands.

What’s it like managing a business more generally?
Running a business is multifaceted, involving a wide spectrum of responsibilities, challenges and rewards. You have to consistently demonstrate excellence in areas such as leadership, decision-making, team management, financial oversight, operational efficiency, marketing, sales, customer relations and long-term planning – as well as work-life balance – among many other areas.

It’s a demanding and intricate role; success in business management demands a unique blend of strategic thinking, effective leadership and the agility to adapt to evolving circumstances. It carries substantial responsibilities, but it can also bring about incredible rewards.

What are your business goals for the future?
My primary goal is to continue our expansion by entering new markets and broadening the company’s geographical reach. Continuing to build and nurture a highly skilled and motivated workforce is also hugely important. We plan to invest in employee training, leadership development and talent acquisition to achieve our strategic objectives. We also aspire to collaborate with other companies through partnerships, alliances or joint ventures to unlock new opportunities and explore new markets.

We’re also committed to establishing sustainability goals aimed at reducing our carbon footprint and actively participating in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Lastly, our pursuit of strong brand recognition remains a key focus. Developing a strong brand presence can significantly enhance consumer trust and foster brand loyalty, ultimately contributing to long-term success.

What impact might AI and other technological advancements have on the concierge industry?
The recent slew of technological advancements offer the industry exciting opportunities for the concierge sector. Mobile applications, chatbots and AI-powered platforms will significantly improve customer interactions, offering tailored recommendations and services. Integrating technologies like AI and IoT can empower providers to enhance customer experiences and streamline operational efficiency, fostering growth and customer loyalty. Virtual concierge services are expected to become increasingly prevalent, and the adoption of blockchain technology for secure transactions and payment solutions is also anticipated to become more widespread.

Running a business is multifaceted, involving a wide spectrum of responsibilities, challenges and rewards

How else might the sector develop in the future and what key trends are you seeing?
The concierge industry is poised for a series of transformations in the future, propelled by shifting consumer preferences and global trends. Alongside the technological breakthroughs, sustainability and responsible tourism are taking centre stage. Concierge services will likely embrace eco-friendly travel alternatives, promoting local and sustainable experiences and guiding travellers in making environmentally conscientious choices.

In terms of consumer trends, we’ve noticed growing demand among clients for personalised wellness experiences and lifestyle enhancements, as well as for tailored travel experiences. In the corporate realm, companies may look to integrate concierge services into their employee benefits packages to boost staff wellbeing. This could mean aiding employees with travel arrangements, or assisting with other tasks to help them achieve a better work-life balance.

What challenges do you foresee moving forward?
As the concierge industry continues to advance, it faces a myriad of challenges and opportunities that will significantly influence its trajectory. One key challenge lies in finding the delicate balance between luxury and sustainability, and providing eco-friendly options that also align with the industry’s demand for exclusive, high-end experiences.

We’ve also seen how global uncertainties such as pandemics, natural disasters and geopolitical instability can disrupt the travel and hospitality sector, so businesses must proactively prepare for these uncertainties and develop effective contingency plans.

What are the key opportunities?
Collaborations with businesses to provide concierge services to their employees represent one lucrative avenue, especially as employers are now putting an ever-bigger focus on wellbeing post-pandemic. That growing emphasis on wellness and wellbeing presents a valuable niche for expansion; offering health-focused experiences, wellness retreats and services can cater to the ever-increasing demand for holistic well-being.

We’re also seeing escalating demand for personalised experiences, which offers another prime opportunity. Tailoring services to cater to individual preferences and crafting unique, memorable experiences can set concierge providers apart in a highly competitive, ever-changing landscape.

Just six years ago, Daniel Pérez embarked on an unconventional journey into the world of electric mobility. He began producing content online, documenting his experiences with electric cars and charging infrastructure. These weren’t just videos; they were firsthand explorations of electric vehicles and the emerging charging ecosystem in Spain.

Through this content creation, Pérez gained an intimate understanding of the challenges faced by early adopters of electric vehicles. These challenges revolved around the intricacies of charging processes and the glaring inadequacy of charging infrastructure. Yet, little did he know that these experiences would serve as the foundation for something extraordinary.

“I started creating content about electric cars and charging, exploring the landscape. I saw the challenges faced by EV users firsthand, and it became clear to me that there was a tremendous opportunity to improve and expand the charging infrastructure to meet the growing needs of electric vehicle owners.”

A new era
In 2017, Pérez, along with his partner Lorenzo Antolín, embarked on a remarkable journey by founding EasyCharger. This marked the genesis of their venture into the world of electric mobility.

If I can help even one person recognise their value and self-worth and pursue their dreams, then I’ve made a positive impact in their world

Bolstered by initial investments and a strategic collaboration with Nissan, they set out to create revolutionary charging stations. Pérez’s vision was unwavering – to craft charging stations distinguished by their multiple charging points and cutting-edge software. These stations weren’t just about convenience; they aimed to redefine the electric vehicle charging experience. “We founded EasyCharger to create charging stations with multiple points and cutting-edge software. We wanted to redefine the EV charging experience.”

The transformation into Zunder
Fast forward to 2022, and EasyCharger underwent a transformation, reemerging as Zunder. This evolution was more than a mere rebranding; it signified a quantum leap in scaling their vision. Pérez had grand plans – to expedite the deployment of ultra-fast charging stations across Southern Europe. “We establish charging stations that are not only reliable and competitively priced but also equipped with canopies to protect vehicles, solar panels, and state-of-the-art chargers, boasting 400 kW of power,” Pérez elaborates. “Our target for 2025 is to have 500 charging stations, which equates to approximately 4,000 charging points. Currently, we have nearly more than 350 charging points in operation between Spain and France.” As of today, Zunder proudly operates its first ultra-fast charging station in France, with Portugal and Italy next on the horizon. The company has earned the distinction of being the highest-rated independent operator in the ultra-fast charging infrastructure sector.

Navigating challenges
Reflecting on Zunder’s early days, Pérez candidly acknowledges that the journey was anything but straightforward. The path to securing support was filled with the typical trials faced by startups. “We initiated our journey as a small startup, primarily focused on software development,” Pérez recollects. But Zunder’s growth trajectory didn’t halt there. Pérez elaborates, “We subsequently received significant public funding from national and regional programmes, including a substantial grant from the European Commission in 2023, along with additional support from Spanish national programmes. All this support has empowered us to chart a remarkable growth trajectory.”

I saw the challenges faced by EV users firsthand, and it became clear to me that there was a tremendous opportunity to improve and expand the charging infrastructure

However, Pérez embraces the opportunity to enhance Spain’s growth in comparison to other European nations. “It’s inspiring to see the potential for growth in Spain, and we believe that with the right reforms and a strong regulatory framework, we can catch up to the progress in other countries. We are already making significant strides in France, where we opened our first station a couple months ago, Italy, and Portugal, and we are committed to replicating that success here in Spain.

Pérez also states “we are confident that with the necessary reforms and a sense of urgency, we can achieve the goal of having five million electric vehicles on Spanish roads by 2030. This ambitious target is within reach, and by installing ultra-rapid charging points in just six months instead of two years, we can accelerate our progress and make a positive impact on our nation’s future.”

A commitment to quality
Zunder’s business model is unambiguous and its charging stations, boasting between 8 to 32 ultra-rapid charging points, embody this commitment. However, it’s not just about the quantity of charging points; it’s about their quality. “We set up charging stations that prioritise reliability and competitive pricing, coupled with features such as vehicle canopies, solar panels, and cutting-edge charging technology,” Pérez explains. Pérez’s vision extends beyond merely providing a service; it’s about redefining electric mobility to make it accessible, convenient, and sustainable for all.

Empowering a sustainable future
Daniel Pérez’s leadership philosophy is founded on empowerment and collaboration. He firmly believes that success is a collective effort, where everyone should feel valued and empowered. “You can’t be afraid to lose people by empowering them; they might leave, but you’ll have extracted the best from them during their tenure,” Pérez asserts. He champions extending this sense of empowerment beyond Zunder through mentoring and volunteering. “If I can help even one person recognise their value and self-worth and pursue their dreams, then I’ve made a positive impact in their world,” Pérez affirms.

In a world where sustainability and electric mobility reign supreme, Daniel Pérez stands as an emblem of transformational leadership. His journey from YouTube enthusiast to the CEO of Zunder is a story of vision, determination, and innovation. As the world races toward a sustainable future, leaders like Pérez inspire us to think bigger, work harder, and aim higher. His vision of electric mobility is not just about charging cars; it’s about charging the world with sustainable energy.

Tiago Veiga, CEO of next-generation reconciliation software specialists Aurum Solutions, has had a varied career which has seen him navigate a variety of business situations across industries and across the world. In times of market uncertainty, it is this experience which enables Tiago to not only drive Aurum Solutions forward as a business but give clear and data-driven guidance to its clients as well.

Rather than following a conventional route to the role, Tiago has taken considered risks, jumping into new opportunities, learning from his peers to shape him into the business leader he is today. Drawing on these experiences and continuing to learn from his environment has enabled Tiago to grow Aurum as a business despite current wider uncertainty.

Coming to the table with an open and progressive mindset, Tiago has implemented an ambitious growth strategy, aligning the team behind an elevated, shared, and common ambition for the future. Part of this included a complete brand transformation, a strategic initiative which reflects Aurum’s commitment to continuous innovation and a refreshed brand identity that best resonates with the changing and evolving company.

At Aurum, we specialise in data – consolidating it, reconciling it, and presenting it in an easy-to-digest format

Aurum works with companies that span sectors including banking, fintech, asset management, hospitality and insurance, among others, in over 35 countries. Attributing its success to a client-centred mentality and ability to develop purpose-built solutions, over nearly two decades the business has worked with hundreds of household brands both in the UK and globally, including Stonegate Group, Octopus Investments, Ladbrokes, HTB, Admiral and more, supporting finance teams and transforming departments’ data quality and operational efficiency.

But with ongoing uncertainty, is now the right time to be pushing boundaries in order to succeed? “It’s not enough to march with the masses,” comments Tiago. “Volatile environments require a new approach to devising strategy. We all must change our mindset, push the boundaries, and ensure we have the right tools at our disposal in order to navigate challenging waters.”

Create a senior team with different but complementary expertise
“Leading a business is often a team effort, which is now even more true at Aurum,” comments Tiago.

Many business leaders carry a sense of bravado and the belief that the challenges they face, they must tackle alone. However, this attitude can create further problems and a feeling of isolation. Business leaders have faced a number of evolving and changing uncertainties over the past few years, many from completely uncontrollable external factors, from a global pandemic to war, natural disasters and the reshuffling of supply chains and capital structures. In situations of ongoing uncertainty, it is important for leaders to draw on their network of people for insight and perspective. This includes not only from within the walls of the business, but sharing ideas, thoughts, strategies, and guidance with external business leaders.

Aurum benefits greatly from having seasoned leaders and ownership, which in turn provides valuable advantages to the young CEO.

Tiago adds, “We have an incredible team from diverse backgrounds, each bringing their own experience, thoughts and ideas. Everyone is willing to go the extra mile and by working together, not against each other, we’re able to drive innovation and be forward-thinking, as opposed to being stuck doing the same thing time and time again. Take the time to stop and listen to ideas – you never know where inspiration may come from.”

Focus more on the client and less on admin
Imagine if instead of spending crucial time on administrative tasks, teams could be empowered to focus more on strategic thinking, client relations, and problem-solving to build a true competitive edge.

“When I joined Aurum in 2018 to lead the sales team, I knew we needed to take a customer-centric approach. Building strong relationships with our clients – both existing and new – was essential to our strategy, alongside expanding internationally and taking the company to new markets and new clients, to create a more sustainable future for the company.”

Volatile environments require a new approach to devising strategy

Business Leaders should always have a focus on their customers as part of their business strategy, with careful consideration given to creating solutions to their problems, listening to their wants and needs, and how as a business, you can help your clients achieve their goals.

“Since becoming CEO, my day-to-day role has changed, but my attitude has not. People – whether the Aurum team or our clients – remain at the heart of every decision I make. I’m fortunate enough to have had a varied and interesting career, spanning events to advertising, fintech to fruit. I’ve built and sold my own businesses, created strategies, mentored teams, and so much more. This puts me in a unique position when our clients come to us with a specific challenge to tackle by drawing on my own experience, as well as those of our wider team, to develop a solution. In the long run, this allows Aurum to be seen as a problem-solving business and crucial to our clients’ strategies. In the long-run, this can only be a good thing for our own success.”

Create data-driven decisions
“At Aurum, we specialise in data – consolidating it, reconciling it, and presenting it in an easy-to-digest format. Our software tackles unimaginable levels of data on a daily basis for clients. So, we know the power that data holds and the ramifications of incorrect business data on wider decisions,” remarks Tiago.

