I. SIGNATURE
City of Legacy
Recognizing, Creating
and Realizing Value
II. POSITION
Position
City of Legacy stands for value creation, entrepreneurship and solutions: for the building, unfolding, renewal and creation of a new world of legacies. That includes companies, brands and wealth in business as well as institutions and works in politics and society that carry across generations. Legacy by legacy, we recognize the value a venture holds and the value still to come. From it we create earnings, growth, impact and permanence beyond the individual. And we realize what is entrusted to us.
CATALYST·VISIONARY·STRATEGIST
Your partner for strategy and finance, leadership and organization, brand and design, solutions and execution. All from a single source, from the first thought to the result. For 1 founders, owners and companies of every size. For 2 capital, from family offices, foundations and philanthropists through private equity, venture capital and sovereign wealth funds to activist hedge funds and investors. For 3 organizations, institutions, governments and royal houses. And for 4 visionaries and decision-makers with the will to shape the present and the future for generations.
Whether founding and growth, transformation and succession, equity investment, carve-out, turnaround or reorganization: what the venture demands decides the form. I act as sparring partner, take a seat on the advisory board, lead with full operational responsibility, or take an entrepreneurial stake.
“Created to create.”Dennis Fransen
“Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position.”Michael E. Porter, economist, Harvard
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”Alan Kay, technology visionary
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel laureate
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”Steve Jobs, founder of Apple
“We create. So the future begins, unfolds and grows beyond itself.”City of Legacy
“His counsel was as if one had inquired of God. So was all his counsel regarded by the kings.”Bible, on the counsellor of kings
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III. MY FOUNDATION – Practice
My Foundation
I lead City of Legacy. My path connects several disciplines: banking and corporate finance, strategy and transformation, international management, venture capital and innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and design. I know each of them from my own practice.
This is what I build on:
- Commerzbank AG, leading bank for the German Mittelstand: private and corporate banking
- Enterprise Holdings, the world's leading provider of mobility solutions: branch management, cost and performance accounting
- Corporate finance boutique, international mandates: M&A processes, valuation, investor outreach
- World Evangelical Alliance, Business Coalition, global business and investor network: corporate strategy development
- Plug and Play Tech Center, innovation platform and early-stage investor from Silicon Valley: corporate innovation and venture capital, partnerships between corporations and startups
- Strategic leadership, organization, planning and decision-making
- Site and operations management, people, processes, quality
- Leadership responsibility, strategy and organizational build-up
- University in Munich, strategy, leadership, innovation, brand management and international marketing; practice project with an international energy technology group, invited to its headquarters
- Own entrepreneurship, brands built from the ground up: legal protection of brand identity, product and design, supply chain, financial plan, online shop and international website, own AI systems
For more than fifteen years I have worked where value is created. I have created my own brands, led organizations, valued companies: in my profession, in my studies and as an entrepreneur. With wisdom, foresight and vision, analytical clarity, creativity and entrepreneurial drive I read a venture from the numbers to the culture, decide, and stand behind the result, together with my team.
III. MY FOUNDATION – Research
Research
My practice includes my own research: how companies grow, and which decisions keep their growth on track even after the billion-dollar round. It covers the topics that owners and leadership teams care about today.
My research fields:
◆Value creation: how owners and leadership teams realize the value they have already identified and make it last, and which value levers work fastest, across private equity, family businesses, corporate groups and growth companies.
◆Expansion and internationalization: how well-capitalized companies combine finance, organization, marketing and technology into growth that lasts; with interviews at Celonis, Germany's first decacorn, and Atlantic Labs, a Berlin early-stage investor.
◆Venture capital and ownership: how capital changes leadership, culture and ownership, what Celonis, Personio and Revolut made of it, and which lessons from Gorillas, WeWork and Quibi keep growth on track.
◆Scaling and organization: how HelloFresh grew from around 100 to some 20,000 employees in 18 countries, and what hiring and culture contributed.
◆Corporate governance: the US and German systems, compared through the examples of Amazon and Zalando, and how leadership and oversight work together in each.
I bring practice and research together so that your company realizes the value it holds.
IV. FIELDS OF IMPACT
Fields of Impact
With City of Legacy we develop companies, brands, structures and systems in which capital, people and technology work together. For every venture: We solve it. With insight, structure and intuition.
What remains at the end:
◆Strategy and Value Creation: Where the value lies and which path lifts it. A course for the coming years, for a company, a portfolio or an equity holding, decided in sparring.
◆Transformation and Growth: The company comes through the upheaval and carries itself afterwards. Succession, reorganization, carve-out, turnaround or growth: led operationally where the venture demands it, proven in numbers.
◆Brand, Design and Communication: Brands with substance: identity, presence and communication as one unit, from the mark to the client conversation.
◆Innovation and Solutions: An idea becomes a finished solution: a new business field or product, tested, realized and on the market.
◆Organization and Leadership: Decisions are made where responsibility sits. Roles, teams and paths ordered so that only what belongs at the top lands there.
◆Finance, Valuation and Value Creation: What the company is worth and what increases that value: valuation, business model, key figures, costs and working capital.
◆Processes, Projects and Sales: What is decided gets done, until the result is measurably on the table.
◆AI Systems and Automation: An AI system that works for the company itself: analyses, decision papers and processes that run on their own.
What I propose, we also execute: from valuation to organization. This is backed by a team of specialists I select myself.
V. INVITATION
Invitation
It begins with a conversation about the venture: what is to be achieved, what it needs and by when. Then I decide whether and in which form we take it on: sparring, an advisory board seat, leadership or an equity stake. After that comes our offer: scope, team and terms. Whoever talks to me also works with me. The first step is the inquiry on this page, an e-mail or a call.
Whoever works with City of Legacy belongs to the Legacy Club: people who create great things and open doors for one another.
What we lift or newly create together becomes part of a new world that works and lasts, across generations.
House of Consulting at Platz der Vereinten Nationen, Bonn | Munich | international
Data privacy · Legal notice · City of Legacy · Dennis Fransen