Founder-Led · NewHope Strategy
As founder and Managing Director of NewHope Strategy UG, I led a small consulting firm from zero to a paying client base — and personally ran the engagement that modernized a restaurant client's day-to-day operations.
Founded in September 2022 while studying, as a way to apply strategy and analysis work to real businesses rather than only case studies. Over roughly two years it became a small but functioning consulting practice — a four-person team recruited and led, a client pipeline developed, and approximately €20K in revenue in the first fiscal year.
The flagship engagement was a digitalization project for a local restaurant, and the clearest example of how the firm worked: diagnose the bottleneck, design a pragmatic fix, see it through to measurable impact.
The restaurant ran entirely on manual, paper-based processes — handwritten orders, phone-only reservations, and no structured way to reach past customers.
That capped two things at once: how many walk-ins the floor could actually serve during peak hours, and how many of those guests ever came back. The second was the more expensive problem, and the one nobody was tracking.
Rather than proposing a generic "go digital" package, the team worked the problem in three steps.
Mapped the existing order and booking flow to find where time and customers were actually being lost — before deciding what to buy.
Selected and configured digital ordering and booking tools sized for a small independent restaurant, not enterprise software the client would never fully use.
Rolled the tools out alongside a refreshed marketing push, with the four-person team handling implementation and staff onboarding on-site.
Customer footfall was up 30% within two months of go-live.
Beyond the single engagement, the project became NewHope's proof point for winning further client work — and running it end-to-end, with sales, delivery and team leadership all at once, was the most concentrated operator experience of my time before Viega.
Corporate strategy work — the Viega M&A pipeline, say — is about getting a decision approved on paper.
Running NewHope was the opposite discipline: living with the consequences of your own recommendation, in a business with no fallback team if something didn't work. That combination of analytical rigor and hands-on accountability is what I bring to strategy and M&A work now.