A corporate explorer unit means managing a business with a different operating rhythm. While the existing business seeks to optimize performance within a set of known variables, a corporate explorer's task is to de-risk the company's investment in future growth opportunities. This requires a different organizational approach to manage the exploratory operating rhythm. Our guest today speaks from deep experience and adds even more detail to the case study that he wrote in the corporate explorer field book. Before I introduce our guest, I want to thank our sponsor of the corporate explorer series Wazoko. Wazoko, which means great idea in Swahili, empowers large organizations to create effective sustainable innovation ecosystems to both exploit and to explore. It does this through intelligent enterprise software that connects and harnesses the power of employee supplier startups, universities and the unique Wazoko crowd of over 700,000 global problem solvers. Wazoko calls this connected collective intelligence and you can find our friends at Wazoko at www.wazoko.com. So welcome to today's episode of the corporate explorer series and one called the explore unit, how to build a team for exploration and we are joined by a seasoned corporate explorer who's done just that and has all the scar tissues and all the warts to prove exactly what he's done, but he's going to save you with the trouble and he's going to share how to do it. Welcome to the show, CEO of MAVY Next, Eric Croeschitz. Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having me. Great to be here. We did a little bit of homework a bit a week ago and we probably should have pressed record on that because we went down somebody round of a hole shared so much knowledge. It was really, really valuable, but it's hopefully going to give you an even better episode today. I really enjoyed our conversation and we're going to repeat that with more today. So Eric, I told we'd start before sharing your experience of building a team and all the permutations that go with that, that maybe you'll give us a brief overview of how you got to here and particularly how in 2020 Uniqua, established a separate unit called Sanus X, which is now MAVY Next and what that journey brought for you. So we'll set context with that and then we'll go into how to build a team. For the beginning, from my side here, I'm not the classical kind of innovator also from my background. I always say, first of all, I'm probably what you would call a corporate animal to a certain extent. I'm 15 years with the same company, which is quite unusual in today's time. So yeah, and second of all, the Uniqua boards, the board of these insurance companies, insurance group, I'm with for these 15 years, they always put me where there's either something to fix or something to build new. That's the stuff I so far did well. Let's see for the future and I really enjoy as well. My background actually is asset management risk management and that's where I'm coming from. So my first managerial role at Uniqua was overhauling or building a new risk management department after the financial crisis. So after we had two more than 200 year old company, first lost in 200 years, Greek government debt crisis. And at that time, I was building up this risk management unit new, which was really, really cool task and challenge. After that, my boss became CFO. He used to be the chief risk officer on the board and now then he became finance and risk officer, came to me and said, the director of finance department is not working. We have to complete the risk to the department, the quarterly reporting doesn't work. We have to roll out here, pieces, stems, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, cool, one of the largest and most important departments in the group. I was quite young back then beginning of this. So it was a big honor and said, okay, let me try it. And then I really five years built this team that restructured the finance department in a way together with this team, which worked really, really well. And after four or five years, turned out, now it works. And then I also failed to key. I have to move on my own because the people around me were just technically better than me and the processes were fine. So what I figured back then was that that Unica is a general insurance company. So we offer all kinds of insurance products in Austria and Eastern Europe. So I think it's 17 or 18 countries, if I'm not mistaken. And we always say from Geneva to Ukraine, that's the region will be active. And one thing that always, yeah, was obvious to me or was interesting to me is that we are actually very strong health insurance as well, especially in Austria. And we also have a lot of healthcare assets. So we have own hospitals, we have doctors, networks, and so on. And at that time, it came to become boring for me in finance, where I get the opportunity to do an executive MBA in certain font and below. And they sent me all over the world, Singapore, China, Silicon Valley, friends, of course. And whenever I was telling the story of Unica, everybody said, that's so cool. You guys have held assets and your insurance company. Why don't you? And there's this mega trend in healthcare, right? Prevention and many things happening, almost knowledge, Congress. So why don't you make more out of this? So I came back, started