Excedea joins CIVITTA: An interview with Viktor Reppo

Excedea, one of the leading consulting companies in the Nordics, is joining forces with CIVITTA. Read more about it in an interview with Viktor Reppo, one of the company’s founders: 

 

First of all, wishing you and your team a warm welcome to CIVITTA! We’d like to find out more about the company that you’ve built, together with its areas of expertise.

Thank you very much for the warm welcome! We are very excited to join CIVITTA.

Excedea is a team of 23 consultants based in Estonia, Finland, and Sweden. We are specialized in two service areas; both are related to business growth. One service area is international growth and new markets entry, the other is funding for growth and innovation. In both areas, we have extensive experience and comprehensive methodologies. In the international growth and the new markets entry, we are supporting our clients throughout the journey, from forming the internationalization strategy to practical implementation. In the funding services, we are helping our clients to maximize their funding potential and acquire financing from pan-European programs and local funding administrators.

Excedea was founded at the end of the year 2007. In those days the international growth and especially the emerging markets strategy was on top of the agenda for most large companies. At the same time, there was a clear deficit of international growth and emerging markets experts. It was widely recognized that export capacity is paramount not only for companies but also for the competitiveness and wellbeing of entire nations. We set our goal to offer our clients the support that they needed and deserved in navigating this exciting and accelerating megatrend.

While for many consulting companies it seemed too complicated, we found this challenge exciting, we saw the opportunity to create value and were dedicated to bridging the emerging markets gap for our clients. Later our clients helped us realize that the skills that we developed in the emerging markets are also very valuable in the developed countries. Thus, we started increasingly working in the western European markets. Over the years we have gathered extensive experience from many industries and markets and developed a comprehensive methodology to support our clients throughout the growth journey. Today international growth remains one of the areas where companies strongly benefit from expert advice and support. 

What unites most of our clients is the high growth ambition. We offer several areas of expertise, but I believe it is fair to say that overall and before all, we are growth advisors.

 

What are your plans for the near future in relation to developing the offices and their service offering?

Our Estonian and Finnish offices will integrate with the respective CIVITTA offices, while our Stockholm office will form the new base for CIVITTA in Sweden.

We see many opportunities to further improve the depth of our existing services as well as offer new value-adding services to our clients. Through the CIVITTA group, we get access to the top talents in many countries, which is clearly beneficial for international growth services. Additionally, CIVITTA people have deep competencies in other areas, for instance in data analytics, sustainability, digital transformation, etc., which can greatly benefit our clients. On the funding side, there are also many synergies. We will add new competencies and capabilities, that will benefit our client, and we have a deep expertise that we can offer to all CIVITTA offices.  

 

Talking about interesting or unique projects, can you tell us about some of the most impactful ones you have contributed to through all three offices?

We have been blessed with the opportunities to work with many inspiring clients and on many incredibly interesting projects. I can not disclose very specific details of the projects as they contain a lot of confidential information. We have done a lot of work with life-science and biotech companies helping them fund state of the art innovations and bring them to new markets. We have done big projects with construction materials companies including paint and coatings, plasters, wood, stainless steel, aluminium, and plastics, helping our clients effectively open new market territories. We have worked with some of the world-leading chemicals manufacturers, and well-known consumer brands and did extensive assignments in the food and beverage industry.

 

What are your plans and expectations now that you joined the CIVITTA family?

I expect to learn a lot from my new colleagues. Everything that I have seen so far makes me believe that CIVITTA has great people and the highest quality standards. This is always inspiring, and I am glad to start working together.   

 

Last but not least, as CIVITTA is positioned as the Challenger advisory, could you share how you feel this Challenger spirit will apply to your future endeavors?

The challenger spirit is very natural also for our team. In the last few decades, the management consulting industry has been going through many changes due to the commoditization of information, globalization, the popularity of the management science in academia, digitalization, etc., We must constantly strive to deliver higher value for our clients. On top of it, we chose growth and innovation to be our field of work and these topics, by their very nature, presume constant challenging of the status quo. I find that the challenger mentality is very natural for our entire team, so we feel right at home.