Christian Grotebrune

Solution Organizer, Next-Generation Successor, Interim Managing Director, New Worker, Career Designer, Visionary Forward Thinker, and Implementer – Christian Grotebrune is one of the leading experts on family businesses.

Are you looking for a speaker on innovation and transformation? Then Christian Grotebrune will inspire you with his expertise, gained from 40 years of experience at all key positions in family businesses and corporate consulting. Through his lectures and consulting services, he provides valuable insights into how companies can achieve operational excellence and secure their future.

Christian Grotebrune speaks about change, drawing from his current role as the leader of a team working at the intersection of technology and management. This is where companies enhance their competitiveness through digital transformation.

With more than 40 years of entrepreneurial and consulting experience, he is a highly valued sparring partner in business and personnel management, restructuring, and digitization. One of his key focuses is raising awareness among family-owned SMEs about new technologies, as these businesses often lack the resources for forward-thinking corporate development.

Christian Grotebrune’s Keynote Topics

• Career Design – No Fear of Change

If anyone can speak convincingly and passionately about shaping family businesses, it is Christian Grotebrune. He knows firsthand how to manage business succession and develop mid-sized service companies as a managing director. As a captivating storyteller and a successful career designer, he encourages others to follow his example: to continuously reinvent their professional lives at every stage and to embrace new paths—even later in life.

• Curiosity for Practical Solutions – Doing is Like Wanting, Just More Intense!

Grotebrune has experienced, initiated, and shaped almost everything that constitutes a successful, fulfilling, and exciting professional life. At the age of 26, after completing his military service and studies, he had to abandon his career plans and take over his family’s service business in its fifth generation under challenging market conditions. He has always faced inevitable future challenges head-on, deriving guiding principles to create optimal outcomes for all involved. This is why he calls himself a “solution organizer” – he provides the idea for solving your problem and shows you and your audience the path to the solution. However, he does not see himself as part of the solution itself.

• Courage to Embrace Change – As a Team

One of the first steps the young managing director took to restructure his family business—a chain of dry cleaners—was to join an experience-sharing group (Erfa group) as a consulting tool. He knows from personal experience how valuable structured exchanges with competent business partners can be and how they help analyze, reflect on, and discuss business situations.

After successfully restructuring his business and, through the Erfa group “aPLUS4,” establishing around 25 textile care businesses in the new federal states and Estonia under the Sauberland & Fasson Franchising label, Christian Grotebrune made a strategic decision at the end of 1994 to leave the industry and shift his career at the age of 36.

• Restructuring Roadmap for SMEs

Building on his own restructuring success, he founded a consulting firm for SMEs with the Betriebswirtschaftliche Beratungsgesellschaft Lippe (BBL), offering restructuring support. His focus was on corporate finance, assistance with business acquisitions and sales transactions, and interim management.

• A Change in Perspective Leads to Unforeseen Solutions

Then, after decades of successful self-employment, Grotebrune took an unusual career path: at the age of 51, he became Head of Family Businesses and SMEs at UNITY AG, an internationally operating management consultancy specializing in digitization and innovation management. There, he built his “own brand” and helped expand the business segment to approximately eight million euros in revenue.

For him, teamwork is an essential yet often underestimated success factor. Helping others become strong and successful, stepping back from the spotlight, dedicating time to team development, and being a reliable point of contact—this is his idea of successful collaboration. One of the key requirements for this is humility and respect for different ways of thinking.

Years before his anticipated retirement, he actively worked on a succession plan. The generational transition in his team is carefully planned, with a gradual shift of responsibility to his successor rather than an abrupt departure.

Christian Grotebrune leads by example on how to manage a successful transition. He remains a coach and mentor for his team, ensuring a smooth and effective succession process.

Interested in working with Christian Grotebrune?

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