to talk to my boy and say, Hey, that's actually something that's really interesting. Couldn't we do something around this? And finally, at the same time, I'm my CEO, my now boss, I'm just a bunch better. He came back from a kind of an executive education he did with his team at Harvard Business School, with the idea of ambidexarity. So we got to know Mike Taushman there, and Judge O'Reilly, and Andy Binz, and so on. And he almost had exactly the same idea as me, just more structured. That's our news strategy. We're building a new strategy, ambidexarity, and our exploration topic is healthcare. And the next thing I can remember is that I was alone in a newly founded company. And the goal was to build up what to get 100 million revenues from healthcare until the end of 25. So that's how it all started. And it loves the fact that your leadership team goes away and does something with that knowledge that they learn. You know, people who always ask for advice and don't do anything with their that advice, I call them ask holes. So they're always asking advice, but then you give the advice, they don't do anything, including going to these executive retreats to do workshops that it's only valuable if you actually do something with it. And that's obviously stimulated your mind, your leadership team, and you did something with it. But magnificent story, and the fact that you're willing to act, and act before you need to as well, is really interesting. There's one thing before we get into the content of this book that dawned on me was, firstly, unique as willingness to create a fighter brand from within. That takes huge bravery from a leadership team. That's doing well. So when the organization is doing well, to still have the foresight to go, it's not going to always last this way. What are the characteristics that you saw of the team and your colleagues and yourself that gave that willingness? Was it some crisis on the horizon? Or was it just a willingness to go again before a crisis arises? I was hard to say in hindsight, and they have not been part of all the discussions in the board, of course. But one thing which is, and you hear it over and over again, but I really think it's true, it all starts with the CEO, right? And we have a super visionary CEO with Anthony as a bunch that he's quite wild already in this function. But he always wants to be this step ahead. As you say, when he's asking, he's also listening and then thinking, how can I further develop this company? And that's a very, you would need to know him. It's a very, very unique character who really steps up and says, okay, this is what we need to do. And there was no like live editing scene or paying or whatever. So it really, it is a situation where we are actually quite healthy. I think we're making around 300 million in profits per year. That's not like the best company in the world, but you can get quite comfortable with it, especially as an insurance company. But you have these characters, right? You haven't raised here. He became CEO very early, very, very young. And then you have his, he picked his management team who has a similar mindset. And I think I'm really super lucky and super happy that I had this environment because without this environment and without this support and this vision from the top management, I wouldn't have worked, right? I could have done whatever I wanted. It wouldn't have worked. And that even now, like this morning, eight a.m. in the morning, once a week, I have one hour with, with some players, right? And really discussing how can we, for the developers, he has his very specific ideas. He's also make like pressuring me to a certain extent. But it's a good thing, because he wants progress there. He really stands up for the topic. But he's even after almost five years, he's still totally like committed to it. And without that, as I said, I think it would not work. Of course, I also have to deliver and execute, but he has to back it in order to what meetings in the annual budgeting discussions here to defend my budget, to give me the freedom and independence. We need as a team, if he and his management team would not believe in the topic of Moby, I think we would die quite quickly. And it would have never been born, so to say. So I think that that's the main thing. Of course, there are a thousand things afterwards to execute. And I cannot even say that I know how to do it, because you have to ask me again, end of 25, if you were really successful. So we are still on the way. But that's the basis. I think that's really, and you need this kind of character. It's so difficult to see that from the outside. So when you're, I'll give you an example. So I'm running an event here in Ireland with a couple of colleagues. It's called the Reinvention Summit, April 29 and 13 next year. And we wanted to have some CEOs on the panels. But you know when you go to an event and you see the CEO talking about some innovation that they've had, and you can tell they actually don't know anything about it because they didn't do any of the work. They didn't have a weekly call with Eric in their company to understand, to really understand that they didn't go away and do a corporate education program to really understand that innovation. And that piece, you say, the characteristics, that willingness to learn, that willingness to try