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Founder-Led · NewHope Strategy

Restaurant Digitalization, Start to Finish

Sep 2022 – Jul 2024 · Giessen, Germany

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.

€20K
Revenue in the first fiscal year
4
Person team recruited and led
+30%
Customer footfall within 2 months of go-live

The Company

I founded NewHope Strategy UG 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 I built it into a small but functioning consulting practice: recruiting and leading a four-person team, developing a client pipeline, and generating €20K in revenue in the first fiscal year.

The flagship engagement was a digitalization project for a local restaurant client — the clearest example of the firm's approach: diagnose the operational bottleneck, design a pragmatic fix, and see it through to measurable impact.

The Challenge

The client ran entirely on manual, paper-based processes — handwritten orders, phone-only reservations, and no structured way to reach past customers. That was capping 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 Approach

Rather than proposing a generic "go digital" package, the team worked through the problem in three steps:

  • Diagnose: mapped the existing order and booking flow to find where time and customers were actually being lost.
  • Design: selected and configured digital ordering and booking tools sized for a small independent restaurant, not enterprise software the client would never fully use.
  • Execute: rolled out the new tools alongside a refreshed marketing push, with the four-person NewHope team handling implementation and staff onboarding on-site.

The Impact

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 — sales, delivery, and team leadership at once — was the most concentrated operator experience of my time before Viega.

What I Took Away

Corporate strategy work (like the Viega M&A pipeline) 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 — analytical rigor plus hands-on accountability — is what I bring to Corporate Strategy and M&A work now.

Happy to walk through the details.

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