To not only survive but thrive amid uncertainty, businesses must embrace data as a powerful tool to identify, assess, and mitigate risks. But increasing volumes and complexity, paired with strict regulations, means that ensuring the integrity of data is impossible to achieve manually, which is why they have developed a solution which eradicates risks of errors. By automating the process, it frees up finance teams, and senior leadership teams, to instead focus on what the data is saying rather than trying to process it, leading to better and more accurate strategies.

Sean Reddington, CEO and Founder of Thrive Learning, is not your typical entrepreneur or founder of a technology-driven business. He didn’t go to business school or study computer sciences or have family money backing him. Instead, Sean worked hard, took advantage of all the opportunities he could find, and built his own foundations and understanding of what makes a successful business. What’s more, he ensured he had a good grounding in learning technologies and the industry, before seeing an opportunity in the market and seizing it.

Founding Thrive, Sean has changed the game for creating ground-breaking new ventures. Capitalising on his tech knowledge and experience, and recognising that learning is a continual process, Sean saw a huge gap for an Instagram-inspired platform that combined learning, internal comms, skills and collaborative knowledge sharing, and founded Thrive in 2018, armed with an ambition to revolutionise the industry.

Crucial to Sean throughout the process was creating a people-centred business. Sean attributes Thrives fantastic success to taking this approach from the beginning, throwing out the ‘traditional’ business-building rule book, and steering the business through turbulent periods, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

Keep your friends close
Business books and experts will tell you hiring and working with friends is a bad idea, citing reasons from blurred lines between work and personal, to potential lack of work ethic. However, Sean decided to go against the grain and instead has built a business surrounding himself with trusted friends, colleagues, and people he knows well.

“Starting a new business is always a leap of faith, no matter how good you think the opportunity might be or how confident you are in your vision. You need support and people you can trust around you – trust isn’t built overnight.”

After beginning trading in 2019, the pandemic hit. Sean recalls, “Building a business during a global pandemic was certainly character-building, and there were some dark moments when that first lockdown hit.”

Hiring friends and trusted people from Sean’s existing network is what he sees as one of the secrets to flourishing during such difficult times, alongside transforming Thrive into a business which would succeed in a world of working from home, furlough, and rapid digitalisation.

“Everything I’d worked for across 17 years was invested into Thrive. When Covid hit, we were on a knife edge as businesses furloughed workers and cut investment in non-essential suppliers. And we had to cut pay for our then 35-strong team. Despite taking pay cuts, none of our team left. I’m not naive enough to think that was 100 percent down to our company culture – everyone was stuck between a rock and a hard place back then. But we have focused our efforts on building Thrive, from the very beginning, to be a great place to work with people I know and trust, so I do think that helped hugely.”

He adds: “The lines between work and home were blurred during the pandemic, but that’s not a bad thing – the more we respect people’s responsibilities outside of work, the more valued they feel, and this, inevitably, has a positive impact on wellbeing.”

You don’t always need venture capital investment to grow
For many businesses, an injection of cash or know-how in the early days of building a business from venture capital (VC) can be a huge help and benefit. However, Sean wanted to showcase you can successfully build a business using organic growth. And it has worked. Headline year-on-year results include:

•  100 percent ARR increase.
• 50 percent uplift in customer base; 36 percent increase in employees.
• 99 percent customer renewal rate; 99 percent customer satisfaction.
• 150+ employees – a 33 percent year-on-year increase in headcount – and 350+ customers

In 2022, Thrive turned down 83 acquisition or investment attempts. Sean comments: “We’re having too much fun to sell now. It’s such an exciting time to be at Thrive. I’m surrounded by talented people and working with more and more like-minded global customers every day, with a clear plan for what we want to achieve in the future. Truth is, I’m not ready to give that up.”

The benefit of completely organic growth, without PE-backing or VC funding means there is no pressure to build out an exit plan, and no one external to answer to around where or how money is being spent or invested to help with growth.

Boards don’t always drive the best business decisions
As Sean says, “we’ve never followed the ‘it’s always been done that way’ mentality of business, so why should we start now?”

For Sean, while people have clearly defined roles in the business, he believes hierarchy can create a divide between people in the business. “At Thrive, we’re incredibly fortunate to have such a strong and experienced leadership team. To me, it seems crazy to not tap into all of that knowledge and expertise to drive the business forward.”

The more we respect people’s responsibilities outside of work, the more valued they feel

He continues, “Everyone at Thrive grafts hard and has the same passion and care for the business as myself, Mark, and everyone who has been on this journey since the beginning. Most of our success has come from ideas that have been sparked in conversation with everyone (or maybe over a Guinness…), so I want to ensure as a business we can continue to tap into that knowledge and idea stream, and encourage even more collaboration across the team where we can. Not just have a board of directors who make all the decisions.”

A final benefit of not having a board to report to, is that Sean and the team have the freedom and privilege to make business decisions without the rigmarole of seeking permission. This has allowed Thrive to be nimble and agile, and bring in experimental initiatives such as a £10,000 cash prize for the best sales lead of the year, as one example.

Don’t be afraid to bring development decisions forward
At Thrive, the team has a business plan and ambitions of where they want to be in the future. However, thanks to the reactive nature of the business, the team has had the ability to fast-track business decisions if the opportunity is there, and adapt its platform based on conversations with customers in order to solve real-world challenges.

For example, in 2022 Thrive heard its customers’ pain-points and took a fresh approach to skills development. Thrive’s tech is built from listening to end users, emphasising the point that learning shouldn’t just be a tick box exercise.

Sean comments, “Our industry is ladened with never-ending acronyms and astronomical additional or hidden costs. Our customers wanted a space which combined all their learning and comms needs together in a way that addressed the whole picture and ideally saved money by consolidating everything into one platform. We’ve been fortunate to be able to team up with customers like Vodafone, Sky, and Matalan to develop our platform to meet the needs of our customers.

“Taking the leap and moving away from the LXP label, and calling Thrive an ‘all-in-one learning and skills platform’ was a big decision for a company still not yet five years old. But it paid off. Today we’re proud to be used by hundreds of global companies not just for training, but to communicate policies and business-critical messages as well as identify, progress and manage skills across their organisation – So, when we say ‘all-in-one’ we really mean it.”

Colosseum Tannlege is the Norwegian arm of Colosseum Dental Group, the pan-European dental health business. The Norwegian company was founded in 1986 by a dentist who believed that chain management would be the future of dentistry. He was right: today there are several dental care chains in Norway, and Colosseum Tannlege is still at the top.

Mia Grundstrøm became CEO of Colosseum Tannlege in 2020, six months in to the COVID-19 pandemic. She previously served as CEO of Aleris, Norway’s leading private healthcare company, providing hospital and medical services nationwide. She had been with Aleris for 13 years, growing up through the company from business controller, to CFO, to CEO.

“I saw Colosseum Tannlege as my next challenge,” Grundstrøm said. “It is motivating to be part of the development of this industry, where Colosseum Tannlege still has great growth potential.”

2022 was the fastest growing year for Colosseum Tannlege to date, with 22 new clinics joining the chain. “It’s been a tough, but incredibly interesting and motivating year as a manager,” said Grundstrøm. “The biggest challenge has been to balance integration and ongoing operations. We had to expand and establish a larger organisation and management to handle all the new clinics.

“Pandemics, brutal wars, energy and financial crises have severely tested us and other industries in recent years. It’s a challenge, but it really shows the importance of good cooperation. And finally, it has demonstrated the excellent adaptability of the Colosseum Tannlege staff and dentists. I am proud to be part of a company that supports patients every day and provides them with quality service.”

For Grundstrøm, scaling the business while retaining that high level of service is about getting the right people on board, and putting people in the right place. “We all have different skill sets, and by understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses, we can create strong teams that can take our business to the next level,” she said. As a manager, you must dare to hire people who are more knowledgeable than you, Grundstrøm went on to explain. This isn’t always self-evident to all managers, but shared knowledge gives you double back.

“My motto is that knowledge in itself is not power, but shared knowledge brings power and value, taking you and your company to the next level,” she said.

Scale with polish
The field of dental health is witnessing increasing competition, driven by higher customer expectations. The modern patient expects – and demands – the highest dental quality. But perceived quality extends far beyond just the examination or treatment: it encompasses the entire patient journey, from initial contact, to consultation, to the end of treatment.

In order to compete in the dental market, we must focus on our patients,” Grundstrøm said. “We need to exceed their expectations of dental treatment so they can tell their friends about their experience.”

To accompany the business’s huge expansion, Colosseum Tannlege has taken a number of steps to improve its availability to its patients. It opened a new customer centre to ensure that all incoming inquiries are answered quickly – whether by email, phone or other channels. As well as expanding the number of clinics it operates across the country, those clinics have also extended their opening hours. And a new online chat channel for patients to contact the customer care centre is imminent.

In 2022 Colosseum Tannlege invested NOK 140m in new modern equipment, and in the construction of large interdisciplinary clinics designed to provide efficient and quality care to patients. In the past, the idea of a large dental chain would have been a daunting thought for many practice owners – but Colosseum Tannlege is excited to see more independent dental practices join a larger dental service and experience the positive aspects of being part of a greater whole.

“A large interdisciplinary clinic offering a wide range of services creates an inspiring professional environment and is an excellent platform for interdisciplinary learning and knowledge exchange,” said Grundstrøm. “The most important thing is that patients receive the best and correct care possible with modern technology and equipment.

“Our clinics have well-functioning facilities that allow our therapists to devote their time to treating patients, rather than dealing with administrative issues. At Colosseum Tannlege, dentists are given the opportunity for further development.”

The future of dentistry is digital
In the field of dentistry, online appointment scheduling is fairly new. While customers increasingly book everything else online, dentists often continue to send appointments by mail. Colosseum Tannlege has developed an online booking system so that patients can choose the appointment that best suits them. Not surprisingly, online booking has quickly become patients’ most popular way to make an appointment.

The dental health industry is also being advanced by artificial intelligence. Modern technology has been speeding up developments in the field – such as in identifying and treating caries. More commonly known as tooth decay, caries is a common dental problem that is sometimes detected too late. Advanced technology and AI can put an end to this delay: allowing dentists to detect dental caries faster, and start treatment based on a more effective process.

Shared knowledge brings power and value, taking you and your company to the next level

AI-based technology can also be used to detect and measure bone loss in the tooth area. This allows dentists to better understand patients’ dental health and help to detect the need for tooth extraction at an early stage. These advances are helping to improve the prognosis of patients at the same time as reducing the cost of treatment.

Another exciting development in dental health is the use of 3D printing. This enables more precise and cheaper manufacturing of dental implants and other prosthetics. Dentists can make individual preparations of prosthetics that meet the individual needs of each patient and improve their therapeutic effect.

AI and modern technology have the potential to play an important role on the road to achieving a more sustainable and eco-friendly dental health industry. Using 3D printing reduces material consumption and waste, while AI-based diagnostics and treatment planning can improve accuracy and reduce the need for invasive and resource-intense interventions.

Sustainability
Colosseum Tannlege is also responding to the trend of sustainable development. “What we do in the area of sustainability matters to our patients and future patients,” said Grundstrøm. “Climate change, changing consumer habits and new regulations require sustainability. Tackling major societal challenges. The situation requires greater action, responsibility, and long-term action in dentistry.

“We take this responsibility seriously. That’s why we form sustainable partnerships with other Scandinavian countries and promote sustainable development. We want to make big strides in sustainability, and as part of a larger team we can make big strides together. We are the first DSO in Norway publishing annual quality and sustainability reports – this ensures the necessary internal attention and commitment. It’s what we do in our day-to-day business that drives us to improve.”

This commitment to sustainability looks inside the business, as well as out. Each year the company conducts an annual employee survey, led by Great Place to Work, the international workplace culture organisation. According to the latest survey, 86 percent of Colosseum Tannlege employees feel their work is meaningful and ‘more than just a job.’ “In other words, we take care of our employees!” Grundstrøm said. “I am incredibly proud of the work we do and our culture of inclusion and collaboration.”

Owners with strong purpose
Colosseum Tannlege is a part of Colosseum Dental Group, which operates more than 620 modern, fully equipped clinics and 50 laboratories in 11 markets across Europe. The group employs more than 12,500 dentists and assistants, and treats more than six million patients per year. Colosseum Dental Group is owned by the Jacobs family through Jacobs Holding. Jacobs Holding donates all of its financial dividends to the nonprofit Jacobs Foundation. The Jacobs Foundation invests in the future of young people by supporting the development of young people and children through programmes around the world. It aims for equal access to high quality education whatever their background and wherever their home.

