I take the seat. Not advising the team from beside it, but running it, carrying the number and making the decisions the role owns. Three to twelve months, full time or part time depending on what the business actually needs.

What usually brings people here

A leader has left and the search will take months, while the commercial rhythm quietly falls apart. Or the role is new, nobody yet knows what good looks like in it, and hiring permanently means committing to a job description written from guesswork.

The strategic choice

Whether to hold the position or reshape it. Most interim briefs are written as cover for the last person. The more useful question is what this seat should own by the time the permanent leader arrives, and that is a different answer.

What I do

I keep the commercial cadence going, because that is what decays fastest without an owner. I fix what is obviously broken rather than starting a transformation nobody asked for. I make the decisions that have been waiting for someone with the authority to make them. And I write down what was tried and rejected, not only what worked, because the rejected list saves your permanent hire a quarter.

How it runs

I want the numbers as the team uses them day to day, the three decisions currently stuck, and an honest account of who is thinking about leaving. Then a clear mandate. What this seat decides alone, what needs a conversation, what is off limits. Interim roles fail more often on unclear authority than on unclear priorities.

What you get at the end

A handover that leaves your permanent hire a better situation than I found, with the ground prepared rather than the mess redistributed. The last two weeks are part of the engagement, not a formality after it.

Sometimes you do not need a leader, you need an answer. A few hours, or a few weeks with a defined question, and a recommendation you can act on or reject on its merits.

What usually brings people here

A board question nobody internally can answer without a conflict of interest. A vendor decision about to be signed. A performance problem where the diagnosis keeps changing depending on who is in the room.

The strategic choice

Almost every engagement turns on separating three things that get discussed as one. The strategic choice, which is where you are going and what you are giving up to get there. The tactical plan, which is the sequence. And the operational work, which is what people do on Tuesday. Most stuck decisions are stuck because a strategic question is being answered with an operational answer.

What I do

I look, I ask direct questions, and I tell you what I actually think. I start from the customer and the organisation as they are, not from the internal structure outward, because inside out is how most businesses arrive at the wrong answer confidently. No account team, no upsell into a larger programme.

I also spar

A recurring conversation with a chief digital or commercial officer on priorities, team structure, what to insource and what to leave with agencies, and who should own what. Some of the most useful work I do is an hour a fortnight with someone who has nobody impartial to think out loud with.

How it runs

By the hour for the sparring, or a fixed short engagement with a written recommendation for the defined questions. I will tell you which one your question needs, and occasionally that it needs neither.

Four different things that get asked for with the same word. A conference talk, hosting a panel or a company event, a closed session with a leadership team, and a hands on workshop. Practical rather than visionary, built for the specific room, in Danish or English.

What usually brings people here

A team that needs to get past the AI headlines to what it means for their business. An event that wants someone who has run the thing rather than only studied it. A panel that needs a moderator who understands the subject well enough to ask the second question. Or a leadership team with a decision in front of them and no shared view of the options.

What the room actually wants

Every audience has now sat through a keynote about exponential change and gone back to a job where nothing changed. So they are tired rather than curious, which makes them a better audience. They want to know what this does in their job next month, what someone like them tried that failed, and what their board will ask them afterwards.

Which of the four you need

If the audience did not choose to be in that specific room, it is a talk. If the expertise is in the room and needs drawing out, it is moderation. If a leadership team has a decision to make, it is a leadership session. If they should leave with something built, it is a workshop. Delivering the conference talk to a leadership team is the most common mistake and the least useful hour for everyone.

How it runs

A conversation about the audience and the one thing they should leave with, then the session. Groups from a handful of people around a table to a few hundred in a hall.

Two decades of running and fixing online sales, from single market shops to operations across the Nordics, the Benelux countries, Germany and the United Kingdom. Trading, merchandising, the journey itself, and the gap between what a business believes customers experience and what they actually do.

What usually brings people here

Traffic is fine and revenue is not. The platform was replaced and performance never came back. Or the team is busy, the dashboards are green, and nobody can say which lever moved last quarter.

The gap where the money is

There is a distance in every business between what the organisation believes the customer experience is and what the customer meets. Nobody is lying. The belief is assembled from a journey map drawn two years ago and a dashboard measuring the happy path. After six months inside a business you cannot use its product like a stranger, so the friction becomes invisible to exactly the people who could remove it.

What I do

I buy something, properly, with my own money, on a phone. Then I break it. I read the last two hundred support tickets as text rather than as categories. I find the two or three points where money is leaking, fix those first, and put a weekly trading rhythm in place so the team can see cause and effect inside a week rather than inside a quarter.

Where I go looking

The right product in front of the right person at the right moment, which is an internal structure problem more often than a technology one. Pricing and where value is captured, usually the fastest lever nobody is pulling. Payment and delivery, which are conversion features that end up owned by operations. And customer service, which is the only team speaking to customers every day and is managed as a cost line.

How it runs

A short diagnostic first, because the brief is often not the problem. Then the work, with one owner and a weekly decision.

Everything after the first payment. Retention, dunning, pausing, win back, lifetime value and the loyalty mechanics that are supposed to hold it together. It is the part of the business that decides whether acquisition was worth paying for.

