Keynote speaker, growth guru, bestselling author, cofounder of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), founder of acknowledged global initiatives to spur the development of small and midsized companies … Verne Harnish has already made a big difference in the world. He also impressed us the first time that we personally met him after joining the EO in 2010.

We were immediately struck by his clarity and the logical consistency of his ideas. Suddenly all of our prior experiences took on new meaning and coalesced into a new way of thinking. His tools and best practices were embedded in a straightforward, cohesive system that opened up entirely new perspectives with a holistic way of viewing things. Verne had succeeded in revealing the cross-connections between different aspects and how they influenced one another. People, strategy, execution and cash were now no longer separate disciplines but integral parts of a clear, integrated methodology: a kind of operating system for business.

We immediately started applying the system to our own enterprise. And since the materials were still only available in English at that time, we just waded right in and translated them on the fly. However, we soon noticed that “blindly” applying the U.S. approach in Germany and Europe didn’t yield the desired results as quickly. We kept experiencing problems with some of the tools and exercises, and therefore began gradually adapting and tweaking the methods to get them into sync with the very different requirements of our market.

Over the years, we relentlessly continued this fascinating process of “europeanizing” the methods and combining them with various other theoretical models like Business Model Canvas, OKRs and Extreme Ownership on the one hand and the ideas of Ken Wilber, Holocracy, Simon Sinek and Reinventing Organizations on the other.

Today we can proudly say that scale up, as we have enhanced it for the European market, is unique … and are pleased to make it available to everyone who wants to grow with it.

In addition, Nikolai is one of only a handful of global trainers for the Scaling Up framework.