Eighteen years running it. Now sitting with the people who have to.
I am David Nagtzaam. I spent eighteen years inside companies going through change they did not fully control, first building the technology and later carrying the number. Some of it worked. A fair amount of it did not, and those are the parts I am most useful about.
Now I hold a select number of private counsel relationships with chief executives and founders, and I take a handful of single decisions a year for people who are not ready to commit to more than that.
The record, in specifics.
Most of what is useful to the people I work with, I learned in the years I was getting it wrong. This is where that happened.
- Philip Morris International2017 to 2022
- Sat with senior leadership through a four-year transformation as Entrepreneur in Residence, across three roles in Benelux, Global and Europe. Launched a new product category online, built the first regional digital hub spanning 28 markets, ran a €21M budget and a team of 19.
- Seventh Media2014 to 2017
- Built it from three people to eleven, then sold it to McCann in 2017. I have been on both sides of an acquisition conversation, including the part nobody writes about afterwards.
- McCann Worldgroup2014 to 2016
- Change management inside a creative organisation that did not especially want changing.
- Google2008 to 2010
- Search quality in the Netherlands, and a team of six. Recruited after a white-hat hack on a large forum was pointed out to the wrong person.
- Independent practicesince 2022
- Advisory and interim leadership inside companies going through fast technical change, in Europe, the United States and the Gulf. Recent work includes OpenAI, Mercor, Revpanda and Leaders In Digital.
Eighteen years of it. I have been on the wrong side of enough of these decisions to know what they cost.
David has one of the most broad-based minds I have ever seen, seamlessly able to switch between the geek world and the high-level strategic world, without a missing beat.
Michael SmolensChairman and Founder, DotSubWhere the record was earned
Quoted in
Why I moved to this, and why now.
For most of those years, the part of the job I was best at was not the strategy. It was the twenty minutes before the meeting, with one person, working out what they actually thought before they had to say it in front of eleven people. I did not have a name for that then. It turns out to be the whole job.
The other half of the answer is less flattering. I have been the person who made the confident call in the room and then sat in the car afterwards with nobody sensible to check it with. That is a specific and quite lonely experience, and it is the reason I take this work seriously rather than treating it as a second career with better hours.
Operating experience on its own is not enough, which is why I trained formally and hold a credential. Judgment and method are different things. Plenty of people who have run companies give terrible advice, usually by answering the question they once faced rather than the one in front of them.
What I am like in the room.
Direct, and slower than you expect. I ask a lot of questions before I offer anything, and I will say plainly when I think you are wrong, which is the thing most people say they want and fewer people enjoy in the moment.
I do not do encouragement as a service. If something you have done is good I will say so once, and then we will move on to the part that is not.
One thing I am not good at, since it is fair to know before you commit a year: I am impatient with detail I consider settled. If you need someone to work through an operating plan line by line with you, that is a real need and I am the wrong person for it. Say so early and I will point you at someone better.
The first conversation
If that sounds like the person you have been looking for.
Most people who write to me have been turning something over for months without saying it out loud to anyone. That is the conversation. Half an hour, and by the end one of us says whether this is right.
Apply for a placeTwelve months. Eight relationships at a time.