“Having an owner with such a long long-term perspective and a clear purpose as Jacobs helps us bring the best out of our business, which again promotes the best for our patients,” Grundstrøm said.

BBK is a Banking Foundation that has held the same values and its compromise with the Biscayan society for over a century. In 2014, changes to the 26/2013 Savings Banks and Foundations Act forced it to become a banking foundation, in a context of high uncertainty and instability regarding both microeconomic and macroeconomic trends as well as in the stock markets. Instead of becoming independent from it, which was the easiest way to go after the Act was passed, BBK did not hesitate to remain in support of Kutxabank, as it had always done.

BBK has always followed the same idea: to allow Kutxabank, the largest services firm in the Basque Country, to remain attached to the society of Biscay and its institutions. This required us to remain in support of Kutxabank after the Act, specifically through three angles: by effectively managing BBK’s assets, which amount to €3bn; a strong social component, following the specifics that the Spanish legislation has for decades enforced on banking foundations; and asset diversification.

Nowadays, BBK is the controlling shareholder of Kutxabank, with 57 percent of its shareholding, and supports the promotion of the Basque economy with investments in local companies. BBK also carries out the largest social work in Spain per inhabitant in relative terms, and the second in terms of size: €231m.

BBK’s governing principle is sustainable competitiveness. This model is based on the ethical values of humanism, which incorporates environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria in all of its corporate policies and decision-making processes, avoiding the model of competitiveness based on price while focusing on innovation, quality and excellence as ways of differentiation. Likewise, BBK is committed to the development of talent, creativity and its contribution to generating quality employment, with an approach that ensures respect for and preservation of the environment, equal opportunities and social integration, contributing, in short, to the improvement of the welfare state.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals
BBK’s commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is especially strong on three dimensions. First, BBK is committed to solving the energy crisis by supporting optimisation and self-sufficiency strategies. Second, the digital challenge is also a priority for BBK, as the foundation focuses on placing the most innovative technologies at the service of the people. Third, BBK seeks to ensure that the well-being of our society as a whole, leaving no one behind, is a global priority.

BBK’s Social Work
BBK’s Social Work encompasses a wide range of initiatives, to which the Foundation devotes more than €40m per year. BBK’s social work is the second largest in Spain and the largest in terms of spending per capita. Its role in Biscay is that of a facilitator, allowing socioeconomic development to endure and making sure that the needs of Basque citizens are covered to the greatest extent. BBK has a research and intelligence department that is constantly working to determine the key interests and needs of each age group and collective. Its activities include: scholarships and internships, support to self-employed professionals, cultural activities, social participation, health prevention programmes, environmental preservation, support to disabled people that lack physical or mental autonomy, and social innovation pilot programmes. All of its work is ultimately devoted to the wellbeing of the Biscayan society.

Raising awareness on sustainable competitiveness
Measuring the impact of our actions is becoming more and more common in our society. It is no longer enough to evaluate the economic and financial impact of companies; societies and customers are increasingly demanding to learn more about the effects of each action from a social and environmental point of view.

BBK’s commitment to sustainable competitiveness implies understanding impact measurement as a tool for learning and continuous improvement, helping to generate a spiral of positive impacts on society, improving the quality of life and the welfare state.

Within this topic as its framework, BBK has developed different initiatives with the goal of raising awareness on the importance of acting under the parameter of sustainable competitiveness.

Choosing tomorrow
One of the campaigns that best embodies the usefulness of the management model promoted by Sagredo is ‘BIHAR: Choosing Tomorrow.’ It is an exercise of reflection on what might happen if we continue to use unsustainable models as a society. The short film is a dystopian work that poses a plausible scenario of tomorrow’s society. Throughout Bihar’s life, we can see how, in the near future, catastrophic changes can occur if we do not switch current paradigms towards sustainable, innovative models of competitiveness.

Along with the short film, a large bust of Bihar was commissioned from renowned sculptor Rubén Orozco. A living sculpture designed to reflect on the constant evolution of time, represented by the rise and fall of the tides of the Bilbao Estuary. It can be seen next to the Zubizuri Bridge in Bilbao, only when the tide is low.

As for the results, Bihar traveled the world, obtaining coverage in the main national and international media. It had a huge impact in online media and press, with 30 percent international coverage as it was present in 75 different countries. In addition, it reached an audience of more than 200,000 people, with an AVE of €5m (plus 87 percent in KPIs). The news of the short film’s premiere went viral on social media around the world, with more than 300 million views. Due to its enormous success, the short film was broadcast at prime time on the Basque Country’s main television channel, eitb.

Kolapso
The latest campaign developed by the Foundation is called Kolapso. This new project, again framed within the idea of raising awareness of sustainable competitiveness, was created to represent reaching the ecological point of no return in an accelerated way, a metaphorical representation of the pressure we all exert on the world we live in every day. To portray the strong impact of day-to-day decisions, the Kolapso metaverse was created to represent the city of Bilbao and a balloon-shaped infrastructure was installed in the main square of the capital, created to collapse, unlike our planet. Citizens were invited to answer a survey with questions about their consumption habits, as well as about environmental and sustainability routines (‘Have you ever bought packaged fruit?’, ‘Do you usually buy products in local stores?’). Based on these answers, the balloon increased in size – or not – until it exploded, simulating the collapse of the world. BBK pledged to donate a food basket to families at risk of social exclusion for each survey. The balloon ended up bursting 73 hours after its installation, four days ahead of schedule.

Leadership and values in the company’s strategy
Xabier Sagredo, BBK’s CEO, is committed to a change of the current social, economic and environmental model, which would end the current ‘short-termism’ principle ruling most of human activities nowadays.

He supports a socioeconomic model that takes all of us into account: companies, institutions, nonprofits and citizens. A model based on fair and sustainable competitiveness, committed to innovation, technology and talent, that respects ESG criteria and makes us reflect on the consequences of each of the decisions we make in our daily lives.

This model arises from the need to put the preservation of the welfare state before purely economic criteria, and is based on consistent decision-making in all areas (personal life, at work, environmentally speaking) and in all of our roles (consumers, companies, workers, and citizens). It develops talent, creativity and contributes to the generation of high-quality jobs from an approach that guarantees respect, environmentalism, equal opportunities and social integration.

Today Wilfa is the market leader in the small kitchen appliances sector in the Nordic countries, selling to all major retailers in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. It is also attacking export markets with gusto, starting Wilfa Germany GMBH in 2020, and opening up distributors in the UK, Netherlands and Poland and, in 2022, Spain, France, Switzerland and Austria.

Hoff joined Wilfa, which is based in Oslo and was founded in 1948, just after graduating from the Norwegian school of business and economics and the University of Trier. His first role was working as a controller in Hong Kong, learning how the factories operated that made the products Wilfa sold. When he returned to Norway he worked as a product manager, then as a key account manager, and also as a marketing manager.

This wide range of roles, Hoff says, “has given me a complete understanding of the whole company, which I have used to create business where others haven’t been able to see the opportunities. With good understanding of consumers need, our retailers need and how our factories work, I have been able to find new categories, develop products at a quicker pace and give confidence to our retailers that we are the experts to be listened to. This has given us great opportunities.”

Those skills were needed when the company’s then-CEO left, taking one of its agencies with him. “Since I had a good understanding of what was possible to do, I landed a new agency to replace it quickly,” Hoff says. Within a few years, Wilfa had built the new brand to be a market leader, only for the brand owner to decide to do it all themselves. Again, Wilfa found a new agency, for Dyson, taking that brand from three percent market share in 2015 to over 50 percent in 2019. Once again Dyson decided to do its own marketing and distribution, and Wilfa lost almost 50 percent of its turnover.

We have built many market-leading brands from zero

At this point, Hoff says, “we decided that it was time to build our own brands instead.” The company launched E-way electric scooters, a full assortment of kitchen knifes and pots and pans under the name of EGO, and a host of other new Wilfa products. “By 2020, we had recovered almost 100 percent on turnover and we delivered an even higher EBITDA than when we had in 2019,” Hoff says. “So our strategy now is not to have too much risk in foreign brands and we only take in external brands when there are categories we can’t do ourselves.”

Wilfa, Hoff says, “has an extreme focus on customer experience. While most of our competitors are just making another coffee maker, we ask ourselves, ‘how can we help consumers making better coffee? What are the pain points that they know, or don’t know about, when making coffee?’ Then we include experts on the category, our fantastic engineers and great category team to find out how we can avoid these pain points.

“This means that our products very often have a smart solution which helps the consumer succeed better using our products. We are also less focused on the cost of the product when making the solutions, so we often end up with a more upscale product, but we do so in order to make the best product in the market. This led us to win 32 ‘best-in-test’ awards in 2022.

“The reason for being best-in-test, we believe, is that we go to extreme lengths to make the best product possible without being hindered by price focus. This way we ensure the product becomes as good as it can be before we launch it.”

Wilfa still sources and distributes “already produced” products, “like many of our competitors, but we do less and less of this due to we don’t believe this is a sustainable position for the future, with private labels, and Chinese factories going direct to the market,” Hoff says.

“What separates Wilfa from other importers, is that we always strive to develop the best products, and we like to challenge the market leaders within each category. We have done so to challenge Oral-B on electric toothbrushes, Moccamaster on coffee makers, Kenwood on kitchen machines, and we will continue to do this to give consumers the best possible product. Wilfa is already the market leader in many categories such as waffle makers – nine years in a row – coffee makers, coffee grinders, ice-cream makers, ice cube makers, blenders, sandwich makers, stickmixers and humidifiers.

“Another thing that separates us from many of our competitors is that we have a stronger focus on concrete environmental changes on our products. Because of this, we implemented FSC [Forest Stewardship Council] paper on all our instruction manuals, gift boxes and mastercartons, we changed our products to be better so we could increase our guarantee from two years to five years, we removed 18 tons of styropore, became environmental lighthouse approved and now we are doing a complete life cycle analysis on our products so we can see how we can become carbon-neutral by 2025.

“We have built many market-leading brands from zero. Unfortunately, when doing so, the brands tend to want to take over by themselves. This has led Wilfa to have quite a bumpy ride, with some years of good profit and other years with heavy losses. This has given me a good understanding of the implications of sales, margins, costs and how we can avoid such challenges happening in the future.

“Also, working with global leading brands have given us a good understanding of the market, how large corporations do business, and we are trying to take the best from this and implement those lessons in our organisation. Wilfa is most likely the most agile company in the industry, and we take the benefits of working partly like the larger companies, and combining this with the flexibility of a smaller company. And we operate with a very flat organisational structure, every one can give their input on things, so we can make quick decisions.

“Since we have quite a few new people and we work in a changing industry, I have had to be very much involved in operational tasks. I am a leader who is very much involved in all details. This is especially during the last few years, as we have hired a lot of new people in our organisation to help us achieve our goals. We present our strategy overview to the whole organisation, while trying to break down each project to each employee so they understand their role in the big picture, and understand what their contribution is. We also inform all employees openly where we are, what the challenges are and how we will cope with these.

Our products very often have a smart solution which helps the consumer succeed

“We always have good discussions about potential and risk before we go into a new project. All category managers must make business plans, which we go carefully through and check out with our experienced country managers. This way we ensure that costs are under control, as well as securing the market potential.

“Our strategy plan is very detailed, with concrete projections and timelines. The progression is measured in our management meetings to ensure we are on track, and if we need to do amendments, we do so in the management group. We are clear about our financial targets, environmental targets, product innovations, guarantee costs, customer satisfaction KPIs, brand awareness and brand preference, forecasting and employee satisfaction. These targets have been broken down to more concrete projects and contain tasks given to each employee within a concrete timeline, with concrete KPIs and bonus models to help motivate them to work together against our common goals.”

Hoff is committed to a role that continues to be more hands on than many company bosses might be comfortable with: “With the great opportunities which lie in front of us, I believe my main task is to ensure that we have the financial strength, the organisational resources and competencies and the strategy plan to make this come true. I will still be quite operational, as this separates me from many other CEOs in the industry. This has always given me a unique understanding of what is going on in the industry, with our suppliers, our customers and in the organisation.”

Despite all the problems of the global economy, Hoff is realistic but optimistic: “Of course, we are also challenged by the current situation. Freight costs are extremely high, raw material pricing is increasing, and with the current situation in Ukraine and with all prices on power, gasoline and other goods increasing, the market is quite tough.” However, he says: “In 2021, we had a turnover of €55m, and our target for 2025 is to reach €100m.

“This, we believe, will be mainly driven by new markets, new categories which we will launch and taking market share by launching more and more interesting products. We will also move many of our products over from mechanical products to app-based products with a consumer-friendly solution.”

Market demand for data centre space has been growing year-on-year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future as more and more devices connect to the internet and more data is produced.

