Business development & strategic advisory

What do you need to understand?

I work with business leaders and policymakers to get the right strategic inputs for their mandates: situational assessments, policy or strategy formulation, benchmarking, or validation. The insight can come from a dataset, a researcher, a specialist, or another executive who has faced the same question. AI now manufactures intelligence on tap, at collapsing prices. The scarce part is knowing which sources to trust, what judgement to work with, and what to underwrite a decision on.

For 25 years, I have grown service lines for content-centric businesses and acted as a trusted advisor to senior corporate executives. Based in Vienna since 2020, I work as an independent 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.

Track Record

25 years in international business development and strategic intelligence.

1999 — 2007

I started out in the media and internet space, from early dotcom adventures in Amsterdam to scaling up a local newspaper advertising business in Shanghai.

2007 — 2009

Building executive communities and providing strategic intelligence to institutions became my mainstay from 2007 onwards, when I was hired by The Economist Group to head up sales for the B2B enterprise arm in Beijing, providing senior executives with economic intelligence, risk and policy analysis, and access to the Economist Corporate Network, 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 — 2025

Based out of Vienna, I began working globally as an independent business development and strategic advisor. I operated within cross-border innovation consulting partnerships with Asia Growth Partners/IoT ONE and MING Labs, and launching Asia Growth Exchange, a cross-regional event programme sponsored by August Leadership, IMD Business School, and Start2 Group.

2025 — 2026

I delivered an 18-month consultancy engagement with The Conference Board, a global, non-profit think tank and business membership organisation. Across three mandates, I provided strategic and commercial support to the growth of its China Center; contributed operationally to the launch of its key account strategy across Europe and Asia; and took an interim leadership sales role within the Economy, Strategy and Finance Center in Brussels.

2026 — Present

Acting in a fractional executive capacity as Director of Institutional Clients for The China Global South Project (CGSP), an award-winning independent, nonpartisan multimedia initiative and strategic intelligence platform covering China's engagement across Africa, Asia, and other developing regions around the world. My mandate is to drive institutional growth and build out the client ecosystem, connecting practitioners in government, business, academia, and the non-profit sector with fact-based, agenda-free intelligence.

Insight Ecosystem

Three pillars in strategic intelligence.

01 Subscription

Content, data and analysis

Structured, syndicated insight on a steady cadence: data, written analysis, video, and AI tools built on proprietary research, delivered by subscription. It can be embedded in an organisation's own workflows. For a policymaker or an executive, the value is access on demand: a sharper understanding of an issue at the moment a decision needs it.

02 Advisory

Expert briefings

Specialist briefings, designed to open up dialogue among internal stakeholders or to strengthen event programmes for external audiences. The briefing starts the conversation rather than ending it. With the right specialists on speed dial, an organisation can put the person who knows the terrain in front of its board, its leadership team or its clients, so every meeting pays back the time participants invest in it.

03 Membership

Peer exchange

Closed-door peer groups under Chatham House Rule, funded by members or hosted by a sponsor for its key accounts. A group can form around a role or around a theme that cuts across roles, such as a regulatory shift or a new technology. When every leader has the same information and the same metered intelligence, candour becomes the scarce resource: peers sharing what they actually did, not what they would advise, and testing a decision before it is made.

What's next

Start with the problem statement.

Scenario planning. A growth market or business development initiative. A risk or industrial policy question. A strategy project that needs an outside read — or something else specific to your mandate.

I work across three worlds: government ministries and multilateral institutions; banks, corporations and multinationals; and advisory firms, NGOs, think tanks and universities. If that's you, drop me a line via the form below — I read every one myself — and we can start a conversation by email.

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

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