Axel Springer SE CFO Dr. Julian Deutz - digitalizing print business, going private with KKR & POLITICO acquisition

[MUSIC] Leading Corporate Transformation. The podcast by V. Ha'ul Autobysime School of Management, powered by PWC. On the transformation of companies and their culture, from decision makers for decision makers or from entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. [MUSIC] Welcome to the WHO podcast leading corporate transformation powered by PWC. My name is Martin Cloum. I'm a professor of international accounting at the WHO Autobysime School of Management and I'm one of the hosts of this podcast series. We're back again. This is the first time we meet in the new year 2022. And we look forward very, very much to a new and exciting stories to present to you. With me is Gory von Hirschhausen, part Knight PWC, and I hand over to you Gory. Thank you Martin. Hello everybody. A warm welcome to our listeners, also from my end. So I hope some of you already know me, but for days who don't know me. My name is Gory von Hirschhausen. I'm a partner in PWC leading our management consulting practice. And as a consultant, my job is to support companies on their transformation journey. And this is why my focus for our talk today is to talk about the corporate transformation of Springer and how this translates into the work of the CFO. And this brings me to our guest today. We are very honored and privileged to have Dr. Julian Deutz, the CFO of Springer, with us today. Julian, welcome to our podcast. Yes, thank you Gory and Martin. Thanks a lot for having me here and thanks a lot for coming over to Berlin. Julian, would you be so kind to introduce yourself and also explain a little bit about Springer to our listeners? Who Springer is? Yeah, I'm Julian Deutz, 53 years old, live in Berlin for the last 20 years with my wife and four children. And I joined Access Springer in 2004 when I actually access Springer was more or less a German print publishing house. And by today, and we will talk a lot about that, I guess, we were able to transform really the company into a 80% digital company, international company today, roughly Access Springer, think about it as a three and a half billion revenue company, highly profitable 16,000 employees of which roughly half are working outside of Germany. So this means in a nutshell that Access Springer is really a prime example for our podcast, which is about transformation. This is really a very exciting transformation story that you look back to. As you mentioned, until the early 2000s, let's say roughly two decades ago, Springer was largely a media and print company, right? With the most well-known newspaper BuildSightle have its core, but also other newspapers, regional and national magazines, and a little bit of TV already, I think. But over the last decade, especially very stringently, and with lots of concentration, you transformed this company into a digital company. Sold a lot of newspaper activities, and as you say, 80% of your revenues today come from digital businesses. What triggered this massive and maybe in some ways unprecedented transformation? Who was behind it? Who drove that? I think the most important factor is our CEO who came to office in 2002. He was quite young and one could argue that he really has the right background. He was an editor, he was even by education, music scientist. And he clearly said from day one, and he said that in the companies that was doing whatever 99.5% in print, he said our only future is the internet. And if we think back, at least those of us who already had a very active or even professional life at that time, in 2002, the first internet bubble had just burst. People thought, "Oh, this internet stuff is over, we are over with that, and we are going back to a normal economy." So they had nothing like this new economy. And he really said, "Hey, everything we do now will die. We don't know when it will die, but it will die." Unless we really change our business model, we will not survive. And therefore, there was a very powerful message not understood from day one by everybody. But I think this message was the main driver for us to go onto this roughly whatever, 15 to 20-year journey. What a story, how daring. So this young guy comes in, he has these ideas. In a time when the bubble had just burst as you point out, right? After the euphoric times of the 1990s, we were back to earth. And he says that, and the company went along with it. I mean, it took a couple of years till it really took off to be completely transparent. But he says that from day one, but obviously there was a lot of resistance because as in each and every company, those of the managers that were in charge of the most important and most profitable divisions, which was again, I mean, everything was printed, the original newspapers and built. They didn't really want to want to hear that, and they probably didn't really understand that. And it, I think things really took off when we did the first larger digital acquisition, which was IDIALO, Price Comparisons basically have the offices now in this very building, where we are sitting here and doing this podcast. And then we had for the first time within the management team or the broader like top 100 group, whatever the Jean Santitias, guys and Axis Pringer was a super conservative. I mean, 20 years ago, super conservative, founded in Hamburg, you know, blue suits, obviously everybody wearing a tie and so on, quite a little bit political, patriarchical company. And then this culture shift started to evolve, but it took again, we haven't done that in five years, it took roughly whatever, 15 to 20 years. I