Founder of the leading platform to adopt pets

Being the son of veterinarian I always felt a strong connectivity to pets and animal welfare.

In 2012, during my studies, I was lead to my first startup with broad & sustainable success leveraged by amazing nationwide media coverage, a fruitful crowdfunding campaign, and some smart business development deals.

Today, Tierheimhelden is the leading platform to adopt pets from animal shelters in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with more than 400 registered shelters and ten-thousands of adopted cats and dogs.

  • Tasks: Ideation, Strategy, Roll-Out Management, Project management & Operations, Marketing, PR, Business Development, Funding
  • Website: www.tierheimhelden.de

 

Founder of a successful pet insurance platform – acquired by Allianz group

With a decent track record as a digital entrepreneur within the pet market, I co-founded and ran a company, which successfully sells pet health insurances online via several platforms as part of a multi-channel sales funnel, in late 2013. As managing director, I was responsible for product and online marketing as the company was acquired by the Allianz early in 2015.

In consequence of this acquisition, I continued to drive the project as intrapreneur to manage a successful handover to corporate structures and processes as well as to develop and implement the growth strategy.

Utilizing internal resources as well as digital freelancers from my network, I drove this corporate startup until the summer of 2015. In this time, we managed to build one of the largest dog communities within a couple of months as part of the market penetration strategy for our platforms.

 

 

Founder of an automated underwriting platform at MunichRE

„Chris, we have to implement a fundamental change in the way we offer our services to our customers. But the daily business kills innovative ideas / projects even before achieving any tangible results“. This is how an Executive Manager at Munich Re, approached me in autumn 2015. „I want you as an entrepreneur to help me. Drive this project from scratch like you managed your startups“… Most of my intrapreneurship somehow start like this.

Discovery and Validation: I took over the lead for an innovation idea which was a result of a design thinking workshop. I constantly refined, prototyped and tested the product as well as the business model hypotheses together with the business sponsor and his team to form a corporate startup ready for investment.

Validation and Incubation: Having achieved the internal investment, I empowered the team to develop and implement a minimum viable service as a baseline in collaboration with two pilot customers as well as to develop a business-strategy to scale that service.

Scale Up: I continued to work as an interim project manager enabling the growing team to continuously adapt the service offers to the demands of a growing, global customer base, maintaining an entrepreneurial subculture within corporate structures.

As it might be of special interest, this is how we got from a blank sheet of paper to a digital product, successfully implemented and a running team within 16 months.

I started with organizing three workshops for the whole team:

–  Anticipating customer needs with design thinking methods to develop ideas

–  Evaluation of the ideas to identify the three most promising ideas

– Deciding on a mission and vision to establish an unalterable basis of who we are, where we want to be, and what values we want to serve to our internal and external customers

Using the principles of lean project management I build prototypes and used them to evaluate the potential of every one of the three ideas in interaction with internal and external customers.

Two months later I presented the results. The Business sponsor and I chose one of the service ideas as our main area of focus: „Realytix“, a platform to get quotes for reinsurance covers immediately was born.

2. In the second phase, I groomed a feasible business concept and launched a minimum viable product, supported by internal resources as well as digital freelancers from my personal network. We pitched internally for investment to Roll-Out. Successfully – a few weeks later we moved to a office at the incubator of the Technical University of Munich (TU Munich; „Techfounders“).

3. This is when the third phase started: I led the team to implement version 1.0 of Realytix as a baseline at one of our pilot customers as well as to develop a business-strategy to scale that service. In a “training-on-the-job-manner” I taught them how to use methods like scrum to establish an “entrepreneurial subculture”.

Summer 1st, 2016, after 16 months, I left an independent team of 10 people, running a service in one country, improving their product iteratively, using scrum as a project management method and prepared to pitch for the next round of investment to prove global scalability.

Since then, I constantly continued to help the team in Scale-Up to keep their customer-oriented, agile and lean working-mode.

 

 

Founder of the leading job platform for veterinarians

As a son of veterinarian, I grew up seeing my parents in daily confrontation with the daily hurdles of managing a major veterinarian clinic.

In 2013, during my studies, I decided to initiate and cofound Vetstage.

VETSTAGE, founded 2013, grew to be the leading online career platform for veterinarians in Germany. It was developed iteratively with students as well as professionals and provides a sophisticated and automated solution for job offerings, applicant management, and educational services. The well-established brand reaches more than 1/3 of German veterinarians via its direct channels every month. Combined with its long-lasting political and industrial partnerships, VETSTAGE is in the privileged situation to continue its rapid growth in Germany while expanding internationally.

Meanwhile, I´m less involved in daily operations.

  • Tasks: Ideation, Strategy, Roll-Out Management, Project management & Operations, Marketing, PR, Business Development, Funding
  • Website: www.vetstage.de