They are the backbone of the digital economy and are critical to everyone’s lives, enabling everything from cloud computing, apps, social media, remote working platforms including meeting applications Zoom and Teams, to video and music streaming, shopping, travel, health and medical research.

Without data centres, society simply couldn’t function in this digital age; everything runs from a server in a data centre somewhere.

They are the most energy efficient and effective way of providing for modern computing’s massive demands; one of the most efficient ways to deliver a unit of computing (energy per compute unit) is to put it in a large, modern, advanced data centre on a cloud platform.

The pandemic was a great example of why and how important data centres are – with data centre engineers even being categorised as ‘essential workers’ to ensure that life could continue online as seamlessly as possible.

From the business perspective, data centres can be dedicated to a single organisation, or provide colocation services to multiple businesses. While some hyperscale cloud providers may require a dedicated facility, due to their enormous data centre requirements, businesses of all sizes can benefit from colocation, designed to provide maximum flexibility and transparency. Requiring the same skills to run servers in-house, colocation providers take responsibility for the physical environment; everything from the network cables, power availability, physical security, cooling and even the level of cleanliness are somebody else’s responsibility.

Colocation in data centres has become the preferred choice for many enterprises over building and maintaining their own, which could be any size – from servers in a cupboard, a room, a whole floor, to an entire building housing the equipment. Many organisations have found that by moving onsite IT infrastructure to a colocation provider, they can reduce costs, scale up or down when needed, benefit from more uptime and mitigate security and compliance risks – all without any detrimental effect on performance.

This means that organisations cannot take any risks with the data centre partners with whom they entrust this critical service. Finding providers that can be trusted to deliver robust, efficient, scalable facilities has never been more important.

Here are the top three things to look out for:

Does the provider deliver a reliable service?
Ensure that your partner can provide a flexible and scalable service with enough capacity for your digital requirements now and in the future, and the ability to adapt to continually changing needs.

Is the provider responsible?
Ensure that your provider is committed to delivering a ‘cradle-to-grave’ sustainability strategy, where environmental ambitions are built into every step of the data centre from design to construction to operational management.

Is the facility resilient?
Ensure that mitigating processes are in place in case things go wrong. Check the monitoring, reacting and operating procedures so that if disaster strikes, your provider can act swiftly and effectively to overcome unforeseen circumstances.

Speaking to the 2023 CEO of the year winner: data centre and colocation industry, Neil Cresswell, CEO of VIRTUS Data Centres said: “VIRTUS is the UK’s largest data centre provider. Currently we have 11 data centres providing approximately 178MW of IT load space to our customers in and around London. This is a particularly exciting time for us as we are taking our expertise into mainland Europe to support our existing data centre customers who continue to expand, as well as new ones.”

Having led VIRTUS for 10 of the 12 years it’s been operational, Neil has been integral to the growth and success of the company. He said: “What sets VIRTUS apart from our competitors can be found in many aspects of the design, build and operations of our facilities. However, the quality of operations – the Operational Excellence – is where we truly excel. The way we implement design innovations makes a difference to the service we provide in terms of efficiency and robustness. It’s how we design, build, test, maintain, change and operate our facilities that differentiates us – ensuring robust and reliable availability is delivered.”

Neil concluded: “It is our people who really make VIRTUS the success it is and keep our customer satisfaction scores high. Only by attracting and retaining the best people in the industry will we be able to provide our customers with world-class customer service.”

Click here to learn more about VIRTUS

Milena Videnova of Axpo Bulgaria has everything necessary to succeed in the complex and competitive energy industry. She has proven this with the results achieved in the almost two years since she joined Axpo Bulgaria, a subsidiary of the Swiss-holding Axpo Group.

Videnova is smart, ambitious and efficient. Being a female leader in a male-dominated field is not new to her. She has a strong track record of working in different managerial positions, with over 21 years’ experience in the banking, insurance and financial sectors.

Starting her career as an analyst at the Investment Bank of Brandenburg (a subsidiary of WEST LB), it quickly became obvious that Videnova had much more passion to develop and grow. She went on to hold different managerial positions in Raiffeisenbank Bulgaria (a subsidiary of the Austrian Raiffeisen Zentralbank), UniCredit Bulbank and the Austrian Hypo NOE Investmentbank.

Before joining Axpo, Videnova spent a significant part of her career at Coface Bulgaria, where she was Country Manager for almost seven years. During that time, the company became a market leader in credit insurance.

A result-orientated leader
Videnova joined Axpo Bulgaria in 2020. Having to lead the company during turbulent times, her success and the results speak for themselves. What impressed the judging panel of the 2023 European CEO Awards was her clear and consistent goal-setting and high efficiency.

Turning back to August 2020, when Videnova joined the company, she recalls the first goals she set for herself.

“Our Bulgarian team manages energy logistics in Europe and many back-office functions for the group. My first goal was to expand these and to optimise and automate certain processes that would allow us to gain more clients and services.”

However, Videnova had more strategic goals for Axpo Bulgaria’s development, including turning the company into a trade hub. “When I arrived, we only had a couple of salespeople, just three licences, and there were almost no active deals. Now we are managing over 30 electricity and natural gas licences and operating in 15 European markets,” she explains.

The third goal she set for herself initially was to achieve sustainable profits. And, for the second year in a row now, Axpo Bulgaria is profitable from wholesale trade. Looking to the future, Axpo Bulgaria aims to enter additional markets and diversify more.

Navigating through the green transition in an Eastern European country
What makes Videnova’s situation even more challenging is that she heads up Axpo’s subsidiary in Bulgaria – a country trying to transition from the conventional and more polluting energy carriers to greener and more environmentally-friendly solutions.

At the same time, many local stakeholders support the usage of lignite in Bulgaria’s energy mix. Some of the arguments in favour of this are that lignite is a local resource, and it makes the country independent from external factors. Not to mention the social price that will be paid in case of a fast coal phase-out.

Nevertheless, Videnova believes in the green transition. “Bulgaria has enough natural resources for a healthy green energy mix. To achieve this, however, we will also need more efficient administration and e-government. That will help get the funding to the people who need it. Otherwise, we are going to pay a very high price for the delay,” she says.

According to Videnova, Bulgaria should continue diversifying its energy sources, accelerating renewable energy projects, and building and maintaining existing facilities, including nuclear. In turn, the social price will eventually go down.

Axpo can support Bulgaria in its greener energy future
Videnova thinks that the Axpo Group can also support Bulgaria in its efforts toward a greener energy future. The company develops, expands, and perfects alternative energy sources in Europe and across the world through sustainable energy solutions, power purchase agreements, and the creation of state-of-the-art energy technologies.

When a leader has created and developed a strong and performing team, everything is possible

Videnova points out that Axpo is owned by Swiss cantons and cantonal utility companies, and has over 100 years of history. Together with its partners, it is Switzerland’s largest producer of renewable energy from hydropower, biomass, and nuclear sources. Abroad, Axpo focuses on solar and wind energy. The company has a portfolio of wind farms and is active across the entire solar energy value chain. In fact, Axpo aims to develop 10GW of solar energy and 3GW of onshore wind energy across Europe by 2030.

The company is also an energy trader. For example, Axpo Bulgaria sells guarantees of origin and CO2 emissions, and long-term green energy stocks. The company also offers solutions to producers of renewable energy.

Furthermore, less than two years ago, the group created a special unit for hydrogen production and battery installation in Western Europe. Videnova explains: “This unit has the potential to change the market as it will make storage and trade easier.”

Empowering people to unleash their true potential
Central to Axpo achieving its goals and vision for the future are its people. And Videnova knows that well. She admits that it was initially quite challenging to find and retain the talent the company needs, but is now something at which Axpo Bulgaria excels. The company’s team already consists of more than 100 professionals, and the attrition rate in 2021 and 2022 was under five percent.

Videnova also knows that innovation is another crucial aspect for a company’s success. As such, she encourages a creative environment that allows the company’s talent to thrive. “Now, each employee has the opportunity to present their ideas to a digital board and see them materialised, if approved. There is lots of space for innovation in our field, such as processing large databases and algorithmic trade,” she says.

But is it easy to be a female leader in the energy industry?
When we look at the ease with which Videnova talks about her and her team’s achievements at Axpo Bulgaria, it’s easy to miss the true scale of what it takes to be a female leader in a male-dominated field.

“I have overcome many different challenges in more than 20 years of corporate experience, especially as a female leader. For several different business assignments, even at the assessment stage, I had to deliver far better results than my male peers. I have often been underestimated, especially in the beginning, and this gave me an added incentive to succeed and helped me to outperform,” she admits.

In her role as CEO of Axpo Bulgaria, she meets many challenges, with those mentioned above being only a few. The list includes the constantly and rapidly changing regulations. Videnova explains that such high geopolitical risks make it difficult to anticipate the future: “My team’s daily challenge is to manage the different regulatory frameworks set by governments in the markets where we are active, and they do this very successfully.”

Videnova is not afraid of all the challenges, as she perceives them as part of life. She shares that it is more about having the right attitude, passion, and a positive approach. “I am a pragmatic optimist, always ready to celebrate success and learn from any failure,” she explains.

Videnova follows Axpo’s four leadership principles
Thinking about her strongest qualities, Videnova mentions her ability to network and grow businesses. She adds her ability to build and nurture good relationships with external partners, the company’s stakeholders, and team members. “When a leader has created and developed a strong and performing team, everything is possible,” she emphasises.

Perseverance and discipline are also crucial in achieving sustainable business results. In addition, a high level of agility is required to respond to the rapidly changing environment. Milena concludes that she truly believes in Axpo’s four leadership principles and lives them every day:

• First, be a leader: lead by example, take ownership, and add value;
• Second, make it happen: work as a team, create solutions and opportunities, and act entrepreneurially to deliver results;
• Third, create the future: focus on impact, experiment and innovate, and exceed customer expectations;
• Fourth, care about people: communicate actively, candidly, and respectfully, embrace feedback to grow, and lead with empathy.

Milena Videnova’s message to women is to never give up and believe that having both a career and a family is indeed possible. “The world is changing, and women have incredible potential. Please, do not underestimate yourselves even when others underestimate you. Push to be better, each day, every day,” she concludes.

Life is what happened while Maarten van Dooren, the co-founder of successful 3D imaging software company, PixelPool, was busy making other plans. Starting out with dreams of becoming an architect, life landed him in the fashion world instead. That’s where PixelPool’s software tool, Dtail, finds itself today. It’s on the frontlines of revolutionising the industry — able to shorten production times, improve process efficiencies, and drive sustainability for major brands.

Van Dooren co-founded PixelPool in 1999 with Willem van den Hoed and has grown it to over 100 people across two continents while counting H&M, Levi’s and numerous other apparel and footwear companies as customers.

The guy drafting the windowsills
The path to PixelPool wasn’t straight for Van Dooren. “When I was around 15, I began making models of buildings at home and started thinking I’d like to be an architect, so I ended up going to Delft (University) to learn how to design buildings,” he says.

He took a job while at school and was a ‘pretty good’ draftsman starting as an assistant to the person doing the artistic impressions. Eventually this began taking up more of his time than school. “I got into the 3D visualisation work, by hand back then, but then started doing models in AutoCAD, a very common drafting program used by architects to make 2D and 3D drawings.

The evolution in technology took off quickly. Soon architects could render images of buildings and entire housing projects. This is where the seeds of PixelPool started for Van Dooren. “I didn’t feel I was a particularly talented architect and didn’t fancy being the guy on a project who is assigned to drafting the windowsills,” he laughs.

Additionally, for Van Dooren being away at university was a place he could explore parts of his personality he never had a chance to as a more serious kid. He set aside his studies, started a band, and soon after decided to pursue the startup he and Van den Hoed had named PixelPool, full-time. Very early on, Van den Hoed, who went on to focus on photography, gave the okay for Van Dooren to move ahead with the startup without him.

London calling
Fast forward to 2005. The team got a call from the Design Director EMEA of a major footwear maker who was based at the Dutch headquarters in Hilversum.

“He was looking for an external company to do 3D visualisation work. He heard that PixelPool was doing a lot of good work in the area. He asked if we could help with a new Paris store that he was designing on the Champs Èlysées,” recalls Van Dooren, “and of course we said: yes.”

After that work was finished, according to Van Dooren, the client was so pleased that he asked PixelPool to work on another project.

“We needed to help visualise their plans for the World Cup 2006 campaign for their flagship London store. Because there weren’t any measurements available, we had to fly people to London to measure the space so we could make the first models,” he says.

“We measured the entire place by hand. Then, after a week or so, we got the 3D CAD model. What’s funny is that this 3D model is still used today for all of this client’s stores,” says Van Dooren.

