Strategic Advisory
A long-term thinking partner for founders, boards, and leadership teams. The rigor of top-tier strategy consulting, joined with what I know about how organizations and people actually change.
From mechanism to organism.
Companies built to execute a plan are being outlived by companies built to evolve. Most strategy work still treats an organization as a machine: set the target, cascade the plan, measure the drift. I help leaders build something closer to an organism: a company that senses, adapts, and stays coherent while it changes.
Advisors who can hold both P&L and people are rare. That’s the role.
I work with medium-sized and family-owned businesses facing a generational or strategic transition, with purpose-driven organizations and impact ventures, and with founders, boards, and leadership teams who want an advisor who can hold both the numbers and the people. More and more often, the question on the table is AI: what it will change in the business, how to understand it before buying it, and how to rethink the business model with AI as a given rather than an add-on.
You may recognize this.
- The strategy lives on slides everyone has seen and nobody quotes.
- The plan assumes a market that has already moved.
- The company has grown past its structure, and the real decisions are made around it.
- The next generation is ready to take over, and nobody has said out loud what they’ll change.
- The board asks about AI, and the answer is a list of pilots.
- Every AI pitch sounds plausible, and you can’t tell which of them matter for your business.
- The strategy is clear, and no one has the time or the mandate to carry it out.
Three formats
Advisory relationships
Ongoing strategic sparring with a founder, a board, or a leadership team over months and years. The classic format, with AI on the table whenever it belongs there.
AI-first business models
Focused engagements that rethink your model with AI as a given rather than an add-on: where value is created and captured once analysis, content, and code are cheap, what your organization stops doing, and what only your people can do. The output is a strategic decision, not a tool list.
AI competency for businesses
In-house workshops for your leadership team and, where it makes sense, the wider organization. Designed for your business and tied to your actual strategy. Not a prompt course. The goal is judgment: leaders who understand what the technology can and cannot do well enough to make their own decisions about it.
When advice isn’t enough.
Sometimes the strategy is clear, and what’s missing is the capacity to carry it out. A COO or CTO seat is empty, a transition can’t wait for a hire, or the change needs someone inside the organization to hold it. Then advisory can step up into an interim role: I join for a defined period as interim COO or CTO, part-time or full-time, and take operating responsibility for what we agreed.
It is an escalation, not a fourth format. It grows out of advisory work: we understand the situation together first, and I step in only when that shows it’s needed. The handover is planned from the first day: who takes over, by when, and what has to be in place for the organization to run without me.
- Roles
- Interim COO or CTO
- Form
- Part-time or full-time, for a fixed term agreed at the start
- Availability
- One interim role at a time
- Ending
- A handover to a permanent hire or the existing team, planned from the first day
Understand it before you buy it.
AI is a strategy question before it is a technology question. What it does to your business model, your people, and your own judgment matters more than which tool you buy.
AI is the polarity of the moment: threat or tool, replacement or augmentation, hype or denial. I don’t pick a side. A technology that makes analysis cheap and a leadership task that becomes more human because of it are both true, and the strategy has to hold both.
I build software with AI myself, so I know what it does well, what it does badly, and what it costs. That’s the knowledge I bring to the table, with nothing to sell you.
Advice and build stay separate.
My advisory never includes building software. When a strategy calls for something to be built, I say so plainly, and the build becomes a separate decision and a separate engagement. You are free to give it to anyone. An advisor who quietly sells the build has a conflict of interest. Keeping the two apart is what keeps the advice trustworthy. The same holds in an interim role: I never award a build to a company I have a stake in.
Background
- Kearney
- Six years as a strategy consultant in Berlin, Munich, and Zurich: digital strategy, new business models, M&A and commercial due diligence for leading European retailers and consumer goods manufacturers
- Ventures
- Founded or co-founded six companies and projects since 2009, one of them sold. Built and led a startup accelerator for ImmobilienScout24.
- Operating
- Interim COO and CTO, January to October 2026
Practicalities
Bespoke, with no fixed duration. Workshops are designed per company. Fees by scope; see Work With Me. In German or English.
Bring the question you can’t delegate.
or write to lennart@lennarthennig.com