What do you do after your company is acquired? Live on a tropical island? Buy a fancy house? Take up a hobby like parachuting or art collecting?
In 2021, Martin Klässner achieved the largest startup exit in Austria to date with the sale of e-mobility company has·to.be to ChargePoint for €250 million.
Klässner now passes on the experience he has gained to the next global champions as an investor and strategic companion. I spoke to him to learn more.
When you have something valuable to share
Klässner admits that initially after the acquisition, he "co-founded a family office and invested in startups, as you do. But that was too boring for us, so my former co-founders and I decided to found a new startup called GrowthSquare."
Its aim? To teach companies to scale successfully, with a new research-validated methodology.
According to Klässner:
"We introduced a new way of working within has.to.be, enabling us to execute and scale with excellence."
It all started when the company grew to about 40 people. Management introduced the standard framework, OKR, which is Objectives and Key Results, a goal-setting framework used to define measurable goals and track their outcomes. Typically, it consists of an objective (a clear goal) and key results (specific, measurable outcomes that indicate progress towards that goal)
However, it didn't achieve the desired results. So Klässner and his colleagues thus started to think about "now do we want to work, how do we want to control the company, what do our employees want from us as a management, what do we need to communicate, and how do we need to position the way of work?"
And in doing so, it came up with a method that worked.
"During has·to·be, we learned how to organise the company to manage scale and growth in a very convenient and efficient way — we developed the company to be cash flow positive to this exit value of €250 million with just a €12 million investment," shared Klässner.
Once they started investing, they went on to support startups, consistently providing them with feedback based on how they had scaled.
Klässner admits, "And based on that, we saw that our recommendations were generating some impact."
"We then began to consider whether it was possible to formalise and standardise our recommendations for operating a company, making it replicable and eliminating the need to communicate with everyone in the same manner.
That was the kickoff where we started formulating what we did and how we see management in the company."
After documenting their process, they undertook research with the University of Innsbruck, "because we wanted to get some kind of scientific proof that what we had in our brains was not only rubbish."
They discovered that the relevant topics to their approach have been acknowledged by science over the last two years.
Enter OKR 2.0, aka the Art of Acceleration
Following the exit, they formalised a new methodology for running a company, known as the Art of Acceleration (AOA) Methodology.
The Art of Acceleration Methodology is a people-centric methodology for strategy execution that comes with a dedicated cloud-based platform.
It aims to build resilient companies by enabling transparency and alignment across departments, fostering high-performing teams of intrinsically motivated people and ultimately leading them to sustainable success.
According to Klässner, it incorporates many elements found in OKR, but with a focus on people-centric strategy execution.
It also features several adaptations based on their experiences at has.to.be that significantly enhances the speed and convenience of employees working on the services side and in daily business operations.
No more talk about objectives and targets
One of the significant differences with AOA is that it does not discuss objectives and targets.
According to Klässner, "We only talk about directions and actions. Because we see that the deeper you go in the organisation, the harder it is to formulate an objective."
"However, it's straightforward for employees to identify the next action or the concrete step they need to take to move further in the direction set by management. That accelerates planning time significantly. So it's much faster to plan actions than objectives, and it's also easier for employees to do."
The importance of shared reality
Defining direction and taking action is impossible without a shared understanding. So, GrowthSquare developed a module within their execution methodology called Shared Reality.
"Both the company and its teams must align on a shared reality—establishing a common starting point and a mutual understanding of the environment in which they operate," shared Klässner. But this is not often the case.
Klässner gave the example of a workshop with a big retail company. The top C-level management defined the key challenges for the next three years, saying that Amazon delivery will have a significant impact on food delivery in Austria.
"One week later, we conducted the same workshop with the lower management team, and they reported that they did not anticipate any significant impact of Amazon in the food segment within the next three years.
"So it was revealing to see that even with just one level in between, there was a completely different understanding of the company's environment and reality.
