German born. International by choice. More to come.
Citizen of the world, as people like to say. In my case, the paperwork agrees.
The rest takes a little longer.
I studied computer science in Germany and never finished, because the dotcom years paid too well to stay in a lecture hall. The IT work led into the call-center industry, the industry led into management, and management taught me the two crafts I still use every day: how to run an operation, and how to choose words with intent.
Somewhere in those German years I also formed my first company in the United States, a Delaware corporation for a media business. I did not know it at the time, but that was the start of a habit. I have now worked with US entities for more than twenty years.
In 2012 I left Germany. Everything I owned fit into the back seats and the trunk of an old Hyundai, which I drove south to Spain. There was nothing in my name that could have triggered an exit tax. Not by design, but by timing. I practiced by accident what I would later preach: leave first, then become successful.
In Spain I ran multilingual operations and market research. One project changed everything: structured interviews with founders and owner-operators in the high-net-worth bracket, from the United States to Singapore and Australia, about their outlook, their banks, and one question I never forgot: whether they actually listened to their advisors. I knew how wealthy people ignore advice long before I ever gave any. It has shaped how I work ever since.
From 2015 I took advisory engagements on the side. In 2019 I closed the call-center chapter and went all in: fully remote, permanently traveling. At some point I noticed that I only returned to my apartment to collect the mail and water the plants. So I let the apartment go and lived in hotels for a long time. Today the family has a base, where I come and go.
An early client taught me never to answer the question “what do you do?” with a job title, because people put you in a box. My business cards never carried one. But if I have to condense it into one sentence: I help successful people make sure that what they have stays theirs. Theirs against the taxman. Against a future ex-partner. Against a competitor with lawyers. Against heirs who can not wait, and friends who stopped being friends.
In practice, that means companies and structures across jurisdictions. Residency and citizenship. The right jurisdiction to marry in, and the right one to divorce in. Where to raise the children. Where to hold the intellectual property. Where, jokingly, to bury the gold bars. And all the paperwork that comes with it. By choice, I am neither a lawyer nor a tax advisor: licensed professionals in every jurisdiction I serve cross the t’s and dot the i’s, so that I can connect the dots freely.
Many of my clients value privacy, so much of the work still happens in person. I leave the phone in the hotel, and we talk at the pool. Since the pandemic, some clients accept the digital version, which means fewer flights per year. The family appreciates that.
Eleven years and more than fifty jurisdictions later, my conviction has not changed: what you build should survive the place you built it in.
The book was a beginning, not a summary. More of the thinking keeps moving into the open: in writing, in all three of my languages, and in whatever format carries it best. The advisory practice stays deliberately small. The ideas are the part that scales.
What comes next? Ask me at the pool.