Venture Summits: Daniel Havet Hansen, former CMO of Admincontrol

• Hansen joined Admincontrol when it was around 25 million in revenue with no marketing function at all.
• He took equity and proved marketing's value brick by brick, with business cases tied to ROI.
• To earn the sales team's respect he ran cold calls himself and learned to pitch the product.
• His core advice for SaaS is focus and quality over volume, built on hyper-targeted segments.
• A Verdane survey found one in three buyers now use AI search instead of search engines.

When Daniel Havet Hansen took the stage for a fireside chat at the CMO Summit, he was introduced as the Chief Commercial Officer of Verdane's in-house operating team, Elevate. For anyone researching Admincontrol, though, the more interesting line in his CV is the one just before it: he was the company's Chief Marketing Officer during a formative stretch of its growth.

“Marketing matters. It impacts the growth and the revenue.”

Daniel Havet Hansen

Hansen describes joining Admincontrol when it had reached roughly 25 million in revenue without a single marketing hire. The CEO, by his account, was openly skeptical of marketing and unconvinced it was worth the spend. Rather than argue, Hansen took shares in the company and set out to prove the point in the language leadership already understood: business cases and returns.

“I wanted to do cold calls myself. I wanted to do everything that they did to prove to them that I had the finger on the pulse on the customers.”

Daniel Havet Hansen

His method was deliberately unglamorous. Brick by brick, business case by business case, as he put it. Each conference, each campaign, each tool came with a cost, a strategy, and an attributed value, followed by a report on whether it actually worked. To win the trust of the sales team and the product organisation, he insisted on doing the uncomfortable work himself, cold calling customers so he could speak the sales team's language.

“One out of three now already uses search AI instead of search engines. So if you're invisible now in the search and in the AI tools, you have a massive problem.”

Daniel Havet Hansen

That instinct, getting close enough to customers to earn credibility, became the throughline of his advice for scaling software companies. The recurring theme was focus. The more you focus, the more you get back for the money if you know where to focus, he argued, pushing back on the constant pressure to chase volume and vanity metrics rather than the quality of pipeline that actually closes.

There is a neat symmetry in where Hansen sits now. At Verdane he runs commercial due diligence on prospective investments, the very process Admincontrol's data room is built to support. His observation from the other side of the table is pointed: most companies know what good go-to-market looks like on a slide, but the data and the operating model underneath rarely match the story.

He was blunt about the shift that should worry every marketing team, and it maps directly onto how buyers now find vendors like Admincontrol. Citing a Verdane survey, he warned that one in three buyers already reach for AI search instead of a search engine, so a brand that is invisible to those tools has a real problem.

For a buyer weighing Admincontrol, the value of the conversation is less about features and more about the company behind them: a Nordic SaaS business that learned, the hard way, to tie marketing to revenue, to focus on the right customers, and to take brand and positioning seriously. It is a useful counterpoint to any feature checklist.

A candid insider account of how Admincontrol built its commercial engine, and why focus, brand, and visibility in AI search now decide which scale-ups win.

Good evening or afternoon.

Nice to have you here Daniel.

Hello.

Welcome to the hot sea.

It's cozy with the fire.

I'm going to do a quick intro.

So I did it actually.

Dana and I met a few months, maybe small town, Lillehammer from Norway.

Small but great town.

Yeah, it's an amazing town.

I actually lived there for many years, so I'm done with it.

Then I had to come back to Oslo, but anyhow, long story.

Anyway, so that was interesting.

And then I would, you know, I would throw it to have the privilege to interview you today.

So I did some research a little bit to find out more about you.

So let me tell you what I found and also what I knew.

So Daniel joined Elevate, which is Verdein's in -house operating team in January 2020.

He was their first hire in the Elevate team back then.

And Verdein, as many of you know, is a private equity company, a pretty large one.

especially the Nordics, but globally as well.

He's the CCO.

He's responsible for all go -to market operations across their portfolio, looking at sales marketing, customer success, and overall commercial excellence.

