Stefan, thank you for all your great work growing our business! I wish you the best of fortune in your new adventures.
VP at AliveCor | Personal ECG | Medical Devices and Med Tech Addict | Growing and developing business across EMEA
Today marks my last working day in AliveCor. It was exciting to lead the business in #EMEA (and beyond) for more than 5 years now. It’s with a heavy heart to leave, but I’m super excited about what will come up next! I would like to thank the EMEA team, nothing could have been done without you - Sean A Warren, Hans Jaeger, Chris Shelford, Andy Dunhill, Kathrin Peterssen , Sophie Thorne, Syed Aziz. It was great working with all of you - thanks for all the hard work, the friendship and the fun we had! Also I would like to thank Priya Abani and David Albert for the leadership and building this unique company, Sanjay Voleti for his guidance and the great time we had and all the many people in AliveCor that contributed to the success in EMEA over the years! I would also like to thank all our distributors, partners and customers for the trust - I learned a lot from you. And last but not least I would also like to thank Ira Bahr and Vic Gundotra for giving me the opportunity to join in the first place. It’s a small world - we will meet again! Those years were an amazing time - we built an organization from scratch, launched great products (I think you have seen a lot here on LinkedIn), built relationships with many partners and built whole new businesses and services. We expanded our footprint and business drastically. What do I take away from those years? 👉 Success in business is a team sport - get the right people with the right mindset. Hire people you can learn from and there is no such thing of being “overqualified” in a dynamic environment. 👉 Stay open to learn new things every day. Failing to plan is planning to fail - But any plan is only valid until it faces reality. Road to success is not a straight highway but a steep uphill road with many unforeseen turns. 👉 Therefore resilience is important. We failed often and this was necessary to succeed at the end. Frustration is sometimes part of the job description. Never give up trying new ways. 👉 The consumer business is an interesting play of promotion and seduction - art and science at the same time - that I still don’t fully understand. It’s interesting as it allows fast revenue wins. 👉 B2B business decisions will always take longer than you think and if there is no budget or reimbursement it is a tough sale. 👉 There is a lot of inertia in the way healthcare is delivered and it is hard to change doctors' minds. A product that is adding real value to all main stakeholders is key and the clinical evidence to prove it. 👉 Data privacy and data security are key elements and have to be focused on especially in Europe. The regulatory landscape got far more burdensome and time consuming thanks to MDR. 👉 Europe is not a Union, the devil is in the details and in differences between countries - rules, regulations, languages, reimbursement systems, etc. Now to the beach - See you soon! Or to quote Douglas Adams: “So long and thanks for all the fish”....
