Making the world a better place. For real, for a change. With a team of Net-Zero nerds who have pretty ambitious goals. Have a look at our website. Online in German for the time being, as the German market is already huge with more than 3 million commercial buildings that need to be decarbonized.

Fahrengold is a German innovation leader in the growing luxury automotive accessory market for high-net-worth car collectors.Since joining as Managing Director North America, I have tripled the company's sales by driving a strong presence at events and establishing new, successful partnerships with leading companies in the market, which has enabled us to significantly increase our reach in our core target group. I have also significantly improved many areas of our business, such as streamlining logistics and introducing a nationwide process to certify our constructions to local building regulations.In addition, I have initiated many projects on my own initiative, such as a number of very effective trade and affiliate marketing measures that benefit the company worldwide.

Together with an experienced lifestyle journalist, I established a pan-European print publishing company specializing in travel guides for young city travelers for leading tourist destination cities such as Berlin, Barcelona, Lisbon, Paris or London.Thanks to my keen ability to identify business pain points and develop solutions, we were able to create a product that hundreds of independent design, boutique and luxury hotels used as a free co-branded give-away for their guests. This resulted in a peak distribution of almost 1 million copies per year to a highly desirable target audience.Through my extensive network of business contacts I was able to secure pan-European branded entertainment contracts with leading players in the individual tourism sector such as GetMyGuide, Uber or Spin, which represented the company's revenue model.My many years of experience with technology-driven online business models enabled us to quickly and cost-effectively build an IT stack that covered all key business aspects, including SaaS CRM/billing integrated with a customized CMS cloud application.This efficient technical backbone was an important factor in the economic operation and profitable sale of TAKE A WALK 2022 to the publisher "Lost in the City" (https://lostin.com/).

I have used my extensive expertise in marketing and operations as well as management concepts such as "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries and other best practices for startups to help companies of different sizes get to market faster with the right product.These companies were mostly smaller companies such as Teampay (https://www.teampay.co/) or Idagio (https://www.idagio.com/), which I guided from a technical and solution-oriented to a customer and problem-oriented product development approach. This enabled them to reach critical milestones on the road to profitability and close further rounds of funding to finally achieve a successful product-market fit and become operationally profitable. I have also helped the management of established medium and large companies, such as the Volkswagen Group, to create a more startup-like culture of rapid innovation in their product teams to better compete with aggressive challengers in accelerated markets.In addition, I have several years of experience as a "Lean Startup" speaker, e.g. at Heureka Berlin.

I founded a "Fashion Tech" meeting that has developed into Germany's largest conference in this field. The overwhelming interest of participants and companies in my originally non-profit-oriented meeting prompted me to team up with the leading German fashion trade fair group Premium Exhibitions, which is now part of Clarion Events (https://clarionevents.com/), and turn it into the biannual "FashionTech.Berlin" conference, which at its peak attracted over 3,000 participants twice a year during Berlin Fashion Week.From the very beginning, I was able to convince promising young start-up teams to present their companies, many of which are now well established, at my events.I was also able to gain national sponsors and some of the top locations in Berlin as active supporters right from the start. Before bringing in volunteers and finally using the Premium pool of professionals, I fully organized the events myself and promoted them on social media channels.

Team Europe (now Team Global) was the second largest German startup incubator during the fast-growing years of the Berlin tech industry at the beginning of the millennium and developed companies such as Delivery Hero (https://deliveryhero.com/) from their foundation to their IPO and inclusion in the German stock index MDAX.As a Venture Partner, I supported the leadership team in identifying promising business opportunities through extensive analysis of the US and other markets. I brought management talent into the company to create strong founding teams and then ensured that these teams successfully navigated the ramp-up phase and the first one to two years of operations. This included knowledge-transfer of best practices, leveraging synergies across our company network, business reporting of key performance indicator etc. to the incubator and providing solid financials in preparation for investment rounds.My in-depth knowledge of the US market and its business culture was extremely helpful on several occasions in quickly setting up a national company in the USA and getting off to a fast start, and I had longer stays in the USA during those years.

I taught the Lean Startup management technique at the Berlin branch of the Boston-based Startup Institute (https://www.startupinstitute.com/) for two years.In combination with my speaker activities, I have helped thousands of entrepreneurs to find business success.

I launched eQuisto as the sole founder and built it up to become a German pioneer in the field of mass customized clothing production and online sales, comparable to Cafepress (https://www.cafepress.com/) in the USA.I bootstrapped eQuisto with minimal funding and was quickly able to secure the three leading internet market players in Germany at the time, Web.de, Strato and Schlund, as distribution partners and offer personalized merchandise to their customers.In 2007, eQuisto was sold to the Spread Group (https://www.spreadgroup.com/). I was invited to support the new owner until 2010 in setting up a spin-off B2B merchandising company, which developed into a leading provider in this market.

As an International Brand Manager at Hugo Boss AG, the European market leader in luxury menswear, I was responsible for the successful global launch of its BOSS ORANGE brand (no integrated in BOSS).My responsibilities included the creative spending of the brand's annual media budget of approximately 70 million Deutsche Markt (40 million dollars at the time) to optimize the effective reach subsequently impact of our advertising. I also coordinated the creative input from our external art director, top creative Fabian Baron (http://baron-baron.com/), which resulted in outstanding campaigns.In addition, I led the below-the-line media activities in North America for all brands and the launch of the company's first website, which won two international web awards.