Business development & strategic advisory

I help companies grow revenue.

For 25 years in Europe and Asia, I have built executive networks and grown revenues for content-centric businesses and acted as a trusted advisor to senior corporate executives, helping connect them with best-in-class insights and networks. Based in Vienna since 2020, I work as an independent business development and strategic advisor.

I have spent my life moving and working between cultures. It taught me to listen closely, build with people rather than around them, and still move fast.

The craft

The intersection of inside the company and outside it.

I sit comfortably at the intersection between what is happening inside the company and what is happening outside it. I can talk about corporate structures, go-to-market, talent, and technology with the same ease as I do about macro, geopolitics, and longer-term trends.

Over the years, I have run hundreds of rooms in which these issues have emerged together, enabling executives to use closed-door group dialogues to make sense of them.

The underlying craft is consistent. But where I have applied it, from boardrooms in China, Singapore and Europe, shapes every session I produce or programme I sell. Get the right quorum and the right agenda. Make the payback on executive time work. Keep the standard high. Repeat it often enough that trust compounds and the conversations start to matter commercially.

History

25 years in international business development and executive networks.

1999 — 2007

I worked in B2C content-centric businesses, from early dotcom ventures in Amsterdam to building up a newspaper advertising business in Shanghai.

2007 — 2009

Building executive communities became my mainstay from 2007 onwards, when I was hired by The Economist Group to head up sales for the B2B information services arm in Beijing, providing senior executives with economic intelligence, risk and policy analysis, and access to a membership-driven executive network for business leaders.

2010 — 2021

As General Manager and Forum Director, I built an executive forum business for IMA Asia in Shanghai from the ground up, launching the China CEO Forum, designed for heads of MNC operations in China who report to the regional CEO, head of international, or global CEO, with supporting forums for China heads of finance, business units, strategy and marketing. I left IMA in 2021, part of a transition after I relocated to Europe in 2020, with IMA China a healthy, growing seven-figure operation.

2021 — present

I have worked as a business development and strategic advisor through my own company, Propeller Strategies KG. Between 2022 and 2025, I co-launched and operated an invite-only Asia innovation community and ecosystem together with consulting principals, as a business development strategy to originate and deliver advisory work.

2025 — 2026

Through Propeller Strategies KG, I delivered an 18-month consultancy engagement with The Conference Board, a global, non-profit think tank and business membership organisation, spanning three mandates: provide strategic and commercial support to the growth of its China Center; contribute operationally to the launch of its key account strategy across Europe and Asia; and take a leadership sales role within the Economy, Strategy and Finance Center in Brussels, helping to boost leads and sales with a particular focus on C-Suite prospects.

The methodology

Three ways to build ecosystems.

Which one fits you depends on who you are and what your strategic commercial intent is.

01 Sponsored

Paid membership-driven ecosystem: build a new revenue stream

This is for organisations that sell knowledge: research houses, media companies, think tanks, intelligence platforms, education and training bodies, professional associations, and renowned experts.

Membership is the next tier above subscription, and a second revenue stream. Members are not only buying content. They are paying for curation: a triangle of what you offer, what fellow members share in the room, and what the wider market is saying.

The model is attractive because revenue recurs and invoices go out before services are rendered. It rewards one discipline above all: an obsession with delivering one excellent meeting at a time. I have worked on this model since 2007, and I know where it succeeds and where it doesn't.

03 Partnership

Business building ecosystems: partnerships that create value

A business building ecosystem has parties building something together: a new venture, a new market, a shared capability outside the usual corporate perimeter. This matters now, when competition turns on geopolitics, industrial policy, and the speed of AI diffusion, and no company keeps pace by going it alone.

The hard part is never finding partners. It is agreeing who does what and who earns what. I design the operating model: which partner brings which capability, how terms are structured, how decisions get made, and how the collaboration stays commercial rather than ceremonial.

What's next

Start with the problem statement.

Working together starts with the problem statement: an opportunity to tap, a key account strategy to refine, a new service line to build, or a partnership to move forward.

If any of that is live for you, send me a short email. One or two paragraphs is enough: a brief, a problem statement, or an opportunity sketch. If it's worth a longer discussion, we'll book a thirty-minute conversation.

Send a brief

Newsletter

Subscribe to my newsletter, Augmented Ideas.

Occasional writing on executive communities, ecosystems, and the strategic edges of geopolitics, AI, and go-to-market.

Subscribe to Augmented Ideas →