He's been actively involved in commercial due diligence across their deals and embedding himself in the portfolio companies to define and execute value creation plans, creation plans, which is one of my favorite words, value creation.

scaling, marketing, internationalization.

I know that's a hot topic for many companies right now.

But what's even more interesting or equally interesting is his past.

This venture summit Daniel touched upon it is he's previously held senior leadership roles CMO at Nordic Tech saw scale -ups including quest back Which I had the privilege of using back in the early 2000 about 2003 and 4 when I was at a gress.

Oh, I tested quest back confirm it It was interesting and also been a CMO at admin control and Small fact is that a lot of people don't know that Norway was a survey tool powerhouse.

Do you guys know that?

So with that, I have a fun fact as well before we get out.

Outside of work, he's got a reputation for being as competitive in sports as he is in business.

No surprise that you love these high pressure scale up environments.

And so hence, he's now working at Verdane and Elevate and working with some pretty amazing companies.

But that's what I found.

So maybe I'll move it over to you so you can tell us a little bit more about your background.

Thank you for the nice intro.

Very nice to be here.

I think the vibe that was out there was amazing.

Also, the bus coming into the room was really great.

And then I just looked at the room and I thought this must be an average marketing team with 80 % women, perhaps.

I think that's quite interesting and then good drinks and yeah, really that good vibe I think is also something that marketing teams are perhaps famous for like the fun corner of the office.

That's what we want to be.

We're fun but we mean business, right?

Yes.

So as you said, I just thought about it.

I've been 23 years now in scale ops.

Actually, Verdane is also a scale up.

And the fun thing is that the Elevate team is a startup within a scale -up, investing in scale -ups.

So that's also quite interesting.

But prior to that, I've done three different scale -up journeys.

And I I went to officer school and I learned certain things about leadership.

I went to Norge Santel skorle, learned certain things about numbers, business and all that, even a bit marketing.

But probably learned 98 % of marketing and go -to -market commercial on the job.

So very briefly in terms called Comfix and I think that company is not in good health anymore.

Unfortunately, but that was also a really good scale -up journey from I think 40 million to some 250 million in five, six years.

Organic growth and What we did was we did a lot of ideation within different target groups and tried to figure out what types of educational needs would different target groups have.

So we were just a professional provider and developer of education for business.

And at its peak, we had around 1 ,000 events like this.

We're here today.

And I think the The essence of that was basically to what I really learned was hyper -targeting and really segmenting the market and understanding how you can slice and dice a market and also based on actually being very close to those working in those markets.

What could we offer daily work.

So we had this thing where we had to do 30 research calls into the target groups and then we developed the program and we invited the relevant speakers.

If it was a training or a conference there would be multiple speakers.

And performance marketing started, AdWords, which was called back then, came during that time.

And it was a lot of fun.

Also, the power of communication, because we had to convince, we sent out these brochures and these emails directly into the target group, and they had to take that piece of communication and go to their manager and say, I want to do this training.

I need this.

I need this inspiration from this event or I need this Excel course or a negotiation course, whatever it was.

So we really understood the power of communication and the A, B tested and it was a great school to learn a lot about marketing.

What We talked about during this time that it would be nice to have subscription -based recurring revenue because we needed to go out and hunt in the same kruelne over and over again.

And we talked about subscription business.

And then in 2008 -2009 the financial crisis basically turned things upside down.

We had grown like this and then 30 % of the revenue just disappeared almost overnight.

So that was super painful.

And then from there I went to Questbag, which was something very different.

It was one of the first Norwegian SaaS companies from 2009.

They were around 70 million in revenue at the time.

They had just been acquired by a private equity company.

They had a very ambitious growth agenda, which was about going to new markets, about doing market consolidation, buying competitors, and all sorts of other stuff.

So I thought it was so cool because it was, you know, it was SaaS, it was tech, it was cloud, it was recurring business that I had missed, it was the opportunity to build a team, a group team, and then and then also local teams eventually.

So, and we at the Pico Questpack, also now Questpack is still here.

It's actually much smaller now than it was 12 years ago when I left.

We had set up 20 different offices around the world.

Australia, US, lots of offices throughout Europe.