things, the willingness to risk things, but also concurrently de-risking them is so rare and so difficult to actually identify from the outside. You only actually know it when you're working for somebody. So I love that characteristic that you're talking about. But it actually is a nice segue for the very first role. So picture, if you can remember back to towards all the twists in the road that you've had to get to where you are today, starting off with Mavi next, or Sandus X as it was back then, defining the purpose and the scope and the why. So trying to shape this originally because what an awful lot of entrepreneurs or corporate explorers forget is that there's a why for you firstly for doing it. There's a why then from the parent company to understand what you're doing. Then there's a why for the employees that you're going to onboard. And then there's a why for the customers, for the public to understand as well. So you have to actually get all those different why's in place. And this is, as you say in the book, the very first step is to define this why. Maybe you'll tell us about that before we get into the team then behind that why. First of all, it's a good one. I'm not even sure if they are still work to do in the different aspect and different types of why's that you just said. I think to start with the very beginning, of course, that the first thing was also to convince the core business rights, the insurance company, at least the managers from the topic and give them the why. And again, I didn't come up with that. It was Andreas. I think he once he did it on the plane when just writing it on a piece of paper. Two things. He did two things here. One thing he gave it a frame also that a narrative, let's call it a narrative, where he said, actually, what we are doing, we are moving from the insurance industry, already quite strong insurance, we're going to get a better insurance and even more efficient. That's important because we're only a strong and what we're doing. But we are broadening the scope and from moving from the insurance industry into the caring industry. And it's a simple sentence, but I still think it gives people some kind of perspective to understand that the caring industry is much bigger than the insurance industry. We still will do what we did because we care about people when they have any kind of issues, but we do much more, especially in the healthcare area. We also help them with their health prevention and so on and so forth. Whatever Marvie is currently that gave them. There was a lot more behind it. He even wrote the manifest, like I mean, it has to like, I think it was only a two-page or so, where he describes his version of this story. To first the management team, I think it was the top 80 or so that we gathered together, the pundits, something like this. And then to the broader unique group of people, like 14,000 employees and in his town halls and so on. And that was super important to onboard the people and to get them on the journey. And also with the top 80 last sentence on this one, like after being, what was it, I think we started in November, December 2009-18, if you're not mistaken. And I think in June 2019, we brought together the top 18 of the group for one week, where we really worked with Mike Taushman and the beings, Joshua Riley, who brought them to HBS and only worked on this topic of ambidexterity. Like we were living together in little houses on the campus and so on. And we worked on both, we worked on exploitation, how to get better and operational excellence. Super important for us, it's the core, that's where we are coming from that also our profit needs to be sustained. But we also worked on explore and what actually the goal is. And then this narrative also became more than the narrative, but also got kind of financial goals that I mentioned before. So what do we actually want to achieve as a group? Because we also have investors, we are talking to the company, we have to tell the people what we are doing with the money of our shareholders. And then we came up with these things, okay, we want to scale it first and then we turn it around to make it profitable, but first it has to have a decent size. So we said, okay then, back then it wasn't even clear that I will do it. But we said, Mavi, not the name back then, but like these exploration units should have at least a 100 million revenue by the end of 25. It's not a like a scientifically derived number, but it has some context here, we have a billion revenue group, 100 million is not, it's still tiny within the group, but it has a certain size where you see now it becomes a real business, which is also relevant within this huge group. And you can further develop it later, but if it's smaller than that, it's really not interesting, either for shareholders or any other stakeholders that we have. So that was a really important one to get started and like to onboard the team. And then all the other stuff, like how do we the why to the team? Of course, first we had to found the company and then we defined as a new team, as a Mavi team or back then, as far as X team, we tried to define, okay, what's actually important to us as a team. Then we even did things like, which might sound a little bit weird, but we stopped talking about Unica, for example, we call them our shareholders. We said, we