What usually brings people here

New subscribers look healthy and revenue is flat, which almost always means churn is eating acquisition faster than anyone has measured. Or a loyalty programme everyone joins and nobody notices.

The strategic choice

Whether you are running a subscription business or a repeat purchase business with a subscription price. Those need different operations, different economics and different people, and plenty of companies have quietly become the second while still reporting as the first.

What I do

I map the whole lifecycle, from targeting and onboarding through retention and win back, and find where subscribers actually leave rather than where the team assumes they do. Customers rarely leave at cancellation. They leave weeks earlier, and the cancellation is administration catching up with a decision already made.

The unglamorous parts that pay

Involuntary churn from failed payments nobody chased, which is often a large slice and the easiest to reduce. Win back, where the lapsed list is usually larger than the active base and owned by nobody. And a loyalty programme judged on whether it changes one named behaviour against a control group, rather than on enrolment.

How it runs

One agreed definition of churn, written down. One owner for the lifecycle end to end, because split ownership is why the gaps persist. Then the work, starting with the narrowest thing that can be measured properly.

Where AI genuinely changes a commercial process, and where it does not. Plus the behavioural data foundation underneath it, because without one no model has anything useful to act on.

What usually brings people here

A leadership team told AI is urgent without being told what it is urgent for. Several pilots running with no owner and no number attached to any of them. Or an expensive data project that improved the reporting and changed nothing.

The questions that separate a plan from an enthusiasm

What specifically gets cheaper, faster or better, named as a process rather than a capability. Who stops doing what, because if nobody stops the saving is theoretical. Who owns the number in twelve months. What happens when it is wrong, and who notices. What data leaves the building and on what terms. And what you are choosing not to do in order to fund it.

What I do

I start from the commercial outcome, never from the technology. We keep the two or three initiatives that survive those questions and stop the rest. Then I make sure a channel is actually wired to act on the output, which is the step that gets skipped and the reason personalisation so often turns out to be a first name in a subject line.

The foundation underneath

Identity, consent, ownership and definitions. Four organisational problems and one technical one, which is why these projects run long. Build them properly and the AI conversation becomes straightforward. Skip them and no model will rescue it.

Where this comes from

I led a cross brand behavioural data foundation in a large regulated organisation, built the business case, got agreement across several companies, and ran the first machine learning and personalisation work on top of it. I also hold an executive programme in applying AI to business, covering implementation, scaling and the ethics of it.

Short, sequenced and costed strategy that a team can start on Monday. Business model shifts and pivots. Transformation programmes, including the ones already eighteen months in and not yet visible in the numbers. And the platform decisions that quietly constrain all of it.

What usually brings people here

A business that has grown by adding channels, tools and campaigns without a spine. Everything works a little, nothing compounds, and no two people describe the priority the same way. Or a programme on plan by its own reporting and invisible in the commercial numbers.

Where transformation fails

On subtraction. Plans are lists of things to start and almost never contain a list of things to stop. So the new process runs alongside the old one, capacity halves, delivery slows, and the diagnosis becomes adoption. When people look resistant to change, it is worth checking whether they were given the change or simply given more.

What I do

I read the commercial numbers and the customer journey together, find where the two disagree, and build a sequence from there. Fewer initiatives, ordered so each one frees the capacity for the next. Then I write the subtraction list, which is shorter than the roadmap, more predictive of success, and considerably harder to write because every item on it belongs to someone.

On platforms

A platform problem is almost always a priority problem. Selections get run as technical evaluations with a commercial signature at the end, which is backwards. What it costs to operate once the project team has gone, what it locks you out of in year two, and whether the team you actually have can run it on a Tuesday afternoon in December. Those decide it, and none of them appear on a feature matrix.

Where this comes from

My executive MBA specialisation was digital leadership, platform economics and transformation. Before that I was a partner in an early platform business built on freemium, micro payments and partnership revenue, which was platform economics in practice rather than in theory.

The people and structure behind a commercial digital operation. How the team is shaped, what belongs inside, who should own what, and how the specialists and the board manage to understand each other.

What usually brings people here

A digital team that has grown by hiring whoever was available. An agency relationship nobody is happy with and nobody will end. Or a board that keeps asking the same question because the answer has never been framed in terms it can act on.

Insource or agency

Almost never a cost question, although that is how it gets argued. If a capability compounds with knowledge of your specific business, or customers experience it, or you need to change it weekly, it belongs inside. If it is specialist, cyclical, or benefits from seeing many companies rather than one, it belongs outside. The failure version is owning neither, where an agency sets direction and the internal team coordinates it.

What I do

I work out which capabilities are how you compete and which are services you buy. I design the team around that, hire the specialists and the leaders who run them, and make sure there is a career path, because specialists leave when there is nowhere to go. The cost nobody budgets is management attention, and six specialists without a leader who understands their work produce a group of individuals rather than a team.

Translation

One of the things I do most. I can sit with a developer or a data scientist, understand the trade offs they are weighing, then turn those same trade offs into a business case leadership can act on. That fluency is usually the difference between an initiative that gets funded and one that stays stuck in translation.

On hiring your first commercial digital leader

The common mistake is hiring for the channel rather than the judgement. Deep expertise in one channel is the easiest thing to buy in this market and rarely what the role needs in year one. Design the role around a bad week, not a good one.