So I learned a lot about how you sort of figure out what markets to go to and the product market fit and go to market fit and all that kind of stuff.

And I guess also some painful learnings from that time is that the M &A side of things, so buying competitors is of course not easy for a small Asian or Asian company.

being pushed gently by their owners to grow.

And I think we managed that quite well.

We bought a Norwegian competitor, a Swedish and a Finnish.

And it started to become quite...

We struggled a bit and then we went on and bought a large German.

competitor almost as big as ourselves.

And that's when I really realized that now we have a lot of things on our hands.

These are not really, you know, same type of companies.

They have different go to market models.

One is enterprise, one is SMB, one is out of the box, one is customization.

We had all these types of issues.

And long story short, we, in the summer of 2013, we ended up figuring out during my summer break that we actually had the run out of cash.

And there was a big downsizing that needed to happen very quickly.

And that actually ended up in a lot of people losing their jobs, including me and the whole group marketing team.

And at the time we were 15 people in marketing.

So I lost that job in 2013 and Then I said then I thought what what have I what have I learned what can I sort of use now?

I know quite No people no no one in marketing so I got so they had grown to 25 million on without without a single person in marketing and interestingly enough and I think many or some of you will kind of realize this that I was actually the CEO of the company and I'll say this as a disclaimer right away.

He's away.

He's one He was advised to have a chat with me because someone else thought that maybe marketing would be a good idea to start thinking about.

And he was very was very skeptical, arbs crossed, didn't believe in marketing, didn't know what it was.

He had no idea and they didn't believe in it and I really started up hill convincing him that you know there are a few things you might want to think about in your next stages of growth.

But he ended up hiring me and we talked about it here in the hallway in terms of how can you get someone who at the Eastern salary, which I had to kind of go and, you know, really get into the weeds and maybe go down in salary.

So I was offered shares in admin control, which was very nice.

And I basically just decided I really want to do this.

I really want marketing matters, marketing matters, it impacts the growth and the revenue and that I could good enough pull off all this stuff that stuff that needs to be done in marketing.

Fix the website, fix the messaging, fix the CRM system, make the sales presentations, all that stuff.

Was there one thing that you accomplished that one thing where their mindset started changing or his.

So yeah exactly so I obviously understood that I had I needed to bring some evidence as well not just you know Start there, Start there, which is not necessarily the smartest place to start.

So I had decided that I wanted to prove to Christian, the CEO, and the sales guys that I can really help them.

I wanted to do cold calls myself.

I wanted to do everything that they did to prove to them that I had the finger on the pulse on the customers and that I could pitch the product and understand the product well enough to also get respect from the product team and team and the R &D team.

sales reps and CEO hitting his target.

That was something I thought a lot about.

Yeah, I think that's super important because a lot of times you'll get pushback, at least from my experience of like if you can't show a relation to numbers, people automatically think that if you're coming for marketing and you cannot sell or to talk on numbers, you're sort of put in a bit of a different bucket.

So to prove that.

Exactly.

Do you think so?

You had quite an interesting journey being in -house and now you're on the other side.

Yes, on the dark side.

On the dark side.

And you've seen many changes, right?

So you've seen many things.

How do you think the role of marketing has changed throughout your 23 years within the discipline?

And what do you believe the role of marketing should be and needs to be in an organization order for it to scale?

Everything has changed within marketing during those 23 years.

But I think in a good way mostly because I think previously it wasn't really clear what value marketing would bring.

Especially within you know, software as a service and direct to consumer businesses, it's you know, in those businesses, marketing is actually driving in the revenue in a direct to consumer business.

And if done well in a B2B setting, marketing is very integrated in the whole customer acquisition and expansion retention side of things.

And so it's, but I don't think all companies are able to get the full value from marketing.

I think what I often see also where I work now is that marketing have a too limited equally well be on the right side of the bow tie with expansion and retention and everything related to existing customers.

Yeah, it's a lot to say about that topic.

It's topic.

It's a big one.

Yeah, I think it's...

I it's...

I see the same.

So I can concur.

