I tried to plan my career and my life – but it proved fascinatingly difficult to do so. At the age of 34, I am now at home with the title of ‘stay-at-home-dad’ for my 1yr old twin daughters (try planning that) after 3 intense and great years of building and CEOing a corporate start-up in Maersk for digitising Freight Forwarding and more importantly innovating and significantly improving the customer experience. Both experiences I never saw coming – and both has completely changed my life for the (much) better.
A step back: In 2010 I graduated as Cand Oecon for Aarhus University (Denmark) – a Master with focus on becoming a consultant e.g. on large infrastructure projects using econometrics and macroeconomics as key levers. Next to this I was working as a Management Consultant in a local consultancy business as well as teaching students, lagging me one semester, in Business Economics. These experiences gave me a strong quantitative and analytical background, it gave me deep insights in small-scale consulting as well as starting my passion for presenting and engaging an audience.
After school I decided to join the local consultancy full time, however quickly realised that I was not able to deliver my budget in terms of selling leadership development and coaching. Our customer base was mainly owner CEOs and leadership teams and straight out of school it proved hard for me to get traction in this area. However, I saw that our company was at great risk as revenue was very volatile and highly dependent on a few consultants and customers. So I changed my focus and developed a simple analytical product, separately branded and organised, by challenging a Danish monopoly on 3rd party evaluation of construction projects with government funding. We quickly gained 50% of the national market and built the main (steady and forecastable) revenue stream for our company as well as using this product to get access to a large new customer portfolio with adjacent services.
With a couple of years of experience with a small business I wanted to see what corporate life had to offer. I joined Maersk Tankers in Copenhagen working as researcher/strategist in a small strategy team. Our responsibilities where to create and utilise market predictions for assessing spot rate levels, time-charter portfolios, asset value (we sold a lot of ships) as well as advising on key macroeconomic trends (car fuel efficiency, US shale oil, new bunker standard requirements etc). The Tanker industry is fascinating – and believe it or not a great topic for dinner&drink conversations.
After a couple of years I was poked to take on a new role in Damco in the Netherlands (Maersk owned, 3rd party logistics). There was no role in the org chart for me, so we had to create one. I ended up with quite open title of ‘Operations Project Manager’. In this role I got to invent, scope, start and execute large global projects within different areas. It was a project with a focus on turning the company around after a troubled new global ERP system implementation, it was structuring our global trucking procurement process and execution (600m USD) and it was a project on re-thinking and implementing a new global customer service structure and culture. It was doing these project that I unearthed a strong passion for building from scratch, working on small teams with talented people and challenging the status quo. It was also the results of these projects that got Maersk to ask me to build and run a new corporate start-up to digitise their Freight Forwarding product. The company came to be Twill (www.twill.net).
In the summer of 2016, I assembled a small team of internal experts and we relocated to Berlin for the next 7 months to build Twill together with an incubation partner. Within these 7 months, we spent 6 weeks validating the basic idea, we spent 20 (intense) weeks building the first version of our product and we spent 8 weeks commercialising the product (the last phase was more bug-fixing to be honest). Further, within these 7 months we built (to my knowledge) the first ever corporate start-up in Maersk hence spending everyday in uncharged – and at times rocky – territory. We ended up launching a strong MVP (Minumum Viable Product) on time and budget allowing us to reach our short term goal of onboarding 100 customers and gain internal confidence to have Maersk make a big strategic bet on Twil. Twill became a key element in the overall Maersk strategy. A year later we 10x’d our revenue, launched with feet-on-the-ground in 29 countries, grown the total team to 150 Twillers as well as set a new standard for repeat business. This was strong growth, however Twill was still a very small player in the Freight Forwarding industry – next step was to start scaling and using the Maersk brand more aggressively. At this time, my family went from 2 to 4 with the arrival of our twin daughters. It quickly became evident that I could not do both to the level I wanted – and with a new set of priorities I decided to quit Twill to dedicate my time to family (see my announcement here).
The Twill journey has been amazing and Maersk has been amazing at supporting and pushing. In 3 years I feel I gained 10yrs of experience and again unearthed more passions. Next to confirming that I love to build stuff with smart people I now also learned that I am passionate about creating a purpose-driven-culture that rallys people around something greater than shipping more containers around the world. Further, I learned about Agile product development, I learned what is needed to build and run corporate start-ups, I learned about customer obsession and customer experience design and I learned about setting the right team and leadership.
Lastly, after building a ‘Digital Freight Forwarder’ I can conclude that I am a firm believer in seeing ‘Digital’ and ‘Agile’ as tools – not goals or solutions. I resent discussions around technology without a clear definition of what we are trying to do and why we are trying to do it – and who is going to use it. However, I hear these discussions way too often – something I made a bit of a hobby horse to challenge.
Throughout my career I have been blessed to work with very strong leaders who developed me, coached me, gave me room to grow and that proactively pushed me into roles that on paper were ‘too big’ for me. A lot of these are still my mentors and I consider them close friends. I aspire to become such a leader myself.
In summary, what I bring to the table is experience within corporate project management and corporate start-ups, logistics expertise, purpose-driven culture passion, digital product building – and a passion for presenting & engaging as well as challenging that status quo.
See more on my LinkedIn profile here
Articles:
English:
Lloyds List interview
The Loadstar – Twill chief Troels Randbøll Støvring quits to be a stay-at-home dad
JOC – Damco launching new tech portal amid startup boom
BCG – Digital Transformation in the Shipping Industry
Danish:
Børsen – Mærsk-startup: “Det bliver et langt og sejt træk”
Børsen – 33-årig direktør stopper i stort Mærsk-sats: “Hvis jeg fortsatte, ville jeg ikke være der i mine pigers første leveår”
Berlingske – Dansk top100 talent – Manden bag Mærsks prestigeprojekt
Shipping watch – Iværksætter skal sikre Maersks tag i de mindre kunder
Podcasts:
Buzzsprout: #26: Troels Randbøll Støvring CEO of Twill Logistics
Bits vs Bytes Podcast #018 – Troels Støvring, CEO at Twill
BuzzITtalk – Episode 12: Experience Design, Troels Stovring & Ruth Dannhauer
Awards
- Top100 Business talent in Denmark
Each year Berlingske nominate the top100 talents in Denmark below 36years of age. This year I made the list via my work in Twill. https://www.berlingske.dk/karriere/manden-bag-maersks-prestigeprojekt - Damco Project of the year (2018)
Twill started as a Damco project – where Twill was launched to digitise the Freight Forwarding business. The first year we managed to build a business and exceed the business goals, hence landing Twill a prize as the Global Project of the in Damco for the year of 2017 - Damco Project of the year (2017)
Each year Damco award the prize of global project of the year. In 2016 I lead the creation and implementation of a new Customer Service structure globally in Damco (project name: Customer First) with focus on soft skills, unified global measurements and ranking, churn avoidance and up-selling of extra services. In particular Churn saw a strong positive impact of the program.
My playground for the mind 