mean, you mentioned before that it's not just about being a digital publishing, let's say, platform or company. You also said that you are way more international than you have been in the past. The question is, how much does this need to go along together to become very digital and turn into a more international company? What would you say? How important is that you go both paths? First of all, when we looked at the kind of DNA of Axis Pringer, that is obviously journalism. And we will always do journalism, but journalism in print at some point in time we don't know when, but it will die finally. And our idea was from day one, journalism will survive, but it will look different in the digital age. And we also found out over time that the German language is nice and it's spoken by whatever, 80 million people in Germany and some in Austria and Switzerland, but this limits you. So with build, we were already number one, ten years ago in digital reach in Germany. But to monetize that, we found out that this is simply not enough to turn the whole company around. So we said we have to move into the English language when it comes to journalism, because simply there we can basically address whatever more than a billion people and not just 80 million. That's what we did with the first steps to the US in 2014. And now we just did the largest acquisition that this company has ever done with the acquisition of political in Washington DC. And looking to the digital inspiration, how much came from outside of the German speaking country? So was it a combination of having more people from the outside bringing also more digital ideas? Have they been further on the road, more maturity in digital questions that you found in other territories? In general, with every acquisition we did, we did not only gain ideally a good management team at a profitable business model and a value creating entity, but also we increased obviously the overall digital know-how in the company. First just step by step and then always it got more powerful. And I think from most acquisitions that we did, if not from all of them, we really benefited also in some other areas, because we just got, as you said, go away, we just got inputs and insight, even better network and so on. We also decided, I think it was in 2014, when we did two big steps, we sold our, as you mentioned, partying, we sold our regional newspapers, which was a very heritage of the company Hamburger Amblatt was founded by Axis Bringer himself, the first title, so very emotional thing. And we started to send people to Silicon Valley, because in a management board of site, we thought, actually, about what he had done in our position now. And we said, yeah, he probably would have invented the next Facebook. And we said, okay, we probably won't succeed to do that. But Then we said, "Okay, let's really go where innovation is." And I know 10 years later, everybody, every business sends people to the valley, and it's a little bit like a tourism activity. It was different 10 years ago. And we sent even some of our most important people for a couple of months there, so that they also could connect themselves to the ecosystem there, build their networks, and all that, I think, helped bringing digital ideas really into a, what was a little bit of an old-fashioned company until the early 2000s. So you mentioned the first big transaction, Idiallo, you mentioned the most recent one, which really, again, changes your structure a little bit with political. But you have done a whole string of transactions over the last 15 years or so. My question is, the market for such young and digital companies is not easy. If the companies are already established, if they have a proven business model, they are very highly, extremely highly valued. And if they are young, on the other hand, they are extremely risky. You don't know how it will develop. So how do you do that? At which stage do you go in and buy, and then what are your criteria to select businesses that you ultimately invest money in? - First of all, Axispringer always was a little bit of a family company, all family business. Friedrich Bringer was for a long time, and he recently, a 50% shelter, Frieda has her office on our floor. We see her, so we never, with any decision, wanted, and have not put the company at risk. So we clearly said, hey, whatever we do, even if we are totally convinced today, it can prove wrong in whatever one, two, or three years out. So there was a little bit of a portfolio thinking, but was really to limit at least risk. Then when we started to build this digital business or the digital portfolio, prices were obviously more normal than they are currently. So we did that, as I said, starting in 2006. So there was definitely an advantage to repeat the whole story today is more difficult. And I think we took a good mixture of businesses that have just at least have a proof of business, so they have revenues, and we know they would turn into profitability very soon. It's a very beginning we simply said, let's only acquire profitable businesses after a while we said, hey, this is not the right approach. But we did it really step by step, and I think we always knew that we don't know everything. And so we did it in steps. We never thought it's the ultimate goal, whatever to increase the value of the company by a factor of 10 in five years or some crazy stuff. But we always, I think, were very aware of the heritage of Axis Pringer, of the role of Axis Pringer in the German media landscape, and it really took a aggressive, but not too aggressive strategy, if that makes sense. Looking at your portfolio, what would you say? What are