Consulting & Management

Since June 2024 I have been interim CEO of CREW Publishing. The brief is to prepare the company for further growth: refine existing processes, introduce new ones, establish middle management and enable the founders to move from day-to-day operations into a strategic owner’s role.

After more than twenty-five years, CREW has joined the ten largest publishers in the Czech Republic. It was necessary to set leadership that matches the company’s size — while keeping its spirit and culture.

After more than twenty-five years, CREW Publishing has joined the ten largest publishers in the Czech Republic. Together with the other founder we realised that the company had already grown to a scale where further development requires refining processes, introducing new ones and establishing middle management — and that my involvement in day-to-day operations was becoming a brake on further growth.

The JPF analysis confirmed and specified our situation; it also added observations from a senior analytical team. We chose the JPF interim-manager option with the aim of preparing the company for further growth and enabling me to move from operations into a strategic owner’s role. Ing. David Farský took over as CEO in June 2024.

After three months of cooperation we see substantial shifts in the right direction and a clearer outline of what needs to be done for the future; this is being fulfilled in concrete steps. We appreciate the quick grasp of the publishing market and the ability to sense how the company works — new rules and processes still respect CREW’s spirit and culture. We rate the cooperation with JPF very positively (professionalism, flexibility, speed); Ing. Farský’s arrival within a matter of weeks was incomparable with a classic hire for such a key role.

As General Manager for the Czech Republic and Slovakia within the Bisnode group, in 2013 I led the consolidation and optimisation of the core business processes of seven merging companies on two markets. The change directly affected all employees, customers and partners. A new management team had to be formed. Chosen commercial synergies and hidden marketing potential were gradually extracted. A partial change of company culture was also part of the transformation brief.

Formally there were two principal mergers, which in effect left three companies operating, compared with seven before the transformation. Strong support for branding the new brand was also required.

The formal transformation itself lasted several months. Thanks to the advantages of unifying the product portfolio it was somewhat easier than in other cases. Straightening all processes took approximately two years.

The result of the transformation was economically strong and stable companies that the market also perceives as high-quality, reliable and successful.

I´m happy having chance to work with David from 2011 when we had acquired company Creditinfo which he led as CEO. Thanks to his skills and competencies David added a lot of value to Bisnode and is since 2013 responsible for Czech and Slovak activities of Bisnode.

David is team player with really good delegation skills. His leadership style is build on „leading through the team“ approach – always providing his colleagues space to grow and actively helping them in this. He is open & honest and he thrives when being provided by freedom and confidence to develop his area of responsibility. He is really succesful in translating complicated challenge to understandable problem and lead team to solve one – which helps in making for example strategy targets understandable through organization.

David is constantly developing himself following both new industry as well as leadership trends and he is able to transfer those and test them in real life and he can challenge himself and think out-of-the box when he sees sense and potential benefit of such step.

In autumn 2009 I was offered a new challenge — taking over the leadership of Creditinfo Czech Republic. The brief included raising the company’s economic performance and revitalising it as a whole.

Even in a small and young team (around 60 employees) it was possible to make visible changes relatively quickly. The first steps were partly organisational. They were then followed by changes in substance.

We focused on the product portfolio, commercial policy and marketing tools. The transformation also included a rebranding that helped increase the value of both the company and the brand.

Creditinfo’s economic growth was started even in a relatively fragmented market. The successful changes then culminated in the company’s acquisition by the Bisnode group, which undoubtedly gained interesting value on the local Czech market.

I had the privilege of working with David for the last year and a half. I hired him as a managing director for our former company Creditinfo Czech Republic that we recently sold as a part of a transaction to Bisnode AB. David came into the company at a point were some changes were needed to modernize and refresh the product portfolio, sales strategy, pricing policies, terms and more or less give the company an overall overhaul. He managed within a year to do some drastic changes that delivered improved results and turned negative trends to positive trends. What was most remarkable was that he did a lot of changes without any disruption to the daily business.

David is very organized and efficient and very good at delegating tasks to the right people and enabling them to reach their goals. He is very open minded to new ideas but takes his time to digest things before putting them in motion ensuring that he is usually very successful with what he decides to do. David is one of the best managers that I have worked with in my 15 years carrier as a senior manager in different countries and I can recommend him with pleasure.

As CEO of NEWTON Media, where I was responsible for three markets (Czech, Slovak and Polish), I was personally involved in founding the joint-venture company Admosphere. Admosphere was established — in cooperation with Mediaresearch with 50:50 shares — to create competition on the monopoly market for monitoring media advertising and to win that market.

The start itself was rather painful; the preparatory phase took approximately 12 months. An entire process infrastructure had to be built. In parallel we had to negotiate with the largest client players on the market.

After that phase I stepped off the project. In hindsight we can rate this move very positively. The goal we set at the outset was met within a few years!

Early in my management career, in 2001, as product manager at NEWTON I.T. I was given the raw fragment of a future product — a front-end application for distributing media monitoring.

For that time the product was modular and allowed very good personalisation. Together with a small team of developers we were able to move this solution a substantial way forward within 12 months.

The product itself sold very well to Czech customers and soon became the core distribution and client platform, which — after the initial market-placement phase — brought revenue in the order of tens of millions of crowns a year.

The product remained a key platform of the NEWTON Media group for a very long time.

In 2014, in my role as General Manager for the Czech Republic and Slovakia of the Bisnode group, I took part, in a relatively short period (about six months), together with a small specialised team, in the acquisition of two competing client portfolios and products.

Negotiations that in several phases reached critical moments ultimately ended according to the original goal, and it was possible to announce these acquisition successes to the market even within a few weeks.

The aim of the acquisitions themselves was a gradual transfer of clients from the existing competing platforms onto group platforms. The result can be rated very positively. The quality the market received increased, as did further valuable market penetration and growth in profit margin.

I have known David for over four years. As an attorney, I worked with him for a company he led as country manager and board member on many projects, ranging from acquisition of a competitor, through launching new products, to arbitration proceedings against third parties. During our cooperation, I appreciated many of his personal qualities. David is a quick learner. He always sees the big picture. He is able to identify the important issues in unclear or rapidly changing situations and to address them efficiently.

Most of all, I would like to point out his ability to stay calm under pressure. In dealings with third parties, we experienced together a number of tense situations. His ability to almost ignore the pressure and stay focused was often crucial to achieving our goals, be it an advantageous contract for his company or success in arbitration proceedings. It has been a pleasure to work with David, and I am confident that he will be a great asset to any company that hires him.