I think a lot of times marketing is relegated to Leagent and Brand and it sort of stops there.

Many times and it's also the mindset.

It depends, you know, who's on a leadership team the founder the CEO?

Well, at times it's also the mindset of us as marketers, right?

Yeah But there is definitely when you see a bit of a stall or a lowland numbers Can be as like is is the marketing organization?

strategically placed to pull across the organization and not only within the areas of like, well, you're your lead, John, you stay over there or you just do brand, you stay over there, right?

So what do you think is the role of marketers to set the stage?

Maybe that's a little bit back to how I talked about what I had made up my mind to do at admin control.

I think, you know, gaining the trust from all the different stakeholders within the company, the product the sales guys by being in the weeds with them, the CFO by having a business case and talking about ROI and budget achievement and being able to attribute investment back to or kind of forward to revenue.

So and then what I've found myself spend a lot of time on which I think is super important is to educate a lot as well.

Because people have, everyone thinks they understand marketing, everyone can have opinions about what's important.

But if Screams to loudest gets the the pains and the struggles with sales and all that stuff.

But I think that's a good starting point.

It's interesting.

I see there's some questions coming up and then I'm going to try to tie many things together here.

I don't know how we are on time.

So I'll just keep going until you tell me to shut up.

OK, so connected.

So hot question.

This day and age, many marketers and I'm sure many in this room are getting a lot of questions from your leadership team of we need to do more with less.

That is probably top of mind for many people in the room.

And then sort of the age of AI, then we get you need to do more with less, just slap some AI on there.

Like why are you not doing more when there's this AI situation thing going, right?

So then what's the right approach to take there?

Also combining what you said is how to push back, right?

And so have you know have that voice to be able to do that But what's your thought around the the current you know efficiency is top of mind for most companies?

Obviously AI is part of being efficient and getting the most, making sure that you can have an impact with scarce resources.

I think it's, and again, I am more in a B2B setting perhaps with this, but I think really understanding first the market opportunity and within that market your ideal customer profile.

and make sure that you focus your efforts on the most interesting parts of the markets and the most interesting customers.

Because I think that will benefit you throughout the whole value chain from where do you go look for, where do you market yourself and your business, how do you position your business, what is your messaging.

You can be really clear about those things.

You don't have to provide, you know, the more you focus, the more you get back for the buck if you know where to focus.

And then the leads that you bring in, those will be much, much better quality leads and they will convert through the pipeline.

So I think that's the number one advice.

I can create that and I just saw these things coming through and I'm going to see how I can fit one of these questions here.

So yeah, focus.

So it would be quality over volume.

Yes.

Yes.

I saw a question on MQL somewhere and then it disappeared.

I don't remember where it was, but I was going to bring it together with that because then I actually say, is the question to generate more qualified leads or is the question to generate more opportunities that will close?

Yes.

I think that's actually somewhere.

Yeah.

That would Is that really the conversation that needs to be happening?

Is the conversation actually the opportunities and deals that are created?

And what's the quality of the marketing qualifies that are coming?

And the conversation stays, sorry, I have to tickle my throat, a bit to surface level.

What are your thoughts on that?

Let me see, to help General Manager, what effective advice do you have for obtaining market?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think this is where we...

Right now I see a little bit in the transition phase for marketing and go -to -market where the kind of old operating model is due for renewal and re -engineering.

It still kind of works with the sort of lead gen and MQL, SQL.

But I think something more is kind of needed.

And I think a lot of companies are still a little bit stuck with the old model.

Focusing on vanity metrics, focusing on volume instead of quality.

And what I know, especially now from Verdein, and working with all these companies, and when we do a due diligence for a new company, we look at these things that almost no company are really on top of it.

They know most of them what they should do.

They know that they that they should be on top of their data and there should be clear processes and playbooks and they can draw things on a slide and they do that.

When we come in we see the slides but when we come in later and see the data and the way they actually operate we see that they're missing out.

Because it is complicated to do this exercise of creating a proper operating model throughout the market, which is what you need to do.

Marketing, as I said before, needs to support or should support the whole value chain.

