My Story | camillagadkrogsgaard.com

my journey

Since I was a young girl, I dreamed about becoming a businesswoman. I didn't know what it meant back then. But the hunger, curiosity, and passion took over endless hours and nights of dreaming. My journey started as a show jumping rider in my teenage years. At the age of 18, I was offered a dream job, to live and work in Mexico as a professional rider. It was a completely different world, new culture, language, and new rules I had to learn to navigate in. This exposed me to hard work, discipline, goals, competition, and... Well... the business world. What I didn't realize back then, is that Mexico taught me the game, the language, and the power of the business world, even before I had ever thought to enter it.

From Prof Rider to CEO at 32

At the age of 32, 3 years after finishing my master's at the IT University of Copenhagen, I landed my first job as a CEO, at a market-leading IT company, with 300+ employees and 9 Billion DKK in revenue. A ride of a lifetime, that made me grow into the leader I am today.

From rider to CEO

As a personal trainer, I learned the foundation of leadership.

Leadership begins when you believe you can make a difference. I believed I could help people get in shape - and I did. I believed in every client and learned the mastery of adjusting my training and coaching to each client's, specific needs, battles, insecurities, and drivers - this is key to leadership.

starting my first company at 23

My curiosity led me to the IT University of Copenhagen, studying my master's in 'Digital Innovation & Management. A time of tremendous growth from the exploration of methods and theories within business strategy, business plans, ideation, design, marketing, open innovation, and technology. During this time, I had also become very active with fitness. 9 years ago no one had ever heard about Functional HIIT Training (Crossfit). So, I took a chance and started my own company as a personal trainer. Along with a new website, blog and videos came multiple different clients. I was thriving with the success of my vision coming true. I was helping people, and I was seeing the joy of them succeeding with my training. My personal training would turn out to be game-changing in becoming the leader I am today. Because I learned the mastery of adjusting myself and how I communicated to each client's specific needs, battles, insecurities, and motivation - this is key to leadership.

The most crowded trail is never the way to reach extraordinary success.

As a young leader, I definitely felt the struggle of wanting to prove myself and fit into "the business circle". Yet, It was always overpowered by my belief of staying true to my values as a person. Making that my compass gave me the confidence to refrain from following the crowd. Growing into leadership requires self-leadership - this can be hard, intense, overwhelming, yet extraordinarily rewarding because first, you grow as a person and then a leader.

becoming the leader

i am today

After finishing my master's degree at the university, I was working as a consultant and joined Universal Robots, building the global strategy of their App Store UR+. 6 months later I was offered my first leadership position, as Director of Cloud in ALSO A/S the market leader within IT distribution.

After 8 months the Group CEO appointed me the Managing Director of the danish affiliate. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I never had dreamed of attaining at such a young age. Was I scared and overwhelmed, yes! Did I believe I could do it, yes! So, here I am 2 years later and can proudly say, I together with the best team in the world took the first steps, to transform the company into a digitally mature company, at the forefront with new sales channels, digitizing the customer journey and optimizing internal processes, restructuring of teams and building a state-of-the-art marketing engine. That is what I do best! I disrupt old ways of working, I drive business development, ask the tough questions, challenge leadership styles and give my team the tools and support to be creative and grow - to the success of the company and themselves - and trust me it all was full of resistance and hard choices.

As part of building a Matrix organization, my role was removed in DK and several other countries after 2 years. Today I work with some of the biggest brands in the world as a Consulting Director helping executive leaders accommodate the new demands of the digital age.

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit. I’m thrilled we’re connected.

With much love,

Camilla Gad Krogsgaard