have to deliver to them, because if they're funding us, they're giving us the opportunity to change something. So that helped us, for example, because otherwise people always get prepped into this corporate kind of thinking, I have to talk to this function, we have shareholders and we have separate companies, we have to fulfill this mission. And on a purpose level, I think it was rather easy, I would even say that we worked it out with the whole team and said, okay, what are actually the main values that we should work on, but like, what do we want to achieve? And then this vision came out, it sounds a little bit fussy, but still it's very important for us, we want to create a healthier society, that's what we have as a headline there. And we say, okay, when we go out in 2025, or even then later on in 2030, and we like observed that the people in the markets will be active, Austria, Eastern Europe, currently it's mainly Austria, Poland, Germany. We really want to be part of kind of a movement that brings, that makes people healthier, and it should be visible, and you could actually feel it when you're out there. I think that's still, even though we are really hiring a lot of technical experts from all over the globe, with great education, much smarter than me, but far really, that's very important to them. That's one of the why would you, why would you ever come, like if you could work everywhere, why would you ever come to Vienna, and for a subsidiary of Central European insurance company. So that there must be something, and it's not a salary that I can tell you. I think we are paying via, but they could make much more money somewhere else. But in the beginning, that was actually, that was the easy part, because the team somehow defined it itself. It was more, in our management team, it was more the task to really take it, and really then leave it. The thing I picked up a lot is the language you chose. Andreas as well, choosing the world, the word of care. So we're in the care business, and then you're the language that you choose, because it really forms the mindset, thinking about the corporate parent as a shareholder, removes that kind of awesome them. It means actually they're helping us. And I think that's a huge problem when it comes to ambidex, already that a lot of times you see each other as the enemy, and they're stuck in the ways we're going to disrupt them, and it becomes us and them. So that's a really, really important insight. But you talked about Eric, you can't compete with wages, so therefore, the Hawaii needs to be important. But also, as you told me in a prep call, so does the personalities of that team. So you need somebody who's more open to risk, you need somebody who's more curious, somebody who's a builder in the early days. And as we'll talk as we progress throughout this episode, that changes as the business changes as well. So let's launch into what we talked about the last day, building the team, the different skills and personalities that are needed to build that team. And then we'll go into how that changes as the company evolves. Yeah, that's a good one. That's probably one of my scars that you mentioned into the introduction of this. It was a big learning. It also would be super interested in views from people who are listening in what you experience is. In our case, what you just mentioned was that we still go through different phases of maturity of this exploration unit. That means in the very beginning, it was a lot about ideation, incubation, being creative, trying things to a certain extent also than some, even now, but more often really failing on things and learn and then go to the next. And that, of course, asked for very specific people. One example is that I think when I started, asked people at Wanica who wants to join this new company. And of course, it was a very cool thing. Because it's a new thing. We're investing its innovations. We had really many, I think, 20, 30 applications to join the company. And they tried to be really restrictive. So I only took I think 10 people, if I'm not mistaken. And they gave them really hurdles. I said, you have to quit your job with the insurance company, which is not a small thing because you're losing a lot of benefits and perks and all it. And you start with a new company, which has a completely different setup without the perks. So you really have to be willing to do that. So I ended up with nine people from the core business. And I have to say, like, all really good people, like really successful people, like one of them was, for example, or chief economist, so smart people. And from these nine people, 10, including me, besides me, there's only one person left. So like, almost all of them turned out didn't really feel comfortable in this environment. So after one or one and a half years, we had to let go of all of them, because it was more like they're kind of working. We have working was different, right? They came from a corporate, they were more like, okay, tell me what to do. And I will deliver, I will work really hard. But in this case, it wasn't about telling them what to do it. It was about they have to find a way to solve problems, which I also didn't have any answer, which is completely different than working in an established corporate. So they didn't work out. We got mostly younger people, I would