If there's one advice to start up companies or smaller companies, it's that it doesn't get any easier to fix this.

If it's one priority, Like while you're small, while you're that one man band, one marketing person, three or four sales reps, it's the perfect time to actually start that because when you start scaling, you add complexity and you go to new markets and all that stuff.

It just gets harder.

Yeah, for sure.

I see here, so thinking of that, I'm just looking at the one that's right at my eye level, what things have not changed in the past 20 years.

Yeah, that is still important.

So I guess say maybe the the way of looking at the traditional funnel hasn't yet changed as much as we would like for it to change.

What else do you?

Yeah, I I think what?

20 years ago, I wasn't very much of a brand That hasn't changed for a competitive advantage for a limited amount of time before others catch up.

But if we can agree that you have to be cheaper or have to be different, then I think brand is positioning, brand messaging, identity purpose and all that stuff needs to, or it's more important than ever actually.

So those things haven't changed.

But now I think today we have somewhat better ways we can measure.

Because it used to be that no one really understood how you could actually measure the impact.

Right.

Yeah.

I'm going to ask a question, but on top of that, I think going back to some traditional tactics in marketing as well, or things that haven't changed, I would say comms and PR.

Yeah.

you know, like public relations, I feel a lot of times people forget about that.

And in the age of sauce, you know, it was all like digital marketing.

It's like everything's digital now.

Performance marketing, but, you know, the power of, you know, communication and public relations to get story out, some teams don't have any comms at all or they don't focus, the marketing people don't focus on it.

I think that is extremely powerful.

It's one of the things that would stress everyone to get in.

yourself or you know work with someone to build that story.

It's a forgotten part of within the you know the marketing wheelhouse.

Indeed.

But then, Asa, okay we're gonna shift we talked you're clear on internationalization you've done a lot of scaling both at Questback, admin control and obviously supporting the Verdane portfolio and I know it's a question is top of mind for many people here.

So let's say, how can CMOs scale?

No, that was not it.

Where did it go?

Here it is.

What are the early warning signs that a GTM strategy is not resonating in a new market and how should CMOs respond?

In a new market, I take that as a new region.

I don't know who wrote it, but I'll let you say that.

I think that's this.

If it's a new geography or a new segment, it's the same kind of dynamic, perhaps.

I think going to a new market is a little bit like doing the scale -up or the startup thing again.

So, because obviously to go to a new market you have had some success, otherwise you're very ambitious.

But obviously you should have success in one market before market before you go to another market.

You should have product market fit.

You should also have at least one way documented way of doing marketing and go to market that you think you can use in the new market at least.

That's normally the hypothesis.

And then I think it depends if you're a B2B company with large deals, one deal is maybe enough to have a beach shed in a new market.

And obviously the proof is that you actually get revenue customers in a new market.

But for some business models you can do some testing, right?

You can You can test it like that and have a plan that you follow.

But I think it's very up to what type of business it is.

And there are multiple strategies you can choose.

But I think if you just think that if you're a Norwegian company and it works in no way, it will work in another market, that's certainly not the case.

in terms of the Nordics.

The Nordics are quite similar, but when you start to think about Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Southern Europe, the differences are bigger, of course.

If you were to say, so you mentioned not the Nordics.

If a company was scaling, let's say, to the UK or to the US, there's many new major companies wanting to scale up to the US.

And I love to see that ambition when I say, oh, we want to grow.

And I'm like, well, we're going to Sweden.

I'm like, oh, too close.

How about a little bit farther?

So if we go to the US, what's one key tactic that you have seen work, whether you have deployed it yourself or you have seen in your portfolio companies that has worked really well to enter the US market?

For many of our companies on the product, consumer or B2B I think, focusing on, you know, the US is enormous, so focusing on one state or one city can be the right way to test things.

And really doing, and I think this goes for everything, but a lot of companies don't do this, really doing the homework in terms of research to figure out where is the biggest likelihood of having success.

Where does your product fit the best?

And then being prepared to make adoptions or adoptions to product, to go to market, figuring out a combination of local people versus perhaps sending someone over if you're ready to make that big of an investment from the start.