PixelPool went on to 3D model and visualise the client’s stores in NYC, Berlin, and others. Each store had multiple brand campaigns throughout the year and management wanted to be able to see them visualised beforehand. This was the beginning of a long-term relationship with the brand that continues to this day.

Great wide open
A decline in the architectural side of the business due to the economic downturn in the late 90s in tandem with a close working relationship with one of their major US clients inspired Van Dooren to open an office on the West Coast adding to PixelPool’s presence in London and the Hague and resulting in more opportunities for business with other major apparel retailers.

While visualising store and campaign designs for brands including Levi’s and The North Face, the team noticed there was a burgeoning demand for ways to realistically depict the apparel and products as successfully as they did for the retail spaces. The demand was coming mainly from departments other than retail and brand design, however. Suddenly, wholesale and visual merchandising departments were seeing ways to use 3D technology to improve and speed up their processes, too.

Then came the release of Epic’s Unreal Engine in 2015, which made fully interactive store planning and wholesale presentation a possibility and PixelPool made use of it to start working on a fully interactive virtual showroom. By mid 2019 the first Proof of Concept of this interactive showroom was ready. PixelPool also designed and built a cloud-based platform for the showroom where users could upload their 3D product and connect it to PLM data. PixelPool gave the platform and virtual showroom the name Dtail.

The pandemic highlighted the global imperative for such a platform. Van Dooren stresses: “Apparel has always been an industry where in-person meeting is critical to working together. The pandemic put an end to physical showroom visits and we were suddenly approached by numerous brands who had heard about our Dtail development and saw it as a key way to help approach these new and evolving digital needs.”

It’s all in the Dtail
The speed of technology development in the area has increased exponentially over the last few years and PixelPool was able to leverage its experience with brands to create Dtail in a process Van Dooren describes as creating a startup within the company.

Currently PixelPool is focused on creating virtual samples for customers. For the latter, Van Dooren has opened two offices in Sofia, Bulgaria. One of them is the largest office within the PixelPool Group and is tasked with the production of thousands of virtual 3D clothing samples. These samples enable fashion brands to make swift decisions about what next season’s collection will look like. Uploading these 3D samples to Dtail speeds up their entire process in important ways.

“We are able to give our customers the means to elevate their overall abilities to showcase, present and sell their collections in-store and to wholesalers,” says Van Dooren, “This is extremely valuable. It saves clients time, money and resources and reduces waste, which is a critical issue for the apparel industry.”

Future forward
Van Dooren says the Dtail platform has endless possibilities that involve richer 3D content and inclusion of AI and, eventually, ‘multi-player’ virtual showroom visits, which would bring Dtail into the Metaverse. Because of the nature of the technology and its immersive worlds, using technology such as Epic’s Unreal Engine, originally made for games, has been instrumental to Dtail’s development. “These worlds are becoming more entwined with the progression of the Internet, which will continue to bring about changes we can’t even fully predict,” says Van Dooren.

The publication of the EU’s long-awaited draft corporate sustainability and due diligence directive in February 2022 marked an important milestone of the emergence of mandatory human rights due diligence legislation, laws that impose a positive obligation on companies to have in place due diligence procedures designed to identify, assess and mitigate adverse human rights impacts of their business activities. In parallel, increasing expectations from key stakeholders – including investors, shareholders, counterparties and consumers – are driving companies to increase their focus on responsible and sustainable business, including around modern slavery and human rights issues, and are placing such issues at the heart of the C-suite agenda.

A company’s failure to manage its modern slavery and human rights risks appropriately could have severe legal, regulatory and reputational impacts. Consequently, companies need to ensure they address modern slavery and human rights risks in their organisation and supply chains to respond to emerging legislative trends, stakeholder expectations and to enhance and preserve company value.

The direction of travel: Embedding soft law principles into hard law obligations
The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) are a set of guidelines for States and companies to prevent, address and remedy human rights abuses linked to business. Among other things, the UNGPs state that the responsibility to respect human rights requires businesses (i) to avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts; (ii) to have in place related policies and procedures appropriate to their size and circumstances; and (iii) to conduct human rights due diligence to identify, prevent and mitigate adverse human rights impacts.

The UNGPs are increasingly being baked into hard law obligations:

• Modern slavery and human rights reporting obligations: The UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 requires certain companies to publicly report on modern slavery risks in their supply chain. Similar public disclosures are required in other jurisdictions ( California, Australia, for example). Moreover, the EU is expanding its corporate reporting obligations to require more detailed and more extensive public disclosures, including in relation to human rights.

• The rise of mandatory human rights due diligence laws: The EU is at the forefront of the move to mandatory human rights due diligence. In February 2022, the European Commission published its long-awaited draft corporate sustainability and due diligence directive which imposes a positive burden on certain companies to have in place due diligence procedures designed to identify, assess and mitigate adverse human rights and environmental impacts in their operations and entire value chains. Furthermore, a number of countries already have national laws in place that implement similar standards (France, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands) and many others have similar draft laws under consideration.

The response: developing a human rights risk programme in practice

These developments present a number of challenges for companies in practice.

• Overlapping legal obligations – companies should ensure that they track legal developments across all relevant jurisdictions and anticipate their impact as part of their broader human rights risk strategic planning.

• Responsibility – ‘Sustainability’ has traditionally been ‘owned’ by the sustainability or HR functions within an organisation. Sustainability must encompass an understanding of human rights risks under the evolving legal and regulatory landscape. Consequently legal and compliance functions should be involved in human rights risk strategic planning. Companies should look to convene and empower cross-functional working groups with representatives from key functions, such as legal, compliance, sustainability, HR, procurement and operations. Boards must oversee the company’s due diligence policy and programme.

• Human rights risk assessment – in order to understand and identify an organisation’s salient human rights risks and to inform the development of its human rights policies and procedures, it is essential to conduct a human rights impact assessment which looks beyond the risks to the company itself to the impact (and risks) of the company’s business activities. Companies should ensure that such an assessment is conducted by an appropriately qualified team, is operationalised, and updated.

• An integrated programme – internal and external stakeholders increasingly expect that human rights considerations are integrated into group policies and planning processes. Companies can readily address this by maintaining a standalone human rights policy and ensuring that existing processes incorporate consideration of human rights risks.

• The disclosure challenge – companies will increasingly be compelled to make detailed disclosures of their risks and related programmes and to demonstrate progress year on year; they need to ensure that they can stand behind the public disclosures they make both in relation to human rights and broader ESG topics. Inaccurate disclosures could expose a company to reputational taint, litigation risk and regulatory scrutiny.

• Expertise – it is essential that companies engage appropriate human rights subject matter experts in developing and reinforcing their human rights strategic planning efforts. This could be through the hiring of appropriate qualified experts, the engagement of external advisors or the appointment of human rights experts to the board.

In practice, many companies can leverage existing policies and procedures (eg relating to anti-bribery and corruption) and incorporate human rights (and environmental) considerations into existing operating procedures. This approach could result in a holistic and integrated enterprise risk management approach through a set of procedures that are already familiar to business teams.

The defence: the cost of getting it wrong
A failure to appropriately identify, assess and mitigate human rights risks in an organisation and its supply chains can have severe impacts for a company. From a legal perspective, a breach of human rights-related contractual undertakings with customers (for example under supplier codes of conducts) could expose a company to litigation, contract termination and, in the case of public procurement projects, debarment from future tenders.

The draft EU Directive makes companies (including non EU companies) liable for the acts of their value chain partners where companies do not appropriately identify risks and take appropriate preventative steps. From a regulatory perspective, the prospect of regulatory fines in different jurisdictions is increasing as regulatory expectations and scrutiny increases.

From a reputational perspective, identified human rights issues can impact company value as well as performance against ESG benchmarks. It may also serve as a litmus test as to deficiencies in wider risk management. And all of these factors can have a wider commercial impact on a company – with a potential to harm both company value and company growth prospects.

The bottom line is simple: companies need to ensure they address modern slavery and human rights risks in their organisation and supply chains. To do so will not only protect a company from the legal, regulatory and reputational exposure, but will also enhance the commercial proposition of the company as an ethical and responsible business brand.

How is the packaging industry stepping up to the sustainability challenge?
We saw from the COP26 climate change summit that if the world is to limit global warming to 1.5°C or less by the end of the century, we all have to really increase our efforts.

The packaging industry is taking climate change challenge very seriously. Sidel’s customers, which include well-known global brands and companies, are setting ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not only for themselves but also their whole supply chain.

We all recognise that progress on sustainability relies on cooperation, especially if you consider that analysts expect to see a 2.6% rise in sales of packaged consumer goods by 2025 – that’s another 423 billion units.

How are you going about it at Sidel?
We’ve really stepped up our commitments. Having agreed only a year ago to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at our own sites and facilities by 30 percent by 2030, we have now moved those targets up a gear, pledging to halve our emissions in that timeframe. So, we are now committed to being on the 1.5°C pathway and being part of the best efforts to limit global warming.

All our sites will be 100% green energy-powered by the end of this year. Our new site in Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal (pictured) is a good example, featuring intelligent lighting control and electric car charging stations.

As an equipment manufacturer, what can you do to influence the supply chain?
Sidel is fully embracing this challenge. We want to be at our customers’ side and to lead our suppliers towards a more sustainable future: it is only through working with partners that we can make a difference. We make sure we understand their sustainability goals and we’ve let them know they’re not alone! It takes continuous dialogue and we will use all our technical knowledge and smart data analytics to help them.

We’ve already reduced the energy consumption of our machines – our blowers now use 45% less energy. We also halved the water consumption of our bottle washers and have developed a digital suite that can help customers monitor and adjust their production line energy consumption. We’ve upgraded existing lines, so they are more energy-efficient and sustainable, which last year saved more than 1,500 tonnes of CO2. As an example, helping our UAE-based customer Zulal move to a new integrated packaging line configuration brought them energy savings of 56%.

Our designers can optimise product design to make packaging that uses less material and fewer resources when it is blown and transported. Our moulding technology allows bottles weight reduction, cutting down on material use as well as energy consumption and transport emissions.

We help customers deal with regulatory changes – for example, the move to tethered caps which will become mandatory on all bottles in Europe and the UK from 2024 to minimise litter.

We’re committed to reducing emissions on everything we buy and sell by 25% by 2030, against a 2019 baseline. We recently started a supply chain initiative to support our suppliers to start their own commitment and track progress against our common goal.

Our efforts have been recognised as we have been given an A- rating for our supplier engagement by CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project), a global environmental non-profit organisation.

Where are the regulatory and government pressures on the packaging industry?
There is now a general request for manufacturers to take on more responsibility for waste management, with the intent of making a drastic shift from a linear to a circular economy model. Currently 63 nations have enacted Extended Producer Responsibility measures to encourage schemes such as product takeback, deposit-refund, and waste collection guarantees. More governments are open to funding and creating better recycling infrastructures.

Plastic packaging is often seen as the enemy of the environment. How can you make a positive case for it?
It’s hard to change perceptions, but the truth is that lifecycle analysis shows that plastic, and PET in particular, has the best carbon footprint among materials currently available. If it is properly collected and recycled, PET can offer the best answer to the current sustainability challenge.

We need to see packaging as a resource, not a waste. If we can prevent it from ending up in the environment by keeping it in a circular economy loop, PET plastic packaging can play a pivotal role in protecting and distributing our most precious products.

Since 2019 we’ve been a signatory of the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, launched by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and UN Environment Programme to accelerate the transition to a circular economy.

Like it or not, plastic packaging is going to be with us in the near term and indeed is expected to rise, especially in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and India. So, we have to make this growth more sustainable, and for that we all need to engage all the 5Rs levers: Reduce, Recycle, Reuse, Replace and Reinvent (see diagram).

Reduce is the first and most important action, and it needs to start from the actual design of the packaging. Reuse will come to the fore, with more refill options for the consumers, both at home and on the go. Increasing Recycling is of pivotal importance, both in quantity and in quality: return schemes such as reverse vending machines that incentivise consumers are proving to be a great tool to achieve both. Easier-to-recycle solutions by using one single mono-material layer instead of many layers of multiple materials are on the rise.

PET is already the most recycled type of plastic, thanks also to its ability to achieve food grade quality even when recycled. It will become more prevalent in line with the ambitious targets the big brand owners have set for themselves in terms of percentages of recycled PET, known as r-PET, in their packaging.

We’re also actively seeking to Replace with new bio-sourced or bio-based materials and looking at ways to completely Reinvent the way packaging is conceived.

What is preventing the widespread adoption of recycled PET?
The amount of recycled PET in packaging is increasing but progress is slow, with an estimated global average of 8% compared to 5% in 2018. In Europe, the average is already 15% and is projected to be around 35% in 2030.