the most innovative business ideas that you are invested in? What's in your portfolio where you would say, this is really something very innovative, looking out into a bright future, not yet there, where some of our established businesses, but having a good, let's say, perspective for the future. Great question. It's interesting, it's not the most important business, it's probably because the most important business is from a financial point of view, are the online classifies businesses, jobs, and real estate. But they are effectively a mix out of, you could say, classical sales driven business and a digital platform. But probably the one I would mention as that comes into my mind is update where we are basically aggregating more than 1,000 different journalistic sources, and giving a personalized offer to the users. We've spread that out in many, many countries with just small local editorial teams, something we just started totally from scratch, in contrast to the acquisitions that we normally do. This was the first time we really relied also on our own technical expertise that we can really develop a completely new business model. So that's definitely something we are proud of, I would say. As you already said, when you do that, these investments are inherently very risky and you don't know what the future will bring. Looking back, can you identify mishaps, really mistakes, and could you draw lessons from them? Is there anything you'd say, if you are in such a type of portfolio, reshuffle, this is something you should really avoid, or this is something we learned from that? - What we, in general, found out is that the strong focus that we had from day one, because we always knew in the international perspective with roughly three billion revenues, we are not a super big player. We always focused basically on news media and on classifies. We already, if you would look to strategy charts in 2007 and 2008, you would already find that. And we found out, obviously, the more you've already done in this in a certain area, the less risky additional acquisitions are. So any kind of add on acquisitions for a kind of buy and build strategy is definitely less risky than to open up something completely new. We also found out that this combination of a completely new business model and a completely new market is super difficult, at least for a company of our size. So we tried either with the same business model go into new geographies. If you change the business model, stay in a geography that you know well, most likely Germany. - So I don't know whether that makes any sense what I'm saying now, but is that because the new business already builds on what you have operationally and therefore benefits, or is it because you have learned to understand the market and the mechanism? - It's a letter. We have learned to understand the market. We had an interesting experience, one was in acquisition, which was at that time the most expensive acquisition in terms of EBITDA multiples we've ever done it was in Israel. And the reason why we could acquire that business was really because we went there with all our experts from from Continent and Europe. And during the intelligence process could really find out what were the levers that we really could pull, how could we increase prices? Is it really undermonitized? So we bought it for high multiple parts and tripled EBITDA over the next three years. And that's simply a good, probably a good example that know how is really super helpful. In general, I would say it's a fact that we have a lot of continuity on not only on top management level, Matthias Duffnauer's CEO is still the same CEO than the one I talked about and who was kicking that off in 2002. But for example, also our head of M&A, that's the same person for 15 years. So we've gone through mistakes together and I think we always had very openly together and discussed it, hey, why haven't we found that out earlier? Or why what have we got wrong? Was it something wrong in whatever, wrong management team or was the acquisition from day one to expensive? And I think this helped us. Very important question, of course, always is how much do I integrate companies, new business models into the corporate structure of a bigger group? What would you say? How is there a certain logic that you follow? How much you integrate to leave this? Because you also refer to the entrepreneurial spirit that is driving Springer forever from Axel Springer himself. But how do you keep it in this environment and at the same time as being the CEO, having a certain level of corporate directive? Especially in the early days, we had a team with a nice name, Giechef Zuerungsbereich Elektronge and the media and sounds in German, I can just tell the English speaker, super, super old session today, Electronic Media Department. They had, I mean, officially they had the job to develop the portfolio to find targets and so on. But the real value was they protected the asset from all our nice colleagues in corporate headquarters, from auditors and controllers and the legal people. And we really said at the beginning, the reason for failed acquisitions is often that integration means you basically kill the entrepreneurial spirit. And we always had the idea, I mean, this company that we acquired, Diallo had a Z time, 40 or 50 employees, and we had at that time whatever, 10,000. And we said if we come with all our power, even if it was super interesting for our people to go there, everybody wanted to go to it, Diallo. And we really said, no, you're even not allowed to go there because if only whatever, every fifth employee wants to go there, once and wants to have a