During this interview, Marcus Diekmann observes the café’s barista at work. For a good hour. Then he gets up, walks towards him – and hugs him: “Everyone who walked out here with a coffee in their hand had a smile on their face. You’re doing really well,” he says.
Shortly before, the former boss of the bicycle company Rose Bikes and Investor had said that that was exactly what he expected of himself in the “happiest job of his life”: as a gas station salesman in Holtwick-Rosendahl, a rural village of 3,500 people part of North Rhine-Westphalia. For years he sold newspapers and cigarettes there, always in such a way that as many customers as possible were satisfied. “It worked 97 percent of the time,” he says. “That’s how I learned: People don’t need plans, they need mini-successes,” he concludes this anecdote. Or, no, not at all. Another lesson comes to mind: “Serve and perform. Rainer Gerdes, ex-CEO of Bertelsmann, gave me that. That was his rule of three: serve and perform – then cash in big.”
The 44-year-old has what feels like a whole book of such lessons and hacks for founders, young professionals and other interested readers. After all, that’s what the interview is about. We want to talk to a rather unusual entrepreneur about what he has learned. He is always well prepared and focused, he says. “I am always in the here and now.”
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A miracle for a man whose Linkedin biography includes 30 stations, six of which are even current. He sits on the advisory board of Rose Bikes, is an evangelist at Shopware AG, a shareholder at Votebase and on the advisory board of Baby One. So many balls in the air, how does it work? And then the divorced father also casually mentions that he only works until 12 noon during the children’s weeks, i.e. every 14 days. So you can obviously learn something from Marcus Diekmann.