Sidel offers a testing and validation service to help customers deal with r-PET’s inherent variability and we have set up our own pilot-scale PET recycling line near Le Havre in France. Sidel has also signed up to R-Cycle, the open tracing standard for sustainable plastic packaging. It provides a digital product passport, and is a big step towards the implementation of a genuine circular economy and highly efficient process chains. Partners from around the world can record and retrieve all the relevant properties of the packaging to improve their product sustainability, quality, and manufacturing process.

It takes time to put recycling facilities in place, but we are seeing a lot more investment in recycling facilities in Europe. Materials and chemicals companies such as Eastman, Indorama and Carbios have recently announced major recycling initiatives in France and another, Suez, is creating new recycling capacities in Belgium.

Overall, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the role the packaging industry will play in sustainability?
I am optimistic because I believe in the resourcefulness of our engineers and a growing collective determination to set and meet tough targets. In the end, it will be a combination of innovation, ingenuity, and collective will from regulators, industry and consumers to make the best use of our precious resources.

‘It’s lonely at the top’ might strike you as a terrible cliché, however it is important that it is used. As we mark the start of Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK (May 9–16), which takes ‘loneliness’ as its 2022 theme, it’s clear the pressure faced by CEOs is quite unique.

Let’s start by acknowledging that there is a flipside to the rewards that come with success. I often find that the people I work with have business challenges that are totally consuming – whether it’s strategy, operations, people, growth – everything they do is at the lack of themselves.

CEOs are so ingrained into their business that their own needs simply aren’t met. It can be easy to forget that you’re only one person, and like everyone else, human. In the last two years alone, modern leadership has been under intense scrutiny. Tough decisions have been made during a period of immense transition. As we emerge out of the Covid-19 crisis, there has been little time to process what has taken place. Loneliness, grief, and the personal impact of leading through an unforgiving global pandemic have created the potential for a legacy of loneliness unless you can navigate a path back to yourself.

It may come as a surprise that the tools and strategies I equip modern leaders with for personal growth to deal with these situations are taken from my arts background. I learnt the art of clowning from the masters in Italy. From this, I instil key lessons that in essence can be defined as ‘work well, play harder’. Creativity, kindness, acceptance and play are all key ingredients in my coaching toolkit, and I always start at the same point: Be seen.

This must start with vulnerability. Being open and vulnerable with yourself and your senior leadership team is made much easier when you share your own stories and challenges.

Tell the truth
Faced with an unprecedented number of unknowns, I remember during the pandemic I was approached by a CEO of a multi-billion-pound company in the financial sector. Like many, she was inundated with questions from staff for direction on the return to work. I spoke to her, and she told me how lonely she felt. My advice was simple. ‘Tell the truth’, I said. She then explained to her staff that she did not know what was happening, while explaining what she thought might happen. This shift to vulnerable communication led to the most positive staff response she had ever experienced.

Being proactive with personal growth is so important. It avoids overwhelm, which in turn leads to loneliness. Every CEO, MD and executive that I know who is thriving does so because they are part of a mastermind group, a peer group, or have a touch point with me.

I’m not saying traditional business coaches aren’t useful, but they are very output orientated. They are focused on goals and next steps relating to the company and not the individual. I create a space for the person to be human, held and listened to. It is the biggest antidote to loneliness. Having this space for external support, particularly if you are in a new CEO role where you’ve entered a toxic work environment, for example, can be very beneficial.

It can also be hard leaning into colleagues when you are experiencing challenges. At the end of the day, you’re their boss and they know it. But you’re simply not serving yourself if you do not make time for you. You’re either facing loneliness or burnout.

You might be reading this and thinking ‘I’m not lonely, I’m fine, I go running/cycling/on holiday to wind down’. However, you’re still processing everything on your own. A common issue facing clients I work with is that by the time they go on holiday, they’re just too exhausted to spend time with their children.

The onward journey
One of the key habits missing from the day-to-day lives of CEOs I meet is scheduling time for reflection. I would highly recommend blocking out time in your diary to reflect on what you’ve done each week and I guarantee it is the most important investment you can make in yourself.

Moving forwards starts as soon as you have the courage to say ‘yes, this has been really tough and I feel pretty lonely’, you will soon see things start to change. How much things change depends on your individual journey, however creating openness and a dialogue with a coach, or at work, can help reintroduce the notion that we are all human beings. Perhaps another cliché, but as important as the one I started with, asking yourself the question ‘how am I really doing’ creates the space for humanity and reflection.

For more information on 1:1 CEO coaching visit: https://emmastroud.london

As the pandemic slowly retreats, it has left countless companies around the world short of the talent necessary to take fast-emerging opportunities that have arisen in its wake.

Simultaneously though, many senior executives are unwilling to leave permanent positions for new opportunities until the economic horizon brightens.

Just as crucially, the economic damage wrought by Covid-19 and, now, the war in Ukraine, means many companies urgently need prompt investment. And none more so than start-ups and SMEs, historically the most vulnerable to crises.

Clearly, the demand for executive talent has never been greater and, in its twentieth anniversary, global recruitment agency CEO Worldwide is rising to the challenge with its iCEO platform. First established in 2007 but now more important than ever, iCEO is dedicated to simultaneously plugging the talent and investment gaps in these fast-moving sectors.

It’s an agile platform that provides carefully vetted executives, often with many years of experience in the sector, who also contribute their own capital of up to $1m. The most common amount is $150,000-350,000 and is deployed by nearly 81 percent of arrivals while more than 12 percent bring $350,000-750,000, three percent between $750,000-$1m, and four percent more than $1m.

The number of openings over the next decade will grow by more than a quarter of a million every year

The result is talent plus capital — skin in the game. “It’s a vote of faith in the future of the company,” explains CEO Worldwide’s founder Patrick Mataix. “And it’s a statement of the executive’s commitment. It is an incredible leverage for companies to get a talented and committed executive on board with a limited impact on their profit and loss.”

Once again, CEO Worldwide looks to be ahead of the curve with iCEO. As the firm celebrates an innovative 20 years, it looks back on one ground-breaking initiative after another. Launched in France in January 2002, at first the firm focused on interim management services dedicated to start-ups and venture capitalists in the EU.

The vision was deliberately disruptive. Founder Mataix recalls: “As an entrepreneur regularly using the services of headhunters and consultants, I had been frustrated by the inadequacy of their answers and timing to solve the international problems I was facing daily.”

So right from the start, the firm concentrated on the values he believed were missing in other executive search functions. Action had to be fast, pricing transparent and behaviour flexible. And now, 20 years later, CEO Worldwide offers a full suite of recruitment services that has played a fundamental and important role in distributing executive talent around the world.

In that time the firm expanded in a series of milestones as it responded to urgencies in the market. In 2005, the firm began finding executives for permanent placement. In 2007, original iCEO started to make a growing difference for capital-short companies. Three years later came the name change from CEO Europe to CEO Worldwide, reflecting the firm’s increasingly global reach.

By then it had on its books over 10,000 vetted executives covering 40 countries. In 2013, headquarters was moved from France to the UK where its Top Executive search engine was launched.

It is an incredible leverage for companies to get a talented and committed executive on board with a limited impact on their profit and loss

And today CEO Worldwide can muster a full array of multi-lingual and multi-disciplined talent with a vetted pool of over 20,000 international executives covering nearly all countries and 84 languages. The firm’s clients comprise companies of all sizes from start-ups and SMEs to multinationals.

It’s a measure of the firm’s global footprint that it recently placed a CEO in India for its 1,351-first executive mandate. The firm also boasts 48 ambassadors covering 32 countries. And the vetted pool of iCEO investor-executives alone now tops 3,000, representing a cumulative potential investment exceeding $1bn.

Over the years the firm remained faithful to the original vision. It had to be nimble-footed and react quickly to the demands of the market – in short, client-led. On average it takes just ten days to submit a short list of candidates to the client thanks to a policy of pre-vetting. An in-house video platform allows the client to conduct interviews remotely, which proved to a valuable service during lockdowns and global travel restrictions.

And the pricing model remains a big attraction. CEO Worldwide’s fee structure is highly transparent – for instance, right from the start fees were not linked to total remuneration unlike most competing firms.

The firm was also ahead of the game with its female executive platform. Now four years old, it anticipated growing pressure from legislators and lobby groups for a more diverse representation in the C-suite. Indeed the platform was launched before European regulations that imposed gender and diversity quotas on boards and steering committees.

A runaway success, the platform boasts a vetted pool of over 3,100 international female executives covering 86 countries and 64 languages. Client firms were quick to jump onboard. An international corporate with over $8bn in turnover retained CEO Worldwide to provide it with top female talent. Other women have been hired in top-level management jobs and as non-executive directors in the US, UK, Switzerland, Germany, France and India among other countries.

As CEO Worldwide has found, the nations that are hungriest for executive talent are those with fast-growing digitised economies. They are headed by France with 763, followed by USA (399), UK (273, India (228) and Germany (185).

And the hungriest industries are those sitting at the leading edge of the digital revolution. CEO Worldwide has placed 959 executives in e-commerce and internet-based companies, 895 in consumer goods, 766 in software and 698 in IT and computer hardware. All of these industries have been turbo-boosted by the pandemic.

Looking ahead, demand for top executives in most corporates including start-ups and SMEs looks to be almost insatiable. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of openings over the next decade will grow by more than a quarter of a million every year as older executives retire. And that’s just in the US.

With its finger on the pulse of global recruitment, CEO World has plenty of insights into the current state of the market. “Many organisations are challenged when looking for executives,” says Mataix. “And that’s despite offering enticing perks and high salaries.” They urgently need people with experience – and especially in technology, the right balance of men and women, and those from minorities. Unfortunately, not enough candidates meet all three criteria.

“Many people who qualify for the first two criteria lack the necessary experience, which drives the current talent shortage,” summarises Mataix. “The current issue faced by the market is there are too few executives with experience looking for placements.”

And that, he says, is particularly true of women. Although CEO Worldwide’s platform is contributing to the availability of female talent, many women are declining offers in the current uncertain environment.

Age however is no barrier. CEO Worldwide is tapping a steady demand for executives over 55 years of age who often take interim or consulting positions where their knowledge and experience provides a perspective and depth that is often lacking, particularly in start-ups. Some of these placements turn out to be so successful that the executive is asked to stay on in permanently.

So clearly, it’s yet another disruptive move by CEO Worldwide.

Achieving gender equality is one of the biggest challenges facing companies today. For many, it continues to be an ambition rather than a reality. Yet at Landor & Fitch, under Jane Geraghty’s leadership, gender equality has been achieved across all levels of the business, with 46 percent of its women in leadership positions and 56 percent of all employees’ being female.

“There’s no silver bullet to getting gender equality right,” says Jane, reflecting on the challenges she faced in reaching this goal. “Throughout my career, it has always been a personal passion point and I’m proud to lead an agency that is equal across the board, at all levels.”

Alongside driving change at Landor & Fitch, Jane also has her sights set on helping and encouraging other companies to embrace gender equality, ensuring authenticity is front of mind: “My role as a brand consultant has given me a unique view of the inner workings of companies across different industries – and puts me in a position to help and support other businesses’ efforts to address inequalities. What we absolutely must put an end to is ‘femwashing,’ where brands want to be seen as ‘doing something,’ as opposed to actually making a real difference.”

From the beginning
While studying Politics at the University of Sussex, Jane became fascinated by political advertising and the role communication plays in influencing behaviour. That interest took her to London, where she began her career in advertising, before progressing into other roles on the other side of the Atlantic – working with the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann Erickson, Ogilvy New York and Kirshenbaum & Bond.

“At this point of time in the advertising industry, it was not uncommon to experience gender bias and discrimination. In the early days of my career, I remember walking down the halls of a creative department where the almost exclusively male inhabitants shouted their marks out of 10 for how you looked that day.”

Every brand should be thinking about how they can use their platform in support of a more equal society

Jane returned to the UK in 2007 with a desire to try something new. It was around this time that the world of media was undergoing huge change, something she wanted to get involved with first-hand. And that she did, working for ITV as Content Development Director and then Managing Director at Naked Communications, before eventually joining Landor in 2011 as Managing Director of the London studio.

“When I started at Landor, the branding industry was in real need of revitalisation”, Jane notes. “Brand consultancy as an industry had been slow to embrace technology and data within its offer, and my remit was to explore this while injecting agility and certainty into the work we were doing as a business. But one thing which caught my attention pretty much immediately was the wonderfully ambitious women who were already starting to shift directions and perceptions within the business, including the brilliant Emma Beckmann and Charlotte Morrison, who are still with us today.”

Working her way up the business, Jane became President of EMEA in 2013 and then Global CEO of Landor Associates in 2017. She has navigated many changes, including the merger with experience design agency Fitch, which saw the company officially become Landor & Fitch and Jane take the role of Global Group CEO. “I’ve had an incredible team with me on the journey,” she explains.