tour through the company and wants to talk to the founders, they won't do anything else for the next two years and then we'll reen the company. So we really said we only do the absolute minimum of integrations that we need. And indeed, as you mentioned, that is finance because it was always clear we were for a long time a listed company. We needed on day three in the new month, we needed final numbers. So they always had to deliver the financial data and also exactly in the timeline and deadline that we gave them. But with everything else, they were very independent and we always had this idea of this kind of, cafeteria principle where you can take whatever you want from the big corporate, but you don't have to take anything. It also has disadvantages, but in hindsight this is probably one of the big success factors for Oxygen Plague. I'm so interesting to talk about your portfolio management. I think what we learned is that you started very early with investing in this kind of business models, which are pretty pricey as Martin was mentioning nowadays. As you said, it's not that easy to repeat the story nowadays. We can see, again, early movers have a certain advantage in this way of transforming their organization. But maybe changing the topic, coming more maybe to look at your going private, we are very interested, of course, what were the reasons for going private, and then when you went private, you were also being helped by KKR, who is a co-investor in your company. So maybe you can tell us also what's the story behind this and how you work together, how you develop now Springer. So first question, why you went private and second, how's it work with KKR and how you convinced them to invest into Springer? So let's maybe try to answer that or start the answer with a short anecdote. We, on the management board, we are already for quite some time frustrated that the institutional investors on the capital markets did not really value organic investments well enough. We always got nice credit-fired positions because there was part of our success story, but whenever we came to the market and said, "Hey, EPS grows, EBITDA grows will be a little bit lower because we take whatever 20 million and invests in this business," there was seen as difficult and distracting and at a lesser, but I thought, I've given guidance in this direction. So, and that came to a face where we basically said, "Hey, if it would be our own business, so the fourth, as on the management board, we would probably do things different." And that's frustrating. And then, and now we'll come to the short anecdote. Mathias Duffnauer's CEO and I, we were having a capital market stay in London. We were presenting record revenues and record EBITDA. And at the end, we were saying, "Yes, and next year in our real estate, classifieds, portals will invest probably around 25 million. That's probably not in your plant, and we haven't given guidance on that so far because that's a new development." And this is what we want to do with that and that will accelerate growth. At the end, we had like 45 minutes Q&A, 30 minutes were on this 25 million investment and was a total negative connotation. Mathias and I were sitting in the car back to the airport for, and it takes in London, always a long time, at least in pre-coronavirus times, 90 minutes. And we were both typically frustrating. We said, "Hey, this does not make any sense." Yeah. Either they don't understand it, so the investors are analysts, or we are too stupid to explain, but this is something that doesn't feel good. That was, I guess, on December 8, or 9, in 2018. One week later, we kicked off what was called internally project heritage and said, "Okay, we want to find, we want to see whether we can find an investor." And the task that we set ourselves is that we said, "We will draw up a plan in which we believe what we would do if it would be our own business." And then there are only two alternatives. Either we find a private equity investor who buys into that, and then we can take the company private and implement these plans. Or we don't find anybody, and then we have to be honest, then our plans are not good enough, and then we should probably follow the strict rules of the capital market. But that's very interesting what you are saying in Julian, because there is this very famous quote, which comes from Henry Krev, is one of the co-founders of KGR, and he was saying that private equity started holding companies accountable and to make managers start thinking like owners. So my question is, like you were describing it, you were feeling like very entrepreneurial in what you were doing, and getting more entrepreneurial power for yourself. Is that one of the reasons why you were able to convince KGR, because you are already there, what Henry Krev is saying, PE brings to corporate corporate world? Yeah, I think there was definitely one factor, probably in addition to obviously our hopefully good track record. And as always, in due diligence, you find good surprises, you find some things that look maybe not as good as you thought from the outside, but KGR clearly said, we want to back set this management team at these businesses, and we believe in that. And so, here we are. So how can we envisage that today? Private equity traditionally at least is their approaches to take companies over completely, and to do that in order to subsequently change things, and change them in a fundamental way, structurally, and also in the operations. And especially in the first years or so, they have bi-weekly reporting and very, very drilling down in all, do they do that? Do they watch you so completely and do they