You know, that's normally Normally a good thing if you send over your best salesperson or head of sales or even a CEO I think US is quite common to someone from C -level moves over, aligns with local people, local salespeople, maybe a local marketing agency figuring out the right marketing tactics.

It's smart.

Good, agreed.

I would just add, like for the US, people probably know that it's super into face -to -face meetings, dinners, small conferences, breakfasts.

Those types of things are super important to do for that market, and it resonates really well together with partners.

There was one that said, so how can CMO scale brand and demand generation without scaling spend at the same pace?

Do you kind of talk about that?

No, we didn't.

Yeah.

Kind of but not.

Yeah.

Anything that you want to add there that we didn't say before?

But obviously there's AI here.

Then we can take the other question.

How do you see the marketing landscape evolving with AI?

So we kind of group those two things together.

Yeah.

And I think in this room, everyone has their own experiences.

Everyone uses.

chat GPT and the obvious tools.

So I think that that makes a ton of sense.

Let's see some real and I think one must do is on the gen or sort of as what you call it, gen search.

Generative optimization.

Thank you.

I think we did a big survey this summer at Verdeijn actually and we saw that one out of three now already uses search AI instead of search engines.

So if you're invisible now in the search and in the AI tools, you have a massive problem.

So that is kind of a must do.

I see a lot of There are obviously within HubSpot, within CRMs, all these tools that we already use.

There are a lot of great things happening.

So you can get a lot more value now from the tools you already have.

Then I would sort of I saw a scale line on the list.

I don't know if that person is here I am a big big advocate for for that tool.

It's a it's a startup where you can do great stuff So I would invest in maybe one or two tools starting with one And yeah, there's so much there's sdr.

Bdr.

There's Automations, there's a lot of things, but you can obviously do much more with less now than you could before.

Yeah, agreed.

Yes, a live question.

Let's do it.

We spoke about how AI impacts that part of marketing.

I'm very curious how AI impacts branding since you said it's the one constant in marketing.

Now everyone has the opportunity to create their own brand, but they can also create their own brand, I call it.

Everyone can actually just sort of, the classic expert or fault mistake that people do is that I can do marketing myself just as you said, that everyone, and I think AI tools will probably, you will get like an agent where you can really create good branding at some point.

And I'm quite curious about your reflections on how that actually impacts branding as a field.

I agree with your thesis like you either differentiate or you go cheap, but this will make it truly difficult to actually, because of all the noise and everything, to actually differentiate will be extremely difficult because the moment you do something original, somebody will just copy straight away the moment you're seen, the noise in the marketplace will be just true.

It would be like operating in politics with the Trump as you're competitive, right?

So I'm curious on your reflections on AI that...

Yeah, that...

Yeah, you have to go as well, but I think I have a love -hate relationship to AI, to be honest.

I think it's a bit sad as well about all this stuff.

I don't have a creativity, I used to work in advertising and I see how it just destroys the ad spread.

Exactly.

the arts, the music, the pictures, the videos, we benefit from it in it in our work and we have to embrace it but there's a sad side of it.

And yeah, I see your point.

isn't really there yet in terms of the quality.

So there are some of those kind of challenges.

But eventually it will be in terms of quality.

Like we're basically there now, I think.

You have this thing with you, you know, you can use models and shoot certain things and then you can do all sorts of stuff based on that afterwards.

I don't think I have, I see your red flag, so to speak.

It's not going to be any easier.

But let's hope that, yeah, I think I'm going to pass it over to you.

I don't have any more smart things to say about it.

I don't know, I can add more.

AI is an enabler, right?

And it does things that you tell it to do.

Thank you.

As marketers, we need to have even stronger conviction and a stronger vision.

because that will enable things to be unique, you know, depending on what you feed it.

Right, so we have to know like what do we really want, what do we really want to accomplish, what do we really want to achieve for whatever it is that you're working on.

That requires a marketer to actually do the product.

And that is what I'm truly afraid of is the fact that the moment that you get good enough marketing agents, a classic thing.