say, sometimes also former entrepreneurs who failed or just wanted to not run their own company or had an exit or something. So that helped in the beginning. And then what happened after two years, maybe two and a half years, we got successful, which is actually cool on the one hand. So we had them two or three companies that we either acquired or we built services on our own, which overcame this phase of experimentation. So I think the example that I made in our conversation last week was we had a company which has a business model. In this case, it was employee health. We already acquired the company of the basis for that. We were market leader in Austria, in this area. And then we took the same people who actually were experimenting before ideation, incubation and so on, but not to experiment with a new service. But to implement a CRM system, it was like a software project. It was nothing new. It's a proven process, how to implement this project. And this software project is not like our experiments, which cost around 5,000, 10,000, maybe 15,000 euros. It had a price of several hundred thousand euros. But these people, they were not used to project management. So they started, they just tasted it. And then after six months, we found out it doesn't work at all, because we don't have a plan how to implement TCM. And we like, we burned a lot of money, which we shouldn't have planned, to be honest, you have that now I can talk about it. The pain is subsided now. And that's when I realized here, I know these people who can do that. I was head of group finance. I was, I was leading one of the largest IT projects we had in the group, like rolling out as a B in the counter spectrum. And there were different skills, different strengths. So I should have seen that, to be honest, but I didn't. And then we decided together as a leadership team, okay, for these tasks. When companies actually get mature on services, and we really come into this scaling phase, we mostly need different people, different skills, different processes, and we have to change this all over. So we really changed, like, now, nowadays, we have teams who are only doing ideation and incubation. And very reality also, if an idea works, they also go into the next phase, but they are handing it like literally over to other teams. As you can now be a growing this company, now you're growing the service, please take it. We have, we have different people who do that. Sometimes people can do both, but very early, at least in our case, and maybe somebody had different experience. I was, he was a painful, but super important learning. I still think, thankfully, we learned it quite early before a lot more happened. But it's just something where I realized, okay, not every, like, not, you have to use the people, but really the strengths are, and like, when, when you're building something like this from scratch, you probably have to use different teams and different settings. The other thing we do now, I think in a little bit more often than in the past. So we do every quarter, we do, we call a reset week. We still work according to objectives and key results, because it helps us to keep focused. I think I also wrote about it in the book. It's a bit polarizing. Some people say, nice, I'm working for innovation processes. For us, it worked well, because it gave us this focus. And our OKR cycles are more of these three months. But in every case, we are not, we're not, we're from a practical about it. And after these three months, we actually take the whole company for a reset week, where every team really discusses within the team, are we still doing the right things? Do we still have to write setup based on the learnings from the last three months? Is it still paying into this healthier society vision? Is it also paying in the financial goal that we are having? And then the teams come back themselves presenting the leadership team, or actually everyone, it's an open meeting. What their findings are, and if they want to either pivot or continue as they're working, or stop the team, very rarely it happens that you want to stop their own team. But the discussion is the important thing. And then with all these insights that we get from the, from all our teams, we have now three before that, before people leadership team, we lock ourselves for one day into some external place outside our office and then define the setup more or less for the next three months. And we also can stop things, we can put teams differently together. So with all the content, we try to do this every three months, in order not to run too long in old patterns and because things are moving quite fast. So that's one of the tools we are using in our way of working and how to set the team together, simply because of this learning that we had in the beginning. That's really interesting that you have that check-in weekly with Andreas, and then you have the check-in with your team every three months that comes around quite quickly for a team, very important insight for everybody to check in with their team like that into the systems, are they working, et cetera. But one of the things you told me the last day coming back to the CRM system is that you've noticed this before as a pattern, because you've seen it now, that once you move to implementing an IT system, like a CRM system, it's a