My Story
The first time I went abroad was back in High School when I went to North Delta just south of Vancouver for a year. That’s when I started playing Lacrosse and Snowboarding, generally tried many new things and first ignited my passion for longer and more meaningful travels.
From Cologne, where I went to school in Germany, I moved to Aachen to study Mineral Resources Engineering. During the Bachelor’s degree I decided to go on a semester abroad in Brisbane, Australia, where I started organizing smaller trips - first with and then also for friends. An important reason to go to Australia was to experience the metal mining industry in an internship, though. Subsequent to the semester, I worked for 3 months in a 2 weeks on/ 1 week off FIFO (Fly-In Fly-Out) schedule.
Coming back to Germany, I still finished my Bachelor’s degree in the regular period of studies with a very good final score. Working hard for this achievement left little time for other interests besides Lacrosse and some cooking. Therefore, I decided that I want to use my Master’s degree to focus more on learning practical things for life rather than studying for exams. Going to 2 courses of the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) both showed me skills I wasn’t aware of this far and sparked my fire for developing students including myself. Meanwhile, I seized the singular opportunity to organize an academic excursion to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan for the university institute I was working at.
The next step was going to Trondheim, Norway, to study a full year with the Erasmus+ program. With the idea in mind to properly integrate into Norwegian culture, I joined the student society “Studentersamfundet” where I volunteered as a waiter and bartender in the student-run restaurant “Lyche”. Besides quickly improving my Norwegian, this opportunity allowed me to get valuable insights into a huge student-run organization. Additionally, I volunteered as a cook at “UKA”, the largest and also student-run festival in Norway and spend some time with other charitable projects. As I love to cook and socialize with delicious meals, one of my favorite things is bringing people together with food - partly in form of running dinners as “rudirockt” (which I took to Trondheim) or even better: team-internally e.g. Lax Rocks. Especially due to the human and experience-focused projects, I started to appreciate the natural and very direct rewarding system of making somebody straightforward “happy with my work”, which is unfortunately not so easy to encounter in many modern jobs.
When I have the time and energy, I also like going for the very difficult or sometimes even called “impossible” ideas. Maybe they are just referred to in this way because they do not seem feasible with a common approach. One of these challenges I am proud of, is giving the participants of a cultural exchange and motivational weekend from BEST Aachen the best food they have ever experienced at such a event. To achieve this, I applied my previously gained knowledge from UKA and went for some in this local group unprecedented food sponsoring. Another of these challenges was the demanding organization of the excursion in Central Asia where I had to use all the means I could get ahold of.
The highly productive and rewarding time in Norway gave me the confidence to look for an opportunity in order to improve my Spanish and experience life in Latin America. Working in small scale sand and gravel mining in Colombia and trying to establish a clean production of gold as a byproduct was the hardest challenge I had faced this far in my life and made me well aware of the struggles most other people in this world face on a day to day basis. Moreover, I noticed that I didn’t have the skills yet to convince C-Levels of my recommendations - in this case a more sustainable production. Subsequently, I also used my travel time to work on my photography and writing skills, as well as reflecting upon the modern travel culture.
Back when I started this blog, I decided to work in management consulting at BCG in Germany so as to develop key skills, understand our economy, meet and work with inspiring people and hopefully leverage my impact - at least until I find a fitting opportunity in which I can use my unique skillset in order to make a positive and sustainable impact in this world. After learning a lot there, I learned how to build up a Food Start-Up across all company divisions as the first full-time employee. I was pushing fair chocolate with JOKOLADE and building up the company as COO with my work focus on managing the supply chain and processes. My personal motivation there was driven by maximizing the impact we can have to improve the cocoa farmers' lives in West Africa.
After approx. 2 years as COO, i noticed that I’m not developing much myself anymore while my large efforts lead to diminishing impact returns of what the company was able to move. When I ruptured the PCL in my right knee and was struggling with the responsibility and amount of work, I decided to take a step back, hand over all my tasks over a period of 6 months and fulfill my dream of a 3-month interrail trip through Europe just before I turned 30.
I had already planned this trip while looking for new challenges and didn’t want to adjust or even cancel it. This situation opened the door for my first freelance consulting project, because I was fancying freelancing and all the potential freedoms that would allow for more flexible travelling for a while.
Just the 2 onsite weeks could help my client a lot and I was enjoying this style of work a lot. Therefore, I decided to further test freelance consulting for food start-ups and impact organizations after my trip and bring it to the level where I can easily continue it as a side hustle or between other bigger projects.
The objective of Effective Impact Consulting is that I can efficiently support organizations with a large positive impact potential, or food start-ups with delicious and more sustainable products. I mostly do this on full-time projects by optimizing operations. Besides, I am also working on small - or easy to give, but still impactful advice for building food start-ups, which is possible as a side hustle while I am primarily working on other projects. That’s the type of effective impact I would like to create as a freelance consultant who builds and optimizes. In addition, I developed an effective impact framework (initially for my own career decisions), which I want to share with other purpose-driven organizations that could use it, because I see a lot of potential in it. This framework also lead to the name of my website.
Based on the same mindset that drives me to create more effective impact as a freelance consultant, I will always continue searching for the perfect niche where I can best use my unique background and skillset in order to maximize my impact and make our world a better place to live in. These opportunities could be, but are not limited to:
Implementing innovative solutions for a more sustainable food industry and culture
Implementing ecologically and socially sustainable projects in the mineral resource and recycling industries
Effective ways to mitigate climate change with renewable energies & carbon removal
Proactive realization of innovative solutions and impact levers as social entrepreneurship, charity entrepreneurship or elsewhere in the nonprofit sector
Evaluating and implementing operations optimizations, in order to make companies ecologically and economically more sustainable or to enable innovative projects and their scalability
Evaluating and implementing impact levers for a more sustainable development of organizations and societies
In the end, we need many skilled and especially motivated people to work efficiently together globally to effectively tackle the mutual challenges of humanity for a better future society and I work hard to become one of them.