“We’ve brought motion into our offering with the acquisition of ManvsMachine, experience into the fold with the Fitch merger, and invested heavily in insights and analytics. Today, sustainability and inclusive design are placed at the heart of what we do, allowing us to grow and evolve in line with our mission of creating a positive difference through extraordinary brands, by design.”

Changing culture
Building on her personal success, Jane has shifted her role towards supporting the people around her. “I’m very much focused on my team – mentoring, guiding, and configuring talent to ensure success, both individually and collectively. Part of this is helping foster communities within Landor & Fitch that are dedicated to enhancing diversity and inclusivity.”

This commitment has seen Jane at the forefront of new initiatives that ensure everyone working within the company feels included and empowered. “We all know that creativity flourishes when different perspectives are brought together. As an industry, we had been too reliant on hiring and promoting the familiar,” Jane notes.

In 2020, in partnership with the London team, Jane championed the creation of a grassroots-led global inclusion group, Building to Belong. Their objective being to build and promote an inclusive culture and enable all employees to bring their true selves to the workplace.

There’s no silver bullet to getting gender equality right

As explained by Jane, “Equity focuses on measurable equality and is action orientated. It is a scalable concept that isn’t affected by cultural nuances. Whereas belonging is about creating cultural changes that are relevant to people’s daily experiences. Building to Belong means that diversity and inclusion is the responsibility of everyone at Landor & Fitch, not just a small few.”

“We approach diversity and inclusion through the lens of action and accountability, measuring success by impact and not intent,” says Jane. “We’re gender-equal throughout the business – more women are joining and succeeding than ever before. When women are in the talent pool, they need an environment where they can stay and succeed, and I’m thrilled that we are doing something right in that respect.”

Jane also participates in parent company WPP’s Stella network, which aims to address barriers that could prevent women from progressing their careers to senior levels within the group. “Everyone at Landor & Fitch wants to be a benchmark for diversity and inclusion for not only our WPP network, but the wider industry and beyond”, adds Jane.

Her presence and action in the fight for gender equality didn’t go unnoticed by the business industry either – last year Jane was officially recognised within The Yahoo Finance HERoes Women Role Model List; a showcase of leaders who are championing women in business and driving change for gender diversity in the workplace, where she ranked alongside leading women from Mastercard, Accenture and HSBC.

Branching out
Jane’s efforts aren’t just internal – Landor & Fitch is committed to driving inclusivity and diversity across its brand portfolio. The agency is currently working with some of the world’s leading brands on transforming their inclusivity and gender equality strategies, helping to reshape their purpose.

As Jane puts it: “Brands today have recognised the value of pursuing something beyond pure profits. Purpose drives brand consideration and differentiation, and sustainability and equality have been areas that brands have sought to address.”

One example is Landor & Fitch’s work with Microsoft on the ‘It’s Her” campaign, which ran during Women’s History Month in 2021, and aimed to help the tech giant elevate the role of women in tech. Landor & Fitch took over Microsoft’s internal platform, In Culture, and all of its social media channels to encourage more 18–34 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds into the tech industry.

Jane’s team has also been creating new concepts and ideas for organisations dedicated to the cause too, including Women Political Leaders. Landor & Fitch developed a new brand strategy for the premier political women’s network, ‘Power Together’, and a new identity which builds on the focus of starting the conversation through a distinctive quotation mark. The team designed a revolutionary tool called ‘The Pulse,’ which uses data from WPL’s Twitter API and a sentiment algorithm to translate worldwide conversations surrounding women in leadership. Using cutting-edge technology and innovative design techniques, the living brand is informed by the data collected.

“The tool aimed to be a catalyst for action: to listen, learn and respond as well as serve as a visual reminder of our progress towards a more inclusive definition of power, which is another area we are very interested in, as designers of the future. What is the visual representation of power? How is it changing? How do we help inform that change?”

Jane presented this topic at the Reykjavík Global Forum –Women Leaders 2019, as well as joining the ‘Pictures of Power’ panel alongside Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of Plan International, Hiltrud Werner, Member of the Board of Management, Integrity and Legal affairs, at Volkswagen AG, and Uzra Zeya, President and CEO, The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP).

But the push for change sits with every role: “Everyone has a part to play in gender equality”, she says. “If you are a brand owner focused on the male half of the population, you aren’t off the hook either. Every brand should be thinking about how they can use their platform in support of a more equal society.”

Challenges ahead
And this is only the start. The pandemic has seen women disproportionately impacted across all industries, as gender equality was put on the back burner in many cases. In fact, PwC’s 2021 Women in Work study found that companies will need to double their gender equality efforts just to recover by 2030. For Jane, this only shows the extent to which the pandemic knocked gender equality back.

But the pandemic has offered silver linings. Brands today recognise purpose as a means to achieving something greater than commercial success, and Landor & Fitch is helping brands to transform while continuing to drive business value. She notes: “Brand is now broader than ever in its impact and implications, informing experience, culture, innovation, recruitment, acquisitions, ESG, and workspace. It now has the attention and interest of the C-suite and is seen as a vital tool in delivering real change and business transformation.”

Landor & Fitch analysis shows that brand represents approximately 33 percent of business value and is a critical growth driver – brand and business strategy are connected, says Jane.

“Brand transformation is an adjustment of differentiation drivers to remain relevant to a variety of audiences, while also attracting new ones. It creates powerful platforms that inspire extraordinary brand expression and experience – platforms that unite people and spark cultural change – which absolutely includes the shift towards a more equitable and sustainable future.”

She also believes that one big challenge that lies ahead is getting the media up to speed with the pace of change: “I’d love to see the lazy, standard questions from ‘do you have imposter syndrome?’ to ‘what is it like to be a female CEO?’ stricken from every interview.”

In order to accelerate the pace of change, she thinks more flexibility is required in workplaces across the globe. “Flexibility has been a major stumbling block, but if there were a silver lining from our pandemic experiences, I’d hope that this has been overcome and that we will all embrace the necessary flexibility to bring more mothers (and fathers!) back into the world of work.”

However, in Jane’s eyes, the most important single step businesses can make is to eliminate the pay gap: “It’s not okay and the gap needs to be addressed emphatically and immediately. Stop the excuses, take the pain and take action.”

With clear obstacles on the path ahead, Jane and her global teams at Landor & Fitch won’t be letting themselves (or their clients) rest on their laurels. There’s an honest recognition that there is still a long way to go, with a need for action. But she is passionate about using the opportunity that design can offer and is determined to lead the way in making real change happen.

As memories of the Covid-induced recession slowly dissipate, the business world now finds itself facing a so-called ‘Great Resignation’. A recent worldwide McKinsey survey revealed 87 percent of businesses across sectors are facing or anticipating a talent shortage.

Factor in the pace of shifting technology and the polarisation of politics and society as compounded by the pandemic, and it seems we’re facing a perfect storm. However, if there’s anything recent years have taught us, it’s that the best businesses evolve. Overcoming this particular issue and winning the war for talent will be no different.

Meeting the challenges of adaptation at pace
Organisations face two interconnected challenges. The first is how to keep their people and culture moving at the pace of global change and manage a post-pandemic reality that remains highly stressful. In a world that still seems to be characterised by uncertainty and division, it’s no real surprise there is a gap between vacancies and available, suitably-skilled workers.

The second challenge is how businesses adapt their products and services, given the speed of culture change and consumer needs that also seem to shift every time you look away.

Speaking as part of the creative world, we love our buzzwords – and ‘T-shaped teams’ is very much in vogue right now when it comes to looking at how our own business is striving to meet both these challenges. It’s an idea that can work across industries, though, and is a good way for organisations in other sectors to future-proof themselves while also attracting and retaining high-quality talent.

The concept is simple – teams have broad consultative skills across the top, leading and shaping the knowledge and strategy they use with clients – the horizontal part of the T. In our specific case, this is supported by deep specialist and complementary skills in e-commerce, social media, analytics, and content to meet particular client needs.

This approach enables business agility, providing the right balance of leadership, management and specialisation to drive growth. It’s an easy model to digest and visually looks great in presentations and strategy sessions, though in reality it is much harder to deliver, manage and evolve.

To be successful, teams also need to be grounded in data and analytics. For example, at UM we’ve placed real-time analytics at the centre of every T-shaped team so all members can access the information they need at the right moment – from sales to media data to brand measures.

Look outside your traditional sector
We’ve found that locating fresh talent to make T-shaped teams work increasingly means looking beyond the confines of our own industry – as well as outside our immediate vicinity to other parts of the UK, Europe and around the globe.

Talented media people, we’ve found, don’t just come from media agencies. A myopic focus on sector-specific experience isn’t helping anyone fill the skills gap.

Instead, different interdisciplinary skill sets bring different and highly valuable perspectives – from anywhere from academia to architecture. Aligned to this, we’ve been looking to bring in more people from diverse backgrounds and provide them with opportunities to succeed. Again, they provide much-needed different perspectives.

These ‘hybrid’ teams with a matrix of specialists and outsourced resources create a heady cocktail of complexity. It’s a concept that’s counter-intuitive to the ‘one team’ principle and hierarchical structures that many organisations are more familiar with – even though they’re not necessarily happy with them either.

The key to success lies in ensuring people of disparate disciplinary and professional backgrounds are connected through data and share a common purpose.

An iterative approach
With the pace of change, getting this type of team structure right is an ongoing process. Finding, supporting and most importantly retaining the best staff isn’t necessarily cheap either, so it’s well worth investing in the resources to make it work.

Businesses should experiment and improve the critical pieces for success, ensuring the right processes and technologies are in place. Most typically that means budgeting for talent and training, as well as technologies to support collaborative ways of working across multiple locations.

The components may never stay still, so this approach needs structures for ongoing feedback loops to ensure things are working fluidly and that there aren’t certain parts of the process slowing things up.

Of course, what T-shaped teams are most reliant on is people being adaptive and open to different ways of working and thinking. What underpins and connects them will be common objectives and purpose.

Periods of change will be remembered either for great opportunity or characterised by stress and tension. It’s here that a business’s efforts in culture, training and recruitment become immediately apparent, because T-shaped teams enable companies to focus on the former and ease the latter – and that will help them attract and retain the diverse, skilled talent they need.

“From birth, I think we always want to better ourselves. This is in our blood, in our genes,” says Sam Cinkir, CEO of Este Medical Group, which provides medical cosmetics to clients across the world.

Since founding the group in 2015, Cinkir has made it his mission to make hair, face and skin treatments “previously only available to the top one percent” more affordable and open to “everyone”.

His strategy has paid off; Este Medical Group is now the UK’s leading skin and hair specialist, with a market value of £40m. The group serves more than 2,000 patients a day across clinics in Birmingham, London, Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Sutton Coldfield, with plans to open another 30 branches in the coming years – including a hospital for surgical needs to extend its reach further (currently UK branches handle non-surgical procedures, while plastic surgery, hair transplants and other surgical treatments take place in Turkey).

These plans are part of an ambitious goal to become the UK’s biggest cosmetics company in the next five years, adding to an international presence in Istanbul, Dhaka, Milan and Bucharest and driven by a strategy that puts people at its heart.

Humble beginnings
Cinkir says he knew from a young age he wanted to work in the health and beauty industry. He grew up in a small village in Turkey before moving to the UK at the age of 18, later joining an existing medical cosmetics company, where he spent 12 years learning the ins and outs of hair loss treatments. He climbed the ladder from trainee consultant to general manager, gaining leadership skills that would prove invaluable to his role at Este Medical Group later on.

It was here that he invented his own hair loss treatment and presented it to his director. The director turned it down – so Cinkir decided to go it alone, launching the UK’s first Este Medical Group clinic in Birmingham in 2015.

“I thought to myself, I can do this myself,” he says. “It was of course a gamble – nobody knew me at the time, but I took the risk and I started my clinic upstairs with one room. At the start it was just me and one other person working for me.”

Cinkir spent his life savings – £33,000 – to make his vision a reality, and the risk paid off. The company quickly grew, expanding north and south across the UK with a bold vision designed to offer innovative treatments for every budget without sacrificing on quality, testing procedures and safety.

Affordable treatments
The group now offers non-surgical treatments for hair, face and body as well as plastic surgery procedures, with solutions tailored to each client and budget.

“For the technology we’re using, it’s the most affordable clinic in Britain without a doubt,” says Cinkir. He says the company has capitalised on the fact technology has become much cheaper, quicker and safer over the past decade, with hair loss treatments now available “for as little as £2-3,000, compared to £25-30,000 10 years ago.”

“Surgery is also cheaper than it was 10 years ago, and non-surgical procedures are a lot more popular now because technology has been improving a lot, with big companies investing billions,” he says.

