Selected engagements from our work.

The founding CEO of DiIT was approaching the question of retirement. The business was technologically dominant in its niche and highly profitable, but the next strategic phase required either independent capital for international scaling or full integration into a larger industrial group that could carry the company globally. The CEO did not want to remain operationally central into his late years, but he could not see how to step back without the business losing what had made it valuable — its open, vendor-neutral software platform that worked with wire-processing machines from all major manufacturers, not just Schleuniger.

The owner-CEO faced converging structural and strategic challenges. The Magento-to-Adobe-Commerce platform transition was reshaping the buyer landscape — projects were getting larger and customer expectations were shifting toward broader IT-partner capacity. The company's rural location made talent acquisition difficult, although existing personnel were extraordinarily loyal.

The founders had built a profitable, technically integrated business with proven market relevance and low churn. They had reached a personal milestone: the next phase would require significantly more capital, broader sales and product capacity, and possibly international scaling. Rather than absorbing those operational risks as independent owners, they wanted to find the right long-term software partner who understood the healthcare-vertical SaaS space and could carry the business forward while letting them realise an exit.

ClinPharm operated in a structurally changing market. Pharmaceutical companies and CROs were under growing pressure to run clinical trials faster, more reliably, and with better patient recruitment. Dedicated site networks could create real value at this bottleneck.

The company had built a credible international engineering business — customers in the US and Europe, deep Magento and Adobe Commerce expertise, an existing collaborative relationship with a US partner. But the operating model had not kept pace with the company's structural needs. Project profitability, utilisation, and billing discipline had eroded.

Teknihall had moved from Münster to Dietzenbach in 2021 with significant expansion of warehouse space, personnel, and infrastructure on the expectation of growing Asian customer volume following the Pangoo investment. The volume did not materialise sufficiently — Covid disruption, raw-material shortages, freight-cost escalation, and declining business from Asian partners from early 2022 onward. The company was caught in a classic over-expansion crisis with high rent burden, oversized personnel, and insufficient revenue.

Revenue had roughly halved over four years under combined pressure from COVID retail disruption, the structural insolvency wave through specialty retail, and accumulating internal operational issues. Bank credit lines were fully utilised, personally guaranteed by the 70-year-old founder. The relationship between the founder and his daughter — the incoming Geschäftsführerin — had become a structural blocker for every operational decision.

The legal services market is being structurally reshaped by AI. Generic legal frameworks are becoming commoditised. Larger insurers offer free standard documents that compete with the legal-services value chain at its entry point.