Do we need marketing?

I worked in tech in five years.

They want to do you need marketing?

You need to prove yourself or I'm just going to say.

And the moment they go, I can do that.

We need to create content.

I think there's going to be a risk.

And it kind of means there's a risk that that can happen.

And it's almost then it'll be a bubble.

And then we'll realize we all look the same.

We're all bland.

Everything is terrible.

Then it'll be like, let's go back to it.

So I think that I believe it probably may go that way.

And I think we should be prepared for it.

and then it'll explode and then implode and then go back to the other way of doing it.

But yeah, I think we should all be cautious.

I use AI in a lot of things.

I use it as an assistant to help me do many things.

But the thinking comes from you're talking to it.

I haven't yet gone to run my business for me.

I hope I don't have to do that.

Anyhow, I'm just, tell me when to stop because there's a little...

Yeah, little...

Yeah, okay.

Okay, this is interesting because when you were at, was it Confec, there would be Quest Back as well.

Where do we start when just starting up and money is non -existing?

When you had some money at Ambient Control because there was 25 million and they were like, well, but what about some of the earlier?

So, yeah, but we basically had no budget to have time and control.

So it was my salary.

Now, but there is a lot of...

So of...

So what did you do first?

Because you had to convince first, right?

You had to educate your CEO about why marketing is important and what it's going to do for your business.

So then what did you decide to do first?

No, but I said, I think it's...

brick by brick, stone by stone, business case by case by business case.

This conference, we should be there.

It costs this much.

This is the strategy.

This is the value we attribute to brand, to existing customers, and then hopefully some new business.

And then coming back and saying, yeah, it actually it actually worked.

So obviously you need to have, you need to be able to make some investments ideally as well in advertising, in conferences, in tools and eventually in a team.

But of course there's a, when you're that only marketing person you also realize that it is a fantastic, marketing is a fantastic tool.

that can be deployed and used in so many different ways, which I think gives a good feeling as well.

So you can send emails, you can post on LinkedIn, you can do thought leadership, you can do many things without spending any money other than the salary, obviously.

Okay, all right.

Sounds good.

Last question.

If you If I weren't a marketer, that's my last question.

Just a drop -mike question for you.

What would you do?

Hmm, this is a deep one.

He loved it that much.

What do much.

What do I do I want to do?

If you weren't a CMO and a CCO at Elevate, what would you do?

I almost, or I started a very different education in science.

So I would have I almost ended up as an engineer, so I could have gone a different route.

I'm very happy about having ended up in marketing.

It has been really a lot of fun.

There are so many levers, so many cool things you can do and scale up.

The scale up life is amazing.

It pushes you out on the deep water almost every day.

and maybe just one final reflection on that is that when I went from admin control to the dark side of PE, at first I was super happy now.

I get to use what I've learned in marketing and scaling and all that stuff and work with a lot of companies.

Then I realized that I have three big problems now.

This was in late 2019 and I was going to start in 2020.

Number one was 80 % of the companies are outside Norway.

So I probably have to travel a lot and I will get divorced.

And my kids will hate me for not being at home.

And then corona happened six weeks after I started.

So I didn't have to travel.

So I landed on my feet with that.

And then I didn't know much about B2C marketing.

So I was during the three months before I started, I was really into understanding B2C and direct to consumer and e -commerce and the differences and all that.

I need to educate myself.

And then the worst one was that Verdein, as you said, I was the first person on the LV team, they thought they had hired a marketing expert.

And there is no such thing as a marketing expert.

Because marketing in B2B, in B2C and all the sub functions of marketing, you can you can be an expert in one thing, creative or legion or digital or PR or what have you.

But there are no person who is an expert in everything marketing.

So they had actually hired the opposite.

But I didn't tell them.

So I thought let's see if they figure out that they hired a journalist and not a specialist or an expert.

But I am here still after six years.

You're still years.

You're still here.

So engineer.

Well, it's the rise of the marketing generalist nowadays.

So great.

Well, it was really nice to chat to you and thank you for being here with us.

So thank you.

Give it a big applause.