talk to you about all sorts of KPIs every day? KGR has done now a couple of minority investments in Germany. I think they have, in a way, experience that this also can be a very value-creating and attractive approach for them. When you compare Axis Springer with other targets, at least of the European activities of KGR, we are a relatively large company. We were, by the way, at that time the largest tech-private Germany had ever seen. And obviously with this size of Axis Springer, there goes a certain professionalism. So the feedback that we got after one year was, hey, in average, the companies we invest in are significantly less professional than you are, and this is why many things that we normally do, we didn't need to do here. But what we have and what is contributing to the value of Axis Springer is a very constructive and in times very intense dialogue, super open. Very to the point, it's still polite, but we really clearly say and get feedback, what do we leave us right, what do we leave us wrong? So we are all in a way united or aligned as owners. So the top 100 people are in a way feeling and incentivized like owners that helps. And I would say the most fundamental change was that the management part, plus the top 100 executive, do not look so much on quarterly and your results. Quarter results don't play a role at all any longer. And with everything that we do, and that's something that in theory sounds easy, but that was not in our DNA before KKR joined us. We really now think whatever we do is this increasing value over a five year horizon. And now out of this roughly five years, two years already over, so we look at always roughly 2025, whether that is the end is 26 or 27, it doesn't matter. But this view in terms of value creation, and not in terms of what is my EBITDA guidance and what is EPS and what is the text ratio, but really look, this investment, if I invest in build life, so the television activities of build with that over five years create value. And if so, let's do it. We are so much faster than we were at capital markets because we always had this fear. We always want to avoid us every CFO and every management team a profit warning. So that means if somebody comes in May and says hey, Julian, I have a great idea, but I need whatever 50 million. We would have said hey, that's whatever, 8% of our profits. We cannot give it to you in terms of OPEX to diminish EBITDA. If we have that today, we say hey, if it's a great idea presented to us, if we on the management board believe it's the right idea, we give it to our shareholders. And the whole thing is a process of four to six weeks, and then we are we can do things and that's also totally not only motivating for us, but also super motivating for our teams. Absolutely, I do fully believe that this is very inspiring. But coming back to your CFO role, and I'm pretty sure that you still have direct interact with KKR and they were asking of course also at short notice certain information they want to get. So just give us a little kind of an impression, how do you work with KKR on this? How much questions do they have? What kind of questions you might sometimes also say, this is something I don't answer because we look at this long term. So maybe you have some results where you can show a case that you also kind of educated your investors. I mean, overall the role of the CFO in terms of communications to shareholders changes drastically between a public and a private company. And I experienced that. So in a public setting, basically there's one CFO talking to whatever, one or two hundred institutional investors in a rather shallow way because the typical investors meeting is 45 minutes. So given our relatively broad portfolio in 45 minutes, you never get super deep. Here it's totally different. You have basically one shareholder actually with CPPIB, that's a Canadian pension fund. We have a second one that is combined with KKR and Axel Springer. But basically you have one or two investors talking to the CFO very intensely. with obviously more time, but also talking to the heads of our most important operations. So there are simply more people now doing investor communication, if you will, than before. But I have obviously probably the single most intense contact with KKR, which is simply part of the role. So I'm talking to my shareholders each and every day, but definitely each and every week and probably exchanging emails, not all the time, but very often. I believe what PE is doing is totally fair. They put your organization, especially the finance organization at the beginning in a little bit of a test mode. They want to find out what can this organization deliver, how professional are they, how fast are they with any data that we need, how accurate is that data. And from all what we heard and we cannot obviously not praise ourselves here, they have us very satisfactory for our shareholders. So you see that some things are easing after a certain time. And I guess that's, I mean, I would follow the same approach if I were in the issues. Yeah, that makes sense. That's for just a quick moment. Come back to the digital transformation with all these acquisition you've done over the last 10, 15 years. What is your role as a CFO there? I mean, naturally you will be involved in the financial aspects, divestments, acquisitions, the money needs to come from somewhere and so on. But to which degree are you also involved in the strategy that is behind that and in the selection of the companies and the criteria you use for that? Yeah. I'm very much involved in that. And I'm working, there was our CEO and my board colleagues very intensely because