So even if they had defined actions, they would have conflict. It is crucial to align levels on a common understanding of the current situation and environment, and then define actions to move forward effectively."
Importantly, AOA helps companies weather change, such as funding loss and regulatory shifts, by enabling pivots.
Klässner shared:
"We define a company's shared reality, including beliefs, hypotheses, boundaries, and input. Then, 6–12 months later, you check whether those beliefs are still valid.
If not, you know the strategy must change. This helps with clarity, communication, and shareholder alignment."
A combinatorial approach
I was curious if the approach would work with less hierarchical companies.
According to Klässner, it's a combination of bottom-up and top-down.
"Talking about directions – we call it higher intent and intent depending on the timeframe. Higher intent is three to five years, and intent is one to two years.
The direction is defined top-down by management and shareholders. So, where do we want to go? But how we achieve it — all the actions — are defined bottom-up by the teams.
Teams align with each other to commit and resource their quarterly delivery."
The direction of leadership is given for three to five years and broken down into 12–18 months. Teams define quarterly sprints through actions, bottom-up definitions of possible contributions to the overall direction.
Since its inception, AOA has been implemented in startups of 5 to 10 people, scaleups with 150–200, and pilot projects with 2,000 to 3,000 employees.
Even in large companies, you can introduce it vertically, by department, and scale up.
It's an approach that is agile enough to respond to the needs of different companies.
Lithoz shifts to bottom-up strategy execution with AOA framework
Lithoz is a large Austrian medtech company and global leader in ceramic 3D printing, founded in 2011 as a spin-off from TU Wien.
Specialising in lithography-based ceramic manufacturing, Lithoz enables the production of high-precision, biocompatible ceramics for medical implants, dental applications, and extreme industrial use cases. Its first successful operation using ceramic jaw implants from a 3D printer recently attracted attention.
It adopted AOA to increase efficiency in strategy implementation, and according to Timo Weidner, Director Operations & Strategy at Lithoz, the approach proved so successful that 94 per cent of Lithoz employees adopted the method.
The approaches improve coordination between teams and capacity planning, and "for the first time, we can see what progress is being made, where resources are lacking, and what other problems the teams are struggling with. Instead of the previous reactive mode, we are now in a proactive control mode."
"We can see how healthy things are being worked through or not - far earlier and, above all, before the final key performance indicators (KPIs) in the retrospective, when it is already too late."
According to Klässner, if a significantly higher number of employees know where the path is leading, then this also has a very positive impact on the company's success.
"Transparency undermines influence — that's why some Managers resist it"
Klässner admits that getting everyone on board is not always easy, especially as big companies in Austria or state-owned firms use opacity as a form of control. "Mid-level managers often resist transparency because it undermines their influence."
Klässner asserts that people are more motivated when they understand their impact.
"We break strategy down from higher intents to actions in a tree structure. So every employee sees how their task connects to a company goal. That generates acceptance and motivation."
Having worked in a number of companies over the years that underwent change management based on the directions of external consultants, I was curious whether employees resisted.
Klässner asserts that it's quite the opposite:
"In some cases, new managers wanted to switch away from AOA, but employees insisted on keeping it.
They like it. It makes their work clearer. Planning and reviewing a sprint takes 3 to 4 hours once per quarter, plus a 2-hour retrospective.
That's just 6 hours of planning time per quarter. If direction and shared reality are clear, defining next steps is easy."
For example, at Lithoz, now 77 per cent of activities are today driven by employees who actively take responsibility for strategy implementation, shifting away from the traditional top-down approach led by managers.
Additionally, over 80 per cent of employees define their team's activities and goals through a bottom-up process, setting direction from their own level rather than waiting for managerial instruction.
Where to next for GrowthSquare?
Up to now, onboarding and consulting have been almost exclusively in-person, but the first partial automation of GrowthSquare's AOA will take place this year. The company has also launched a training program for others to become AOA-certified trainers, with a book to be published later this year.
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