The wind-down that saved 30 MSEK a year

When I stepped in as Managing Director at Global Load Out Solutions in October 2024, the brief was to lead and grow the business. What I found instead was an organization with no shared reality. Every person on the team (and on the board) held a different version of what the company was, who the customer was, and what the product was supposed to do. There was no agreed vision, no mission, no coherent strategy.

The product had been built by an in-house Volvo development team on market assumptions that had never been tested against actual customer behavior. Capital had been invested. People had been hired. But no one had ever systematically asked: does this match what the market actually needs?

That was the question I walked in to answer.

I spent the first weeks listening and mapping. What I saw was compounding friction that had been accumulating since the beginning. Not hidden, but normalized.

The development team and the sales team shared the same underlying problem: their structures, processes, experiences, and professional instincts had been shaped by large corporations. These were people who had likely performed well in other contexts. But this was a digital startup and the two environments demand fundamentally different things. The mismatch was structural, not individual.

One exception: one team member was genuinely damaging the culture. Not a fit issue. A behavior issue that most of the team felt.

And underneath all of it, the market hypothesis the entire product had been built on had never been pressure-tested against reality.

None of these were new problems. They were old frictions that had been worked around rather than resolved. I was the first person to name them together as a pattern and to quantify what continuing to tolerate them would cost.

Within three months I had achieved full organizational alignment across team and board. It was something that hadn't existed before I arrived. I also brought in an external sales coach specifically to pressure-test my read on the commercial team. The conclusion confirmed what I had already diagnosed: the sales function needed to be rebuilt, not coached.

I presented the board with a case to replace the development setup entirely and rebuild the product from scratch on the correct market foundation. The issue was not the individuals. It was that the team's entire operating model had been built for corporate delivery, not startup speed. A fit-for-purpose external team would deliver 4x the output per krona spent, and build on the right assumptions. The board approved.

What I kept making visible, at every step, was the cost of delay. Not in abstract terms. In concrete impact on capability, capital, and time. And on human capital. Because people do not thrive in circumstances like these.

I put a severance package in place for the team member with the behavior issue within six weeks of arriving. I pushed the board to restructure the sales team immediately, over the objections of the parent company's HR function, who consistently asked for more patience. I had already waited long enough to know that patience was not the answer.

After months of approved decisions and continued friction from the parent organization, I returned to the chairman with a final position: I need mandate to replace the tech team and execute the reorganization within three weeks. If that mandate cannot be given, we need to have a different conversation about what this organization can realistically achieve.

I knew what that ultimatum would surface. That was the point.

Volvo concluded that they did not have the internal capability to lead and resource a digital startup at the level required. The company was wound down. A decision that saved the parent company up towards 30 MSEK annually and prevented years of continued misallocation of capital and management attention.

I didn't make the decision to wind down. I created the conditions where the owner could no longer avoid making it. My job was to give them clarity. Not comfort.

The alternative — incremental adjustments, continued investment, sustained ambiguity — would have consumed far more before reaching the same conclusion. I got them there in months instead of years.

Compounding friction does not resolve itself through patience. Every week of delay increases the cost of the eventual decision. The leader's job is not to manage the friction. It is to name it, quantify it, and force a real decision before the cost becomes irreversible.

Governance structures that sit between a startup and a large corporate parent create their own category of friction. I learned that the speed, accountability, and decision-making authority a startup needs are fundamentally incompatible with corporate HR timelines and approval chains. That incompatibility is itself a structural problem and diagnosing it early is the only way to address it before it becomes the reason nothing changes.

And sometimes the most valuable outcome is knowing when to stop. And having the courage to say so before more capital, time, and energy is spent going nowhere.