milestone. It's a signal that this is changing now. The explorer type character or personalities inside the company are going to get itchy feet here, or they're going to feel like it's changing, and you might have some flight risks, people risking leaving the company as well. I thought that was an important insight. And again, that's our experience. I think it's not the blueprint for everyone, but our experience also sometimes we have great people which just don't fit into the current phase of the company. So we are also, at least for Austrian terms, and maybe central or continental European terms, we are quite quick in also letting go of people. So we use this kind of Netflix culture they kill a lot, and we say, okay, we always want to have the best person in every position, and we're very open with our people. So, currently we are now in a phase where we use kills, and not fitting perfectly. And then we are also trying to talk with the people very openly. If they still feel like they can make a difference in the team and really want to perform and work with us, and we also give them a very open feedback. So actually we have also quite a high rate of turnover in the team. So it's between 15 and 20 percent, multiple emissions are from our side, but I have to ask the team. But if I look at it, and I'm talking a lot to them in a positive way, because everyone knows, okay, I can really deliver and I can really perform here. And as soon as somebody or as soon as I'm not performing 100 percent, I will also know there will be no surprises. I will always get good feedback and develop, and they will also help me to find something else, or something new, in terms of I'm not the best fit anymore. So that kind of became Iger. So what I wanted to say is, we value the team extreme is one of the coolest teams that I've ever worked with, or maybe the coolest team I've ever worked with, because of that. And nobody should, I think, is really a trade here in a sense of, or even like thinking about leaving like on their own, in a room, or whatever at home, like being frustrated because nobody can always talk about it very openly, which is as if they're different from the corporate setup. That's why it was a good problem to have this to a little bit. And to your point, the type of character who wants to build something will get bored when it's no longer building, and it's now exploitation. So it's moved from explore to exploit. Corporate explorers don't like that. I hated that when I had to do all very linear work, left brain work, excel sheets, etc. It was like torture to my brain. So I totally get that and having the honesty to be able to have those conversations to go, look, I'm not really contributing anymore. I've left jobs like that in the past to the company. I go, look, there's nothing else I can do. The company doesn't have a trajectory for me. I'm going to leave, and you leave really well when you do that, because both parties are happy and you're not hiding. You're not hiding in a row and just rotting. That's what we're trying to do here. It doesn't always work, of course. Sometimes they're misunderstandings and so on. Of course, it's all human beings, but that's exactly what you're trying to achieve. Like it's respectful and level. Same level kind of conversation. As you've grown, you've also acquired growth, like most companies would, which is a great sign that you're actually, maybe it's an aqua hire where you're trying to hire a team, maybe it's a software, maybe it's some patent that some company has. And I thought it was interesting that you were saying that many acquisitions, the age of the founder, has a dramatic effect on how that's going to play out about young and old. And I thought you'd share that with our audience as well. Again, to experience, there is no scientific background on this one. I don't have studies, but what we have served is we invested and we acquired different kinds of companies throughout the last five years. It was either a long lasting or like with all the family businesses, for example, we need to see them in the elderly here environment, where we invested in the company, which is several decades old. And there's a couple who founded the company, over at Nagelika Potsina in this case. And they really were looking for somebody who takes over what they've built the whole life and bring it, make it something hopefully even better, but keep it alive. They didn't have kids to take it over and so on. So there was one thing at the cost for us. It was great because we had experienced founders who were doing this kind of rather complex and not easy business with elderly here. I were willing to hand it over to us and also teach and train our people to abandon our skill that came in was actually digitize, make it scale it in a certain extent, also bring it then to our customer base. We have 17 million customers, only because of connected, but it looks like a win-win. And today, I would actually say it is a win-win. In the beginning, in this case, it was really, really hard because there was some kind of fundamental misunderstanding, yes, or better take totally my responsibility, of course. I was like, I came in and said, okay, now, at the beginning, I said, we acquired 39% of this company and said, okay, now we do this, this, this and this and I want to have these changes and I want to have