Commercial strategy for founders, C-level and private equity. I take the commercial seat, make the call, and then execute the decision myself.
Your team is working hard and growth costs effort. Sales, marketing and business development pull in three directions. The pipeline is reactive. And the decision that would fix it has been sliding for months.
Organisations I contributed to commercially, on payroll or under contract.
Different sector, different size, the same pattern. Someone knows something has to happen and is looking for a person who works it out and then does it.
“Why are we not growing faster?”
Somebody always owns the commercial process. The question is whether that ownership actually shows. Is the role actually taken, does that work, is help needed, and is the market ready for it. That is what I weigh. I read your processes, reach a view quickly, and say what has to happen to move it the right way.
“Surely this cannot be that hard?”
An inbox that sorts itself. A draft reply waiting before you log in. Quotes that stop starting from an old file. A connector that ties your own systems together. Small work that looks simple, right up until you have to design and set it up yourself for the first time. Designing and setting it up is my part.
“Do I deliver my clients what I promise?”
You sell an experience that is delivered thousands of kilometres away. On an expedition ship, in a lodge, far from your office. Nobody from your side is watching. The reviews are just good enough to reassure you and far too blunt to warn you. We travel as paying guests, tell you what actually happens, and then help you close the gap.
Where revenue disappears in a commercial process
Board seats at two companies, in two worlds that look unrelated. Business plans written and modelled, budgets built, investment cases made and the funding round prepared. Payback periods, ROI and the numbers underneath a plan were my job, not somebody else's. If you hire me, you hire someone who has had to answer the questions you have now, back when there was no advisor to pass them to.
Almost every commercial problem put in front of me has a surface current and an undercurrent. The surface is what you see: pricing, portfolio, the numbers you show your board. The undercurrent is what you do not see: which deal is stuck and why, who quietly disagrees with the direction, and what gets said in the corridor. Most people read one of the two. That is where it jams, because the answer always sits in the connection between them.
I work with one foot in the strategy and one foot in the mud. Board table in the morning about pricing and portfolio, sales team in the afternoon going through the pipeline. I have done that for seven years, and it is exactly what makes me useful on a question that starts above and has to land below. Practice translated into theory, and theory back into practice.
Where that comes from: an entrepreneur from an early age, hotel school in Breda where theory had to be applied on the floor the same day, and then six years inside a fast-growing company. In the boardroom I was the counterweight to the CEO and guardian of shareholder interest, and the voice that plays devil's advocate when consensus arrives too easily. BBA International Hotel Management, cum laude. Working languages Dutch and English.
STS Strategy started in November 2025, because there is a gap between what a large consultancy delivers and what a founder or CCO needs. A deck is not yet a decision. Four juniors do not add up to one senior.
Where I sit relative to the alternatives
What I do not do: volume sales coaching, agency execution, content or lead generation as a service, financial modelling, due diligence, M&A advisory, full-time executive roles outside an interim context, and physically location-dependent work. That boundary is positioning, not tone.
Nothing to prepare and nothing to commit to. The first call costs you thirty minutes and leaves you with a sharper diagnosis than the one you have now.
You describe where you stand. I keep asking until it is clear whether the problem sits in intake, in conversion, in pricing, or in who is allowed to decide.
30 minutesA three-week sprint, a fractional cadence over months, an interim seat or board preparation. One recommendation with a number under it, so you can say yes or no straight away.
Within two working daysYou know where your revenue disappears, who decides what, and what you will and will not do for the next two quarters. Then I go and do it. You are not buying an advisory report to execute yourself. You get both halves.
From week threeFrom first call to execution
For founders, CEOs, boards and private equity in B2B scale-ups and mid-market. The commercial seat is empty, half filled or overstretched. I take it, one to five days a week, with full responsibility inside the agreed scope and an end date.
Torn between fractional, interim, a sprint or an agency? Compare the four formats.
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Strategic for boards, practical for SMEs, associations and support offices. Above: which AI course fits you and what it returns. Below: building blocks with fixed scope and a fixed price, from an ordered archive to automatic draft replies and connections between your own systems.
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For owners, investors and CEOs of expeditions, lodges and anywhere else you host guests far from your office. Muriël Labahn and I have more than thirty years of hospitality between us, on the commercial side and on the guest side. We travel as paying guests, read the same trip from both worlds, and then help you close whatever gap we find.
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Not a service. A product I build and run myself. As far as I have been able to find, it is the only calculator that compares more than two countries at once in a single harmonised model: tax, pension, assets, housing and cost of living across nine countries plus the Netherlands, on your own numbers.