People-centric approach
But it’s not just the affordability factor that has helped the company to stand out. Cinkir puts the group’s success in part down to its customer-centric approach – which starts with investing in staff to help them deliver the best service possible.

Today the group has nearly 500 employees, each picked through a rigorous process designed to ensure every member of the team is positive and approachable, building trust among clients.

“I employ some of the nicest, most experienced staff, but I don’t only look at their experience,” says Cinkir. “I also look at their personality. I could take somebody who has no experience and train them to make them top therapists, as long as they have a good heart. What you can’t change is someone’s personality.”

Cinkir has made staff wellbeing and career development a priority, encouraging employees to contribute new, innovative ideas to ensure every member of the team feels motivated. He believes this has helped the company gain its reputation for excellent customer service and high-quality treatments – as recognised in its ISO accreditation and its average rating of five stars on Trustpilot reviews.

“I suffered from acne when I was young, and I remember walking into a clinic and a girl opened the door for me,” he says. “She made me so comfortable and I felt so small; I’ve never forgotten it. So when clients come to my clinic, regardless of their problem, of their colour or of their religion, we treat them with the highest respect.”

The future
That people-centric approach has seen Este Medical Group overcome multiple challenges – not least those posed by the pandemic, when the health and beauty industry was hit hard.

When the first lockdown arrived, the company was in the midst of opening three new clinics, including investing £5m into a new branch at Earls Court.

But rather than bury their heads in the sand, Cinkir and the team used the extra time to ensure every detail was right for when restrictions eventually eased and the clinics could open. The Leeds clinic was refurbished and other works were carried out to optimise existing services. The new Earls Court premises has since become one of the biggest in Europe.

These latest openings are just the start of Cinkir’s plans for the future, though. “I am not a person to have many goals,” he says. “My goal was to have one clinic originally and make it a success, but today I have many more, so I don’t want to be greedy and say I want to open Este all around the world. I believe that what is written for me is written for me.”

But with an ambition to become the UK’ biggest cosmetics company in the next five years, Cinkir doesn’t seem to be done yet. A mentorship scheme to support young entrepreneurs entering the cosmetics field is one of several projects on the horizon. These moves mark Este Medical Group out as a trailblazer in the business sphere at large as well as a spearhead in the health and beauty industry – and a promising example of the power one innovative vision can have.

Building a brand is hard work. Maintaining a brand is even harder. Imagine driving past a billboard with McDonald’s Purple Arches. Or, Max Verstappen telling broadcasters how much he loves Mountain Dew. It could happen with a poorly managed brand. That’s what Roger Dudler, founder and CEO of Frontify, helps prevent with a platform he and his team created for companies that helps manage their brands.

“Inconsistent logos, for one, impact customer trust and damage public reputation. But it’s not just about logos. It’s also about how companies speak, write and relay the story of their brand inside and outside their company walls. And, it has become much harder to maintain consistency for global companies if they don’t have a system that makes it easy to find, adapt and communicate their brand assets,” says Dudler.

What Dudler didn’t know in 2013 when he started, however, was how prescient his software would be. With an increasing number of people working from home fueled by a faster and more robust internet to power a world of online sites, mobile apps, social media and new devices, the challenge of managing a brand’s assets and all the information that governs them has grown exponentially.

“Only 10 years ago, Lufthansa was having to create brand assets and maintain them within an organisation spread across several countries with inflexible front ends that made it nearly impossible to be consistent,” says Dudler. “Imagine needing to share film footage for commercials. The amount of time our clients lost on exchanging assets in the past is remarkable.”

What Frontify has done is evolve to give companies such as Lufthansa a united front when it comes to things like logos, fonts and colours, as well as important and often changing guidelines about where and how the brand is used.

These guidelines and shared assets help prevent the damage to a brand that in the worst case could ruin their relationship with customers. A single source for all stages of brand building, Frontify also offers collaborative spaces for working on a variety of projects, templates for non-designers to easily be creative and a way to access it all through a desktop app.

Then came a global pandemic
COVID-19 accelerated the need for companies to function remotely in all areas of the business. “It was sink or swim for many and we could check all the digital-first boxes for them. We were already future proofing existing customers who’d built up their brand homes and we were able to provide a suddenly, business-critical solution for those needing to quickly adapt,” says Dudler.

I get fired up about Frontify building an ecosystem that puts the brand at the centre, where the platform is the connective tissue

With work scenarios in flux, being able to count on information and assets was critical to getting work done. Nearly half of Frontify’s enterprise customer portfolio consists of new contracts that were initiated during the pandemic, with overall platform user figures topping 2.5 million. One particular enterprise customer has seen total registered users skyrocket, up over 200 percent during the pandemic.

In the beginning
After studying software development and serving as an apprentice in his native Switzerland followed by several projects with companies there, Roger’s entrepreneurial development took a more serious turn when he started Frontify. Before Frontify says Dudler: “I was a coder doing obvious things like websites and I was in a very comfortable position getting good projects and coaching others.”

But Dudler didn’t feeI he was using his potential full so he started looking for something bigger and more challenging to channel his creative energy into. He began fiddling around with a new tool he eventually named, Clarify.

A pivotal moment came after he was asked to speak at a Frontend Conference and chose to talk about Clarify. In the room next door was someone more famous. In Dudler’s room there were “maybe 30 people.” But then the other guy had cancelled and suddenly his full capacity room moved to Dudler’s. At the end of the presentation a guy in the audience shouted: “Shut up and take my money!”

That was the starting point for Dudler to jump off and do his own thing. Eventually, he asked the CEO of the agency he was working for if he thought his idea had potential and he referred him to Doodle co-founder, Myke Naef who was also an angel investor. Myke and other seed investors including former Google software engineer and Frontify co-founder, Thomas Düebendorfer, and Cédric Waldburger of Tenderloin Ventures gave him the money to get started.

Myke who went on to mentor Dudler says of him at the time: “What convinced me immediately to invest and get involved was that Roger was a full-stack product builder. He covered all relevant bases. He had a clear vision and was able to build a product by himself. And, he did it at blazing speed with impeccable quality. It is rare to find all these competencies required combined in one person.”

The future of brand management
For Dudler, the gratification of helping people with their daily work continues to inspire him: “I get fired up about Frontify building an ecosystem that puts the brand at the centre, where the platform is the connective tissue.”

Further, Dudler feels processes should feel like second nature and provide the kind of experience that he believes satisfy the human need for reduced complexity at work. “I think personalisation and tailored experiences will be sought after and even expected by brands. Our new API enabling more customisation is a big step toward this realisation.”

Dudler also sees brand management breaking down the concept of where brand ownership lies and who brand builders are, empowering individuals at every level to play a part in the overall brand management process.

“This gives people the feeling they are really contributing from the ground floor and a part of something that matters,” says Dudler. “Ultimately, deeper analytics that reflect the way users are working with the brand will allow for better decision making and governance for ultimate engagement and expression.”

For most entrepreneurs, being at the helm of a business considered highly innovative, carrying out international software projects, and winning competitive bids against the ‘big four’ consulting firms, would be strong indicators of success.

However, for Adela Wiener, it was the point at which she realised that an established process automation solutions business wasn’t the right future path and the moment she decided to embark on a full-scale transformation.

‘Courage over comfort’ is the ethos that has driven Aurachain CEO, Adela Wiener, through her career and one that epitomises her bold decision to take her company in a new direction three years ago.

“The company was doing well as a services business,” Adela reflects. “We were implementing bespoke complex process automation solutions for enterprises across different countries. We had a good client base and were carrying out major contracts, winning competitive bids over larger players in the space, based on our ability to implement solutions in just half the time they could.”

Aurachain, in its previous iteration, was implementing client solutions using several different Business Process Management (BPM) systems but had already begun to develop its own IP in the form of accelerators to shortcut its implementation cycles for large banking clients around the world.

“Three years ago, I stopped believing that the intelligence of software developers should be used to build hard-coded solutions for our clients. The more custom work, the bigger the cost, the bigger the dependency on the vendor, and the bigger the frustration on both sides – vendor and client,” Adela explains. “We saw that the future was increasingly going to be about empowering organisations to build their own digital process apps and less about delivering these for them. This is why we made the strategic decision to move into the low-code application platform (LCAP) market.”

“Low-code is, first of all, a mindset. One that enables organisations to create digital apps without primarily investing in hard coding. It removes the friction between business and IT, bringing developers and business analysts together to collaborate and therefore allowing them to achieve quick time to value.”

Low code is a trend and opportunity that has also been acknowledged by Gartner, who heralded 2021 as the ‘year of low-code,’ and predict that, by 2025, 75 percent of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies.

Adela and her business partners began to explore the possibility of packaging up their existing IP and knowledge into a low-code process automation product to generate enterprise grade applications.

The Aurachain transformation journey, spanning the last three and a half years, has seen Adela drive the business through seed and Series A funding, creating a new product on a new tech stack, changing the organisational structure and part of the management team – while navigating the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Taking the plunge
“The transition from a solutions company to a SaaS product company was a complex one, requiring a whole new approach to structure, KPIs, acquiring and retaining clients, implementing and scaling.” explains Adela. “I knew building a good team around me would be key to success. I sought advice from people I hold in high regard from the tech industry and venture capital world, with experience in various facets of a SaaS business. It was important to me to get a range of different perspectives and expertise.”

Securing funding was the next step – and crucial to sustain product development. This is where Aurachain’s strong reputation in the enterprise process automation space was beneficial, enabling the team to quickly secure $25m of series A funding from private investors.

The biggest challenge
The key ingredients to a great product, Adela believes, is a foundational engine that works perfectly, scales, and is easy to expand with new features, either through innovation or client-driven inputs. The product development process was both timely and costly, involving the integration of all utility components into a single platform, that today is made of six modules.

However, Adela’s biggest challenge came with transitioning the company from a software services mindset to a product mindset. “Mindset changes are related to people and some people aren’t able to change their mindset very easily, if at all, especially when there’s emotion involved. I had to take difficult decisions to change the team around me and let some people go. As a CEO, I have a bigger responsibility to the company and the wider team to take the right course.”

Personnel changes were also in the customer success team to reflect the new vision – to be completely driven by delivering value to clients or creating a competitive advantage for the business. As a result, at Aurachain no decision is made solely on a product level unless is results in tangible business value for clients.

Since the initial product launch at the end of 2019, the team has won clients in Europe, South Africa and the US. 2021 has seen Aurachain increase its revenue tenfold on the previous year.

Covid challenges and opportunities
The launch of the product also coincided with the outbreak of Covid-19, which presented huge challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes – but for start-ups especially. Aurachain had just launched its UK office in London and had begun recruiting a team there, but when the first lockdown was implemented, the team had to change its strategy.

“As a CEO you have to be ready for everything – you need to be clear-minded and not only react quickly, but also anticipate as much as you can. The pandemic made everything hard to predict, but despite this, it was one of our best years yet.”

Lockdown gave Aurachain the opportunity to validate its market position. Businesses needed to evolve quickly and were looking for faster, lower-cost and more agile ways of doing things. As teams, goals and processes had to change quickly, so too did their technology stack and critical business applications. Against a backdrop of global disruption and uncertainty, Aurachain increasingly gained client traction.

It was during this time that Aurachain began to work on a project close to Adela’s heart: a national system built in her native country, Romania, for a job retention scheme to provide financial support to employees through the pandemic. At the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020, Romanian furlough scheme requests were being handled manually and taking up to 10 days to approve, placing immense pressure on government staff. As claims continued to increase, the government had to react quickly to find a better way to process the volumes of claims rapidly and securely.

Aurachain’s low-code platform was used to develop Romania’s National Job Retention Scheme Portal (aici.gov.ro). The app was built and ready to use in under two weeks and improved the work of around 1,000 public sector workers. At its peak, the app handled 48,685 applications per day and a significant number of applications per second. As a result, furlough application acknowledgement was cut to just 1.5 days on average, with many applications processed even quicker.

Despite her involvement in building a transformative system to help her home country deal with a global crisis, Adela still maintains that the two biggest achievements to date are the product and her team, with the resilience of the founding team being a key driver to getting them where they are today.

A foot in the past and a foot in the future
“I am a big believer that we wouldn’t have managed to be where we are today, as a company, product, and team, if we hadn’t experienced our previous journey as a custom solution business. We learned so much from each market, each client and all the mistakes we’ve made,” Adela reflects.

“As a product company, we know what we want to be: a leader in the low-code space, for enterprise grade apps, by offering a product that represents the best balance between the highest level of configurability for app creators and the highest degree of extensibility for enterprise clients.

“I can honestly say that the last three years were the most challenging years of entrepreneurial my life, and they were equally difficult for my partners and our extended team. But the reward made it all worth it.”