Oliver Stoldt & Wolfram Sauer found LEADING MINDS.
As I love traveling, I often move my workplace to special places. This was also the case in January 2022, when I took a 3-week break and rented an apartment at the Upstalsboom Resort on the North Sea island of Föhr. Three weeks of fresh air, beach runs, stormy seas, wellness, lots of time to think and plan the year mentally. Wolfram came to visit me on the island for three days during my “time out” and during one of our beach runs I told him that after Corona, the type of requests Premium Speakers receives from clients for speakers and lecturers has changed.
Wolfram asked me: “In what way have the requests changed?” and I replied somewhat vaguely that the new requests were a bit “strange….”. Now define the word “weird” in a business context. And so I told him that clients were no longer simply asking for a speaker who could collectively fit in a group, but that there was much more demand for speakers on specific topics who could also offer workshops and even be able to accompany clients in transformation processes.
These topics are part of Wolfram’s everyday life and his professional activity and we started thinking about a new department at Premium Speakers and discussed this topic further in the coming weeks.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a war of aggression against Ukraine with all its consequences: Energy crisis, inflation, rethinking in politics and business, shortage of skilled workers, double whammy and turning point. Over time, the requests for Premium Speakers changed more and more in the direction of keynote speeches plus workshops plus support in corporate transformation, especially digital transformation, team development, scenario thinking for companies with revision of business models and communication. The very topics we had been discussing and debating since January 2022 were becoming more and more topical and so, at the end of August, we began to sketch out a new company and a platform that could offer these services.
At the end of August 2022, on a trip to Niendorf on the Baltic Sea, sitting on the jetty with an unobstructed view over the Baltic Sea, we thought about the name of the platform and came up with “LEADING MINDS”. We secured the URL and the ideas became: LEADING MINDS – The Agency of the Future. We started the conversation with our IT partner about the website, which was to be designed in such a way that visitors to the platform would immediately recognize what we were offering. We spent hundreds of hours discussing the topics, content, MINDS, partners, etc. and also used the Christmas holidays to push ahead with the implementation.
And then we went back to Föhr for three weeks in January 2023, where we put the finishing touches to it. We labeled our joint company, pushed ahead with the foundation of the GmbH, exchanged ideas, exchanged texts, rewrote and rewrote, selected imagery and then took pictures in Berlin. We briefly stopped traffic on Friedrichstrasse in the middle of Berlin for our pictures (see header image) and on April 3, 2023, we started communicating on social media channels and LinkedIn. LEADING MINDS was born.
What we then experienced makes Wolfram and I simply grateful and humble – LEADING MINDS hit the Zeitgeist exactly and took off like a rocket. And so we start 2024 with many exciting projects, great customers, strong partners and lots of ideas and are excited to see what the future holds for LEADING MINDS.