Why it is here →
At first glance I do four different things. They come from the same habit: I go looking for the hardest question in a company or a sector, and I answer it.
One habit, four applications
No benchmark, no template. None of those four questions has a ready-made answer. You have to take each one apart before anything sensible can be said: which layer, which assumption, and who actually decides. How that plays out sits in the piece on halving prices in Amsterdam.
Two sides of the same trip. In premium hospitality marketing measures the promise, operations measures the experience, and nobody puts them next to each other. Muriël Labahn and I have more than thirty years in hospitality between us, her on the guest side and me on the commercial side. That lets us judge the same trip from both worlds, against one standard.
Nine months of building. No model existed that ran ten countries through exactly the same calculation on your own numbers. Put ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini side by side and you still do not get that comparison, because the work is not recall. It is harmonising, validating and calculating. Emigratieplan took me nine months: tax research, data model, database, security, UI and UX.
AI is the tooling underneath. Without AI, work like Emigratieplan would take years. A commercial question that used to need a quarter and a project group now takes weeks. On guest experience AI changes little, because that is precisely the part AI does not take over, and will not take over any time soon.
I stand with a foot in two generations. One foot millennial, one foot Gen Z, raised in a way of learning that still belonged to my parents. You typed a test on a computer instead of writing it out, and you searched Google instead of the library. The principle stayed the same: nobody tells you exactly what to do, you work it out yourself, and that is where the learning happens. Working things out is still the part of the job I enjoy most. Now with AI alongside it, and with the same habit of checking whether it holds up.
Whichever of the four it is in your case, the pattern is the same. The question has been sitting there for a while, everyone knows it, and nobody makes the call.
Three situations with the same starting point: the commercial structure was missing, or it existed and nobody was steering it. The numbers sit at the top of this page.
The Onemeeting Company
Sales, marketing and partnerships each had their own plan and their own numbers. I reworked the pricing, rebuilt the partner model and brought the commercial line under one responsibility. 2019 to 2025, the last three years as a director and ExCo member.
Maloba Private Game Reserve
An ultra-luxury safari lodge with no distribution, no CRM and no sales story. Positioning, pricing, channels and pipeline built, and the pre-opening led until the first bookings came in. Completed Q4 2025.
Sales Management Association
An association tracking members, sponsors and events in loose lists. CRM selected, implemented and introduced to the people who actually use it, event tooling set up, and the commercial infrastructure put in place. Ongoing.
Within a few conversations I see how a company fits together. Where the money comes from, where it leaks, who really decides. Given a set of numbers I usually know within an hour where a deviation comes from.
That is partly aptitude and partly hotel school. There you learn to apply theory in practice on the spot. A guest with a complaint does not wait for an analysis: you look, you think, you act, you solve it. I use that same reflex on commercial questions, with the analysis underneath it rather than after it.
What a company notices: in week one you get answers to questions that otherwise take a quarter and a project group. And you get those answers in plain language, reduced to one recommendation. Making complex situations simple is the work itself, not the presentation moment.
“Sales is under pressure” is not a problem, it is a symptom. Is it intake? Stage conversion? Deal size? Cycle length? Each layer is a different conversation.
“We need more leads” is rarely the real problem. Often the leak sits between MQL and SQL. The move is then qualification.
Every recommendation states what is known, what is assumed and what still needs testing. No false certainty when the subject is money.
The market has the last word. Internal conviction is tested against customer behaviour, not against meetings.
One recommendation you can act on. And one alternative, only if it lands materially differently.
What it comes down to
Speed over consensus. Logic over politics. What works in the real world, over what sits in the deck.
Companies rarely call me for a presentation. They call because they have a problem and want someone to solve it. I work out the plan, I walk you through what I am doing, and then I execute it myself. The result is the proof. Few people can deliver that whole run from diagnosis to execution, and fewer still want to.
Three pieces from my own work. If you want to know whether my way of thinking fits yours, start here. Fifteen minutes of reading gets you one concrete thing you can do on Monday.
On the most expensive square metres in the Netherlands a meeting centre sat largely empty. Why the move worked, and in which three situations the same move costs you margin.
6 minutes · read the piece →
Busy teams, heavy weeks, slow decisions. Three causes that always sit underneath, and what you can do on Monday without turning it into a programme.
6 minutes · read the piece →
Promoting your best specialist into a management role is almost always well meant. What it really costs, and which three routes do work.
5 minutes · read the piece →
Elsewhere on this site
You describe where you stand. I keep asking until the real question surfaces. Then we pick the format that fits, or I tell you I am not the right person. No prep needed.