I work at the point where international growth meets operating reality.
International expansion looks different from inside the company than it does on a strategy slide. I learned that first by building my own cross-border business, and later through work in much larger multi-market environments.
What works in one market does not automatically become a repeatable system in five, ten or forty-seven.
Across my own company and the larger ones, the recurring problem was the same: how to reproduce what works without reproducing all the cost and complexity around it.
I built it with my own capital.
I built a cross-border business spanning the Netherlands, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, with five offices. That meant living the trade-offs: winning clients, allocating capital, coordinating teams, building systems, and carrying the consequences when complexity grew faster than the business.
That experience shapes how I work. I care about whether the economics, the capabilities and the ownership model can support the plan.
I have worked at enterprise scale.
Four kinds of problem, and I work on all four.
Today I work with CEOs, founders, growth leaders and investors on material international-growth decisions. The work can stop at the decision or continue into an embedded operating role.
I also run outside-in research on investor-backed growth companies, under the title Scaling the Growth Engine. It uses public information only. Client work is never published.
- MSc International Economics, University of Amsterdam
- Executive Program for Growing Companies (2016), Stanford Graduate School of Business
A small room for people carrying large growth decisions.
The retreat brings together founders, CEOs, operators and investors working through the realities of international growth. It is deliberately small: people with comparable operating experience, around the same table long enough to have a useful conversation.
- What travels from a successful home market
- Market and channel choices
- Founder and CEO bottlenecks
- Central versus local design
- Turning an investor thesis into an operating plan
- Small peer groups
- Facilitated working sessions
- Space to work through a live decision
- On the Croatian Adriatic coast
One company. One expansion question.
Start with a fixed-scope Expansion Review and get a written answer on whether to scale, test, adapt, defer or stop, before the next euro of capital goes in.