I was born in 1974 near Vienna, Austria, the son of an accountant and a car mechanic who had fled the former Yugoslavia, which laid the foundation for my very down-to-earth upbringing.
My parents’ lives also influenced my personal interests. Accounting, which my mother practised from home alongside raising her children, fascinated me from childhood onwards. I could watch her for hours before doing my homework. And in the evenings, I could often stay up late with my father tinkering with vintage cars and other machines in the garage. Add to that my admiration for my father, who brought out his native language every year during the summer holidays, and finally my self-discipline in practising the martial art of judo since the age of seven – and there you have the cocktail that has shaped my life to this day.
All this, combined with my irrepressible desire for constant change, led me to study commercial sciences, specialising in corporate accounting, auditing, tax law and Czech business language (Serbo-Croatian was not offered).
I recognised early on the constant need for self-motivated change and continuous improvement.
(Heraclitus, Greek philosopher).
Or as Lao Tzu put it more vividly:
While studying business administration, I worked as a consultant and audit assistant for various companies, which gave me hands-on experience at a very early stage. Immediately after completing my business education with a focus on financial management and Czech, I joined a large trading company based in Prague with origins in the DACH region as chief controller. I later worked there as CFO and co-managing director for more than 13 years.
The skills I acquired in my early years, which I continue to expand and refine with new trends, have served me well for another 13 years as a self-employed interim manager and remain my toolkit for the modern management of numerous companies that I have successfully supported to date.
Due to my work in a wide variety of industries, I am universally applicable. My focus and greatest expertise lie in financial management (interim CFO) and intercultural people management. The latter is an often underestimated factor for successful companies. My more than 25 years of experience abroad have taught me that language barriers, intercultural differences and different ways of thinking have an enormous impact on a company’s performance.
I would be happy to hear about your challenges. No strings attached and no sugarcoating.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably gotten to know me a little better. If you feel that my overall package can support you, then I’m happy to do so. I will be brutally open and honest with you. And I expect the same from you. But I can guarantee you one thing: if we agree, I will see it through.
Thanks to my education and experience, I am able to examine and understand your company within a very short time.
Are you familiar with the following feeling? You drive to work for years, always taking the same route past the same house. And one day you notice that the house has been demolished. Someone asks you what kind of doors and windows it had. But you can’t remember at all. It is often similar in companies. It is called operational blindness. It is like with a frog: if you put it in cold water and heat it slowly, it will perish. However, if you put it in boiling water, it will jump out again in a flash.
I can help you to look at your company objectively and from the outside in order to get it back on track.
Contact me without obligation via e-mail, telephone, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or this contact form.