effectively when we were listed, I was a one who was in a way transmitting and communicating this strategy to our shareholders. I was doing whatever, 90% of our investors meeting without the CEO and obviously the most important ones to see out it together with me. And while as we just discussed communication mode has changed a bit, this has not changed that the CFO and I believe sets a prerequisite for a successful CFO is at the table when we discuss the strategy when we believe what is the right target for our job platforms or for our news media business and it's not only delivering flawless execution, that's a, in a way, what you always have to do but is an important energy, good part of the strategy discussion. You were saying you were, of course, in this role asking for information, you were asking for numbers, the same is true for KKR asking you for numbers and all other owners. So my question is how much is it just a push of a button? How much do you invest in to digitization of your back office processes and your finance processes to provide these numbers and to have your finance people focusing more on insights than on transactions? Yeah, the idea that we have and this goes together with the approach that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, said we said we need like financial data in the way we re-recrier them but we don't want to interfere much into the business of our digital units. And this is why we said, hey, this is the financial data that we need. If you do that with SAP in your unit or whether you do it with whatever workday or some other tools, honestly, we don't care as long as this data is there on whatever is this date at this time in this format. Then on, like in the holding on in headquarters, we invested a lot in super integrated systems. We invested a lot in a fast closed procedure. So we know now whatever on January 5, what is the result of the old year across now whatever of more than 200 companies that we fully consolidate. So that is a super professional fully integrated system. There's only one truth and the truth is with headquarter controlling period. So if somebody asks what's the growth rate of stepstown, this is the one source that we need and that is determining all the external or the internal communication and analysis. And there's not the thing like, oh, yeah, they look at this EBITDA, but we look at this and we don't know what's right. There we are kind of strict. But how they, how the units organize that, that's up to them. Obviously, if we see that it's super inefficient, then we push them to do it in a better way. But we have invested in digitization and in fully integrated processes quite a bit over the last decade. So your activities are very diverse. You still have the traditional print media, build site of course and the Welt, you have internet media like Politico, you have advertising platforms, but you also have financial portal. It's a whole range of things. How do you manage and how do you control and how do you steer such a conglomerate? Are there uniform reporting requirements for all of the businesses? Do you have uniform KPIs that apply to all of them or is it diverse by business? We have unified financial reporting requirements. We don't have unified KPIs because as you say, whatever for a build site on at least for the print part, you need different KPIs then for a purely digital, a classified business, for example. This looks from the outside a little bit more complicated than from from the inside, I guess, because what we do obviously, we have different segments. And within this segment, you have a kind of substructure. So it is not that difficult to get on whatever within, if you see the monthly report, to get a very good view over the first two minutes, whether this was a good month and where other problems, there we have super professional controlling colleagues and controlling mechanisms and really find out extremely fast where there could be problems. In the past, obviously, we did wrong management decisions as everybody else, I guess, but what we never had is over the last 15 years wrong or materially wrong financial information so that whatever people thought until July or August, this business is on a good way and then something happens and it's a correct number. This is simply not happening, therefore we are luckily so much to professional. So that sounds very promising. I think we could talk for hours on all these topics and of course I can tell you a lot of CFOs would be very interesting to learn how you ensure this good and strict way of reporting and having digitization being applied in the finance process. But looking at the time, let's come to our final, let's say, questions we have. So you are one of the first WHU alumni that come from the. What a vice-school, right? At that time, what made you take the decision to go to this at that time, pretty small university? What would you say? What was it that you learned there that maybe is still very present in your daily life of today? I always wanted to do something with business or economics. My parents were both medical doctors and I knew already at the age of 10 or 12 that I never wanted to do that. At that time, public universities were super crowded because it was basically this baby boomer generation. I'm born in '68 and there were all these stories from you. You don't even see your professor and if you don't get into this class, you have to wait a year longer to get into that. So obviously, even very good public university systems were simply overcrowded. It was not super attractive. It was a very national model at that time and then the first private business schools