that rewarding and I want to have this connection to UNICA and they looked at me and said, no. I have been doing things here since 20, 30 years, the way we do them and we're not going to change them. Yeah, you were learning from us, not me, not us learning from you. And I was under the impression, hey guys, we bought 39% of your shares, you have it run out for in the next three to five years and they would run for the run out of maximize the value. And that's exactly the experience and most of us will know that from from younger startup founders who like serial entrepreneurs, they say, okay, I built something, they are also very purpose-driven. But they think more rational maybe, I think, okay, my run out is here and there and they optimize my run out and I also want to hand over this company, but they are not so extremely attached to this company and to these teams and to their customers as the other people who are doing this for decades. So actually for Angelica and Robert, yeah, money was a factor, but it was for sure not the most important thing, right? For them, it was important that the company and the team and the customers that they that they safeguard them and that they become something even better, but also like that they they leave something here which is really has value. It was way more important than to them than to optimize any kind of run out. There was, and then I had to learn, I think I did learn mother's car. I was in there, I was around a third or four at what meeting and like our weekly interactions, yeah, I started to understand and we, as you can imagine, we have a completely different mode of working with these two. Then for example, if you can make this example as well, quite openly, we we invested last year in telemedic, which is super cool investment on our side, they are super happy that we could make it so that the other, the founder is a Polish young entrepreneur, trusted us and that does take over the majority in the shares of the largest telemedicine provider and it's in Europe. And Pablo is a completely different kind of animal. He is one of the smartest guys I know, he's absolute great entrepreneur. He grew a company highly profitable double-digit million revenues within I think four or five years if I'm not mistaken. He has also this run out and he wants to further optimize as much as possible. Like working with him, we had a call with him, like learning all the time, every time, super fast, but completely different setup, as you can imagine. Like Pablo is, yeah, okay, I have a team, but the most important thing is the company and the growth of the company. It works with a team like it's more like our culture, best person in every position. It's not the most important thing that I have somebody 20, 30 years with my company, which also has a value. I know that from our core business, so don't get me wrong, but in this case, it was growth, digital efficiency, and let's get this something really, really big, which is, I hope you can hear it, completely different, like also motivation and setup, as in the first case, that is correct. And now we are working, like we have a portfolio now of, what is it, Marigarck, Coradomo, Telemedi, Marimie, Wallaby, Byol, I think I haven't forgotten anyone now, hopefully, six companies with, well, all of them are somewhere on this scale, and it's different, like to work with them, it's different to let them work together because we also want to connect this customer journeys. And their priorities and their motivations are just different. And that's something I'm very, in the introduction, I'm coming from the asset management side, I'm a financial person, I'm very organizational in process treatment. So I also know, hopefully, my weak points, I'm more the original person, so I had a really hard time in the beginning to connect this totally purpose treatment, totally like driven from the legacy kind of entrepreneurs, which are the different kinds of entrepreneurs that both successful and great entrepreneurs, but to think into this kind of relationship was much, much harder for me. I'm happy that I have my second manager here, Lukas, who covers this other part and together we, until now we can manage it quite a bit, but there was a super important learning, it was also very exciting to call through this, not always nice, because as you can imagine, there were some very emotional discussions throughout the time as well with one or the other. More scars for you, Eric, but it's really like a key, isn't it? Like if you can identify the character, the personality, the traits and the principles of the company you're trying to acquire to make sure it's a fit, it saves so much heartache in the long run, but it's a difficult thing to do, because you'll have this dissonance about, yeah, they're not really the right fit from a personality perspective, but their technology is, and you have to make the decision. So there's so much that goes through your mind in those moments, and again, Eric is up for anybody reaching out, Eric, that might want to discuss these things with you as well, and we'll share where to find you at the end. Last one for you, which is a quick one, maybe, a quick one, but a painful one. This whole thing about celebrating failure, and I think fail fast, fail quickly, it's often mistaken that you don't want to fail at all, but what