Blog
Working notes from running a holding company: what holds up in strategy and marketing engagements, what changes when administration is automated, and what we learn buying companies from retiring owners in the Rhein-Main region. Everything published here comes from our own operations rather than secondhand theory, with the numbers and failures left in. New posts appear here and in the RSS feed.
The average German consulting day cost €1,300 net in 2025. We put all 34 fixed prices of our six practices beside the German market range with a source for each, work out what a managing director in Frankfurt pays a top-tier firm, a boutique and a freelancer, and show the BAFA grant for Hessen on a worked example.
PricesConsulting practiceRhein-Main
What consulting costs in Germany: 34 prices vs the market →Germany hands over roughly 109,000 companies a year and closes 114,000 more for want of a successor. We read sixteen trades through two filters, revenue bound to the company by contract and owner earnings of EUR 100,000 to 1 million, and show where a shared AI-run office adds EUR 40,000 to 120,000 a year before any revenue moves.
Industry assessmentsSuccessionAI-native operations
What an AI-native owner would change in 16 German trades →A modular grow-box came through our pipeline. We ran the full feasibility and the answer sat in one number per crop: the electricity price above which indoor growing loses money. Lettuce breaks even at €0.053/kWh, basil at €1.19, and German industry pays €0.172. Fourteen indoor farms went bankrupt in 2025.
Industry assessmentsAI-native operations
We assessed indoor farming. The electricity bill decides →We counted the public succession exchange nexxt-change for Hesse ourselves on 25 August 2026: 412 sale offers, 291 buyer listings, 39 listings in Frankfurt am Main alone. Plus the asking prices, the KfW figures scaled down to Hesse, and the free appointments where sellers and buyers meet.
The Frankfurt succession market in numbers (2026) →We buy companies at €300,000 to €1M in Rhein-Main and hold them permanently. Before we talk about price we read four things in a fixed order. That order is the checklist for any owner who wants to sell a small business in Germany, with the numbers on multiples, seller loans, and transaction costs.
Selling a company in Rhein-Main: what a buyer reads first →We automated almost every administrative task in a small German holding and hit a wall at the tax return. The blocker is a licence clause rather than a missing feature. Here is the tool matrix, the two walls behind it, the one German tool nobody names, and the deadline that settles the question.
AI-native operationsSoftware and securityLaw and tax notes
No open-source tool can file a German tax return →GEO is the work that gets a company named or linked in the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google and Copilot give. It has no settled price. We publish what cited pages have in common, what we did on our own site, and the 20-prompt panel we run on four engines every month to find out whether any of it works.
Search and AI visibilityRhein-Main
GEO for small companies: getting cited by AI answers →A first-time buyer with around €400,000 wants three owner-run businesses in Hessen. With a bank the programme needs €450,000, without one €1.29M. We rank eighteen financing routes, show why debt cover depends only on the multiple, and check KfW, Bürgschaftsbank Hessen and WIBank terms as of today.
Buying a company: €450k with a bank, €1.29M without →A Frankfurt owner who wants to grow in Rhein-Main and sell abroad asks whether he may email strangers. In Germany the answer is no, in London to a limited company it is yes. Seven countries with the statutory wording, the cost of one warning letter, and the reply rates that actually hold up.
Law and tax notesConsulting practiceRhein-Main
Cold email is banned in Germany. Where it is lawful →We modelled a web studio for trade businesses in Rhein-Main and buried the idea. Then we measured what nobody in Germany has measured since 2018: 142 tradespeople's websites drawn in Frankfurt and the surrounding towns, 122 read in full. Every one carries an Impressum. Three in four offer neither a price nor an appointment.
Search and AI visibilitySoftware and securityIndustry assessmentsRhein-Main
94% of German trades have a website. What is missing →1 / 2 →
Succession (5)The holding (1)Prices (2)Consulting practice (3)AI-native operations (3)Search and AI visibility (2)Financing (1)Valuation (1)Law and tax notes (2)Software and security (2)Industry assessments (3)Rhein-Main (7)