really evolved with a promise of small groups, direct contact to the professor and an international exchange, which was normal now, but which was not at that time. And that was something that a couple of schools could offer and actually I took some time and really went from whatever St. Gallen to Räudling to VHU in Koblenz and looked at the statements and I applied only at VHU Martin, I have to say, and I was accepted and very happy to be so and I've never regretted that for a single second. A good decision. We would say. Last question Martin. Yep. Well, maybe last but one. I would like to add one more question concerning the career because I think that's very interesting. You, after a brief stint in consultancy, you joined Stylman, a textile group and you assumed at a very young age, very quickly positions of some significance, you joined them as head of finance basically and later on as the CFO. At that time they were already in financial difficulties, I think that's fair to say. So how did this come about this relatively early position of importance and what are things that you have taken from this? My first project manager in consulting, he was a crazy guy and he was leaving then consultancy to become managing director of Stylman and he basically gave me a call a couple of weeks later and said, "Hey, this is a crazy company here. Nobody knows even how many subsidiaries they have, they don't know what, they didn't have a consolidated balance sheet. The banks are making it difficult because they want to have real data. and they don't get it and business is going down. - Interesting. - I need your help. And then I met with him a couple of times. And I always, when I knew that I didn't want to do anything with medical stuff, I wanted to understand how really a business functions. And honestly, I mean, I love consultancy, but in a consultancy, I wouldn't say that you really learn that too much. So I wanted to go in a real business and that's what it was. And I was there like in two different stages, like roughly six years altogether. And there's so many things that I've now in a kind of executive position that I know, like whatever one or two levels below me, people are dealing with. I was dealing during that time myself. And that is super valuable because honestly, in a good mid-size company, German middle-stand, you really learn things from scratch. And it's not super fancy. And the business as well, the headquarter was basically on a big parking lot in a vatten-shide vest at the A4D, which is the most crowded highway Germany has to offer. But you really learn things from scratch and you're so close to what really drives the business and how a finance function works or doesn't work. So in hindsight, that were not the easiest, probably the most difficult, but the most in a way exciting years of my professional career, I would say. It sounds like it. So we have a tradition to close this podcast with one question that we ask. All the important questions are very important questions. And that is whether you have a book recommendation to our listeners. I learned, you know, I have to say, me at that, that you have quite a reputation as a man of the books and that people listen to your recommendations. Do you have a good recommendation for our listeners? I hope I have a good recommendation. It's a book that I read shortly after Christmas. It's called Berlin 1936, Berlin 1936, and describes Berlin over the 16 days of the Olympic summer games in 1936. And it's not a real documentary. It's basically, it's different stories that go into each other. If anybody has read Florian, Ilis 1913, which is more popular, at least Germany, it's a little bit zet style. And you get a really cohesive and super interesting picture of how Berlin during these 16 days has looked and how the atmosphere was. And it was obviously Zanazi is already quite strong. People knew about concentration camps already existing, whatever, just 40 or 50 kilometers out of the city. On the other hand, everybody trying to make Berlin look as a very cosmopolitan, very open city because that obviously what the Hitler government wanted to create this impression. And during that, they tell stories of individuals who have whatever be the cafe or a bar at Kufus and Damm or in this area. And this in total is really a very dense, in a way, atmosphere. You really, if you read that, you really feel you've been there. Sounds very interesting. Oliver Hilmes is the author. And being there is, I think, the perfect phrase for today. We have been with you, with this bring a story, with your portfolio, with your daily job as a CFO. It was really, as I said in the beginning, it was an honor. It was a privilege to meet you, Julian, and to have this talk. I do believe we might want to make it a chance to talk to you again one day and make another podcast. So we hope that you take this invite again, and thank you so much for today and your input and your time today. Thank you so much. Thank you. Invite already accepted and it was a pleasure. Thanks, Corey. Perfect, Martin. Wonderful. This was probably the longest or is probably the longest podcast we've done so far. I can say that. But I think it's completely justified with this super interesting story we had. My thanks also, also, you know, a super interesting partner to talk to with Julian, many things. And thanks to you, listeners, for listening in. And we hope to meet with you again very, very soon. Looking forward. Thank you. Goodbye. Thanks, everybody. That was leading corporate transformation. The podcast by Vika U.A.R.O.B.S.I.M. School of Management, powered by PWC. Editorial team, Marvin Shunah, and Ziman Girlach.