you want to do is put out little kind of exploratory ideas to see if there's feedback quickly, so they're cheap, and there's not much investment of time, energy, and finance in that, but the bigger the failure, the more painful it is. So this is something that you told me as well before we came on air, maybe we'll share this as well as a final message. It's two things, right? Sometimes it's hard, like for at least in the whole case, and it really depends on the context probably, but sometimes it's hard to understand when did you actually fail, yeah, so that at least for me, sometimes we have teams and we have services, but not completely clear is it working? Is there a product market feed or not? So it's not the data, it's not black or white, and you have to make these decisions in our case every three months, and that's what we try to do is to turn it around and let the teams give what they need to recommendation or ideal decide on their own and say, okay, should be for the invest or not. Most of the companies, they were not good. I know that other companies, I'm exchanging with them better than this, but most of the team come back and tell you what to continue, because we are super excited about our topic there, of course. And then we have to make the decision on the team, which is really, really hard because it's not clear. And we had twice the case where the teams make the decision, then it's much, much easier because we locate as your closest to the topic, then let's move on. When we make the decision, I think it's also very important to create some kind of ritual or something around it. So what we have here at the office, we have a big wall, call it a wall of ideas, where we have a lot of light bulbs, like inventions, those things, but it really serves the value, like it has the value for us. And like every idea that we start in the three month cycle, like somebody's writing the name of the idea there, we are switching on the lights and that's what we are currently looking at. But even more important, after the three months, if you stop something, the whole team goes there, we have a peer together and we switch the light off together. And that's just this kind of habit, so this ritual turned out to help us to close things really. We know it accounts, we've got learnings, but we close these things and then we really stop thinking about it and working on it. So that's this internal, like this failure topic, how to stop it and really stop it and not invest more and more resources. And the other thing I think I mentioned before is when you go from ideation, incubation into scaling, that's where you just have to realize from a certain amount of investment or revenue that is okay now it's about operational excellence. It's not about experimenting anymore. In our case, we mostly do it in a way that we say, okay, ideation, incubation happens within Marvin next, which is product development company. Everybody in here knows that this is the place to experiment. And when something reaches a certain size, and we say, okay, this is actually scalable, the product market is proven, it's great. Then we spin it out in a separate company. And one thing with the separate companies also that these people who before were product owners and more like this experimental people, either you take new people or sometimes you can keep the people, but they become managing directors. And that also gives them a different kind of also responsibility, but also visibility. And then this starts hopefully to also work more in an operational and excellent more than reprocesses project management and so on. That's our kind of tool set how we do it. One of the things I learned from doing the show is there's so many tools available, there's so many processes available that you've got to make them work for you because they'll work for your mindset, the composition of your team. This is why this cookie cutter approach to corporate consult consultancies don't work because you're so unique, your idea your opportunities unique, the territories you're in are unique. So you can't have a cookie cutter approach. Eric, thank you so much for sharing so much knowledge. Where could people find out? You mentioned about people reaching out to discuss ideas with you, etc. Where's the best place to find you? Just write to me on LinkedIn. Take me. I hope to be very responsive and I'm really open for exchange. That will email address on LinkedIn that's the easier for what we got and it's much easier to follow up. LinkedIn messages sometimes they lose the overview, but just let me know any questions and any point of discussion. I'm really happy to share. I'll link to Eric's LinkedIn profile as well to make it easier for you in the show notes. Finally, just to thank our sponsor Wozoku, which means great idea and Swahili. Wozoku empowers large organizations to create effective, sustainable innovation ecosystems to both exploit and explore that Eric and I were talking about. It does this through intelligent enterprise software that connects and harnesses the power of employees, suppliers, startups, universities and the unique Wozoku crowd of 700,000 plus global problem solvers. Wozoku calls this connected collective intelligence and you can find them at www.wozoku.com. Finally to our guest, thank you for joining us, Eric Croeschitz. Thanks for having me.
