Case study · 2021–2023
Absorbing a vendor's DACH sales org, and growing it into a €30M BU.
When NI decided to stop selling direct in DACH, dataTec won the distribution contract. Someone had to build the division that would carry it, in ten weeks, with a team that didn't exist yet.
€23M
BU revenue, FY 21/22
~40×
Off the starting baseline
5
Commercial engineers hired
Growth figures documented in the interim work certificate issued by dataTec's CEO, May 2023.
The brief was an emergency.
In late 2020, NI (National Instruments) restructured its DACH go-to-market. Direct inside sales was shut down, and the region's volume was routed through distributors. dataTec AG, the largest specialist distributor for test & measurement in Germany, signed the contract on 22 December, effective 1 January. Ten weeks from ink to live.
A new business unit called Modular Measurement was stood up internally to house NI's portfolio. Its initial mandate was explicitly temporary: absorb the products over eighteen months, then redistribute them across dataTec's existing business units. In practice, none of the other BUs had the modular footprint (PXI, CompactRIO, software-defined instrumentation) to carry it. The company's default margin model pushed prices above NI's own webshop. And the ex-NI hires on the payroll looked, at first glance to the CFO, a lot like overhead.
The task wasn't to grow a market. It was to absorb another company's commercial engine on a ten-week clock and make it pay for itself.
What I did.
-
Rebuilt the P&L out loud.
dataTec's default markup pushed our list prices above NI's own webshop. The distributor was losing to its own principal. I modelled the revenue-versus-margin scenarios, walked the CEO and CFO through the tradeoff, and got sign-off to drop the markup. Projection: roughly 50× revenue growth in three years. Actual: around 40× on a two-year timeline.
-
Recruited from the laid-off NI talent pool.
Five commercial engineers and three application engineers, almost all ex-NI, covering DE / AT / CH. They already knew the catalogue and the customers, and they spoke the internal NI dialect that kept the principal relationship smooth while the old NI workflows were still in flux. Talent acquisition was part of the role on paper, and the pool was unusually well-matched: the people NI had just let go were exactly the people I needed.
-
Renegotiated the distribution contract.
Vendor management with a focus on NI was the other half of the role. The business case I built earned a visit from NI's then-#2 to our Reutlingen HQ. We moved our margin off the floor. More importantly, we shifted dataTec's position with the principal from "another distributor" to their DACH test bed for portfolio experimentation.
-
Ended the "overpaid team" problem with a spreadsheet.
The BU was perceived internally as a cost centre. The engineers were expensive, the margin was the lowest of any vendor at dataTec, and the rumours followed. I modelled the full cost structure (logistics, RH allocation, finance overhead) against the revenue ramp. The EBITDA contribution turned out to exceed every other vendor relationship at the company. Finance got a tool to evaluate all BUs on the same basis. The rumours stopped.
-
Stood up the operational base.
Found and fitted out a new dataTec office in Munich, from lease search through layout and move-in. The interim work certificate later singled this out as one of the year's core deliverables. Alongside it: editorial angles for Spektrum, dataTec's quarterly technical magazine, and the PXI campaigns that went with them.
-
Stretched the footprint.
Opened a Swiss legal entity in the canton of Obwald (a six-month review with the cantonal chamber) and acquired MESATEC to anchor the Swiss beachhead. Once the NI business was stable, added Konrad's ABEX and LEON product lines to start reducing single-vendor dependency.
Where it landed.
dataTec's CEO signed an interim work certificate in May 2023 stating that the Modular business "grew from roughly €600K to roughly €23M in the fiscal year under Mr Abry's leadership." That's the documented headline. Behind it, the FY 23/24 run-rate was tracking toward €30M at the time of the handover, putting the two-year trajectory at about 40× the starting baseline.
The BU that was supposed to be temporary became dataTec's operational test bed for new vendor partnerships. The team of five commercial engineers stayed together through the growth phase. Evaluation work for additional portfolios (Heinzinger, NH Research, Konrad) routed through the BU desk as the single-vendor dependency question moved up the priority list.
In early 2023, I moved to a 75% sales and project management role covering four strategic vacancies during a transition period (Head of Sales, BDM, Application Engineer, Switzerland Sales Manager) while the organisation restructured around the next growth phase.
Let's talk
If you're standing up a technical sales org, or absorbing one from somewhere else, I'm open to conversations.