The sounding board
Advisor
Occasional sparring, for when a decision is in front of you and you want to turn it over with someone from the outside.
The situation
The decision is on your desk. And it stays there.
The numbers are in, the deck is built, and two people on your team are certain — in opposite directions. You can feel the loop: every round adds arguments and none of them adds clarity.
You probably don’t need another analysis. You need someone who doesn’t work at your company, has nothing to lose, and asks the question nobody inside asks anymore — because everyone assumes they know the answer.
What happens
We work on your decision, not on a document.
It usually starts with half a day. You bring the situation, I bring the questions. Afterward we decide together whether it continues — as a loose rhythm every few weeks, or not at all.
- Testing the assumptions
- We put on the table what your plan actually rests on. There’s almost always one sentence in there that nobody has checked in years. That’s the one that can be moved — and the picture looks different afterward.
- Sharpening the decision
- Options turn into something your board can work with: what’s on the table, what not deciding costs, and how you’ll know in three months that it was right.
- A second opinion before it gets expensive
- Before the board meeting, before the RFP, before the signature: I look at what you’re planning and tell you where I see risk. Including when that’s inconvenient.
- Translation between camps
- When technology, legal, and the business nod politely and mean different things, I sort the perspectives until everyone sees the same thing. That’s often the actual work.
What you get at the end is a decision, not a 200-page deck. If you need something in writing, it’s one page you can read out in the board meeting.
Straight talk
Not the right fit if …
- … you need a formal report to back up a decision that has already been made. The large firms do that, and they do it well.
- … someone needs to own the execution. Sparring keeps me out of the engine room; if a role genuinely has to be filled, fractional CxO is the honest route.
- … you need someone reachable every day. Sparring works because of the distance: I show up every few weeks, not in every thread.
And if you walk out of the first session thinking it didn’t help, say so and we stop there. No retainer, no minimum term.
Track record
Where the questions come from.
25+ years across marketing, technology, and leadership — from startups to enterprise.
Miele · BMW · Google · SAP · Mercedes-Benz · Payback · MediaMarktSaturn · Deutsche Telekom
In almost all of these projects the leverage sat in the same place: an assumption everyone treated as immovable. That e-commerce is a technology question. That consent has to be a pop-up. Move it, and a stuck debate turns into a straightforward decision.
The second part is translation. Business, technology, law, and data rarely speak the same language, and the most expensive misunderstandings happen where everyone nods politely. I sort the perspectives until the same picture is in the room.
The long version is in my book Der Elefant im Raum (in German).
Rate
€3,200 a day.
It’s here so neither of us wastes time — whether it becomes a single day, a series, or a longer mandate is what the first call is for.
The call
30 minutes before anything starts.
Bring the decision you’re stuck on. By the end of the call we’ll both know whether sparring is the right format. If it isn’t, I’ll say so.