Business consulting
by operators, not from a slide studio.

Most common starting point: a grown tool landscape (shop, ERP, CRM, marketing stack, tracking, warehouse software), unclear ownership, a strategy paper from three years ago that no longer reflects reality — and pressure from leadership to "finally make digital progress".

We tackle this systematically:

• Inventory of the stack landscape — owners, licence costs, data flows
• Assessment against 2–3 year business goals — where the architecture fits the strategy, where it slows it down
• Identification of the real bottlenecks — technical, organisational, procedural
• 2–3 target pictures with investment frame — not theoretical options but decidable paths

Output: a strategy document that can be discussed in a 30-minute board meeting — not 200 slides, but decision-ready.

We assess realistically which topics you can drive yourselves, where external consulting creates leverage, and where you need a technology partnership. The most common honest recommendation: not a big-bang replatforming, but 2–3 prioritised modernisation steps over 12–18 months, each with clear economics and a fallback option.

One of the most expensive mid-market decisions: buy off-the-shelf or have it built?

Typical decision axes:

• ERP — SAP Business One vs. Microsoft Dynamics vs. Odoo
• Shop platform — Shopify vs. Shopware vs. own platform
• CRM — HubSpot vs. Salesforce vs. Pipedrive

We help with a structured assessment — not a gut-feeling recommendation, but with:

• Requirements matrix against your concrete use case
• Total-cost-of-ownership models over 5 years — licence, hosting, customisation, internal admin cost
• Migration-effort estimate with realistic residual risks
• Risk assessment — vendor lock-in, roadmap stability, implementation capacity

In vendor negotiations we accompany the commercial talks. We know the typical discount bands of large vendors, the hidden cost positions (sandbox licences, API limits, premier support, partner margins) and the points where vendors typically give in. For mid-market clients this often saves more in a single negotiation than the entire consulting fee.

We come from e-commerce — own shops, own brands, own warehouse, own marketplace activities. That practice flows into strategy engagements when mid-market companies re-set their sales.

Typical strategy questions:

• Build direct-to-consumer or stay with B2B distribution?
• Own shop or pure marketplace strategy on Amazon, Otto, Galaxus, Mercateo?
• Which assortments suit which channels?
• How is the margin architecture managed across channels so they don’t cannibalise each other?

We assess honestly:

• Own shop makes economic sense for controlled brand experience, higher margins and direct customer contact for repurchase strategies
• Marketplace strategy delivers more at lower CAC hurdle, with immediate reach and less tech effort

For active brands we collaborate with the brand-strategy and brand-concept engagements in our portfolio — positioning, visual identity and tonality run focused there.

Where does your mid-market setup lose time today that could be solved without new software?

We walk through the real daily routines:

• Which Excel sheets are compiled by hand each day?
• Which emails travel repeatedly between the same people?
• Which reports are built from scratch monthly because data doesn’t flow between systems?

Out of this we derive 5–10 prioritised digitalisation levers, each with effort estimate and economics.

Typical use cases:

• B2B offer creation from configurator + CRM data
• Order confirmation and shipping notification end-to-end digital
• Marketing reporting from shop, GA4, GTM and CRM in one consolidated dashboard
• Warehouse inventory via mobile app instead of clipboard
• Supplier onboarding with structured data formats instead of PDF/Excel ping-pong

For many of these levers a no-code or low-code setup is sufficient (n8n, Make, Retool, Airtable, Notion) — we assess honestly when a simple workflow-automation path delivers more than a large integration project.

Typical mid-market situation:

• Marketing team of three
• An "online lead" sitting between sales and IT
• External agency for campaigns
• External agency for the shop
• IT owning the ERP

…and no one owning the overall picture.

We help sketch a viable ownership and sourcing structure:

• Must be in-house — strategy, owner responsibility, data sovereignty, customer contact
• Can be outsourced — specialist implementation, platform maintenance, creative production
• Hybrid setups — SEO, performance marketing, data analytics

We deliver profiles for the key roles to be filled — e-commerce lead, tech lead web, data analyst, performance marketer — including realistic DACH market salaries for 2026 and suitable recruiting paths.

This is not headhunting — we don’t place people — but you get the clarity on which roles have the biggest leverage and where an external partnership is more economical than the next full-time hire.

You’re in the middle of a replatforming, an ERP migration, a shop relaunch or a data migration — and the progress doesn’t feel right?

We offer two formats:

• Project health check — structured audit of a running project (scope, architecture decisions, vendor performance, team setup, risks) with a clear traffic-light report and concrete recommendations on how to bring the project to completion
• Accompanying sparring — regular sessions with the responsible in-house leads, in which we act as an external corrective (architecture reviews, vendor escalations, stakeholder communication coaching)

If a project is acutely at risk of tipping and a change in steering or operational lead is needed, we evaluate taking it on as an interim engagement (linked to our interim management service).

Prerequisites for a takeover:

• Realistic remaining runtime
• Clear mandate
• Sufficient competency on the client side

We don’t take engagements that we can foresee won’t lead to a clean outcome.