The Leadership Learns Podcast

The episode has a handful of substantive observations - chiefly that two structurally incompatible business models under one umbrella create resource conflicts, and that consulting monetisation will shift away from headcount-times-hours - but much of the runtime is taken up by career narrative, generic positivity, and filler encouragement. The ratio of novel-per-minute is low.

“consulting business scales with headcounts, headcounts and then multiplied by hours is more or less your revenue. Huh. In future time, I would say there are different models on the table how to monetize your business”

“those two business models, they started to hinder them directly”

The episode leans heavily on well-worn takes: 'just start,' atomic habits, Simon Sinek's positivity, 'be curious never stop learning.' The AI-will-change-consulting argument is standard 2024-era discourse with no contrarian angle or first-principles reframing.

“just start the journey. No matter whether you have everything on the table, everything analyzed in detail, whatever, just start the journey”

“Being positive to everything, seeing a chance for everything, finding there will be a solution somehow”

Carstens is a genuine practitioner who has navigated a real company carve-out, built a consulting arm from near-zero back-office capability, and has on-the-ground logistics technology experience; he is not a career podcast guest. However he leads a mid-market niche firm with limited disclosed scale, limiting the weight of his authority.

“in January 2023 we had around 100 people on the consulting side where I was responsible for. We had great customers so business was on the table but we had no idea, simply no idea how to write an invoice at the end of January”

“I joined a team who was able for or who was responsible for consulting services in the manufacturing, especially automotive industry. And that is where I work for SIP directly”

A few concrete anchors exist - 100 people post-carve-out, the SaaS platform started in 2017, a stated ambition to double revenue - but revenue figures, customer names, project counts, and timelines are consistently withheld or vague ('within a certain period of time,' 'a big car manufacturer here in Germany').

“we made a clear strategy now that there's so much on the street that why not having an ambitious target to somehow double the revenue within a certain period of time”

“we started 2017 and that was a product orientated business, that software as a service”

The host structures the conversation reasonably but repeatedly inserts his own views at length, validates almost every answer without probing, and asks soft wrap-up questions ('how do you ensure balance?'). There is no meaningful pushback or pressure on any claim, making it closer to a mutual affirmation session than a sharp interview.

“I agree with so much what you said”

“And really what were those key, those key pillars of decision making that meant that 2022 was the right time?”