Milo Tesselaar.

I founded new - Strategy & Concepts in early 2023, after more than twenty-four years of initiating, building, leading, advising across different worlds: culture, media, politics, hospitality, social impact. I’m an Austrian/Dutch mixture, based in Vienna, and self-employed since the age of nineteen, having intentionally chosen my own path apart from school and university early on. What accompanied me through all this time was a way of noticing: I see something new before it exists, a potential or a systemic gap. In places. In people. In organisations. In markets. In systems.

My way of noticing reveals itself, for example, on a winter walk through a striking alpine outpost. A beautiful, structurally struggling place, long written off by the regional economy. I noticed a former hundred-year-old hotel, abandoned for decades. I knew the struggling region well enough to see what it was missing. And I knew an entrepreneur I trusted to see it too. One call was enough to bring both sides together. What followed were years of negotiation and concept work - but the real beginning was a single thought on a walk, and a phone call to the right person: that a shuttered hotel, paired with the right visionary operator, could bring dynamism to an entire region.

Often I don’t start with a brief. It starts with me taking the initiative.

That also happens with people. For example, more than ten years ago, I met a former judge of the highest court whose politics and character struck me deeply. I was so convinced by her that I encouraged her to run for the presidency. As an independent, without a party and therefore without an apparatus. I told her I believed in the substance of her personality and candidacy, and that I would also take the responsibility for building it. In the weeks that followed, over the Christmas holidays, we built a functioning organisation, an independent political start-up, out of nothing with a group of talent that would later call itself “the best team ever.” On election night, the campaign achieved one of the strongest results ever for an independent candidacy in the country’s modern history. For the first time in a long while, this result cracked a political block that had been considered permanent for decades.

Sometimes what I see isn’t an obvious gap, but rather a hidden structural opportunity — a historic institution, respected and established, that needs transformation to fully hit its stride again. I spent several years as a closely integrated strategic partner, accompanying a nationally renowned institution with continuous leadership sparring, business development, relationship building, strategic outreach, shaping brand assets and earning trust. Consistent groundwork. Recently, a year after I had stepped back from active involvement, a former colleague told me that the leading global industry publication from the US had very proactively reached out to collaborate. Years of quiet, patient realignment had become visible across the Atlantic.

This is what I do, this is what I like: noticing what’s missing before anyone else. Often, the potential I identify is, to me, a call to action. A mission for something new, to the benefit of individuals, groups and the common good.

Seeing an organisation, or people, thrive on the potential we once elaborated on together, while also having fun making it happen - that, more than anything, is what makes me happy.

I’ve worked between business, politics, and civil society, between what is and what could be for more than twenty-four years. new - Strategy & Concepts is the most consistent form I’ve given this way of noticing so far.

• Transformation strategist
• Creative consultant
• Campaign director
• Initiator
• Advisory board member
• Ecosystem catalyst
• Executive coach