Haakon Dalseth & Mette Liset

Haakon Dalseth

Tell us a bit about your background

Before I joined Marketer, I spent three years at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). There I worked with a wide range of topics including corporate strategy, M&A and due diligence, go-to-market strategies, and re-organizations and operating model design, across multiple companies and industries. Through helping clients make key strategic decisions and solve complex operational problems, I have developed my problem-solving capabilities and expanded my analytical toolbox, which I hope to leverage and grow further as part of Marketer’s strategy team.

I have a Master’s degree in finance from the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), where I also spent a semester in Brisbane, Australia, exchanging the rainy weather in Bergen for sun and surfing for six months🦘

My interest in start-ups and entrepreneurship started already in high school, where my friends and I started and ran two youth enterpries. Since then, I have always known that I would return to the start-up world at some point. I am therefore very excited to be a part of Marketer’s journey.

How have the first couple of months been?

The first months at Marketer have been great! The company is full of welcoming people, who work together towards a common goal in a fast-moving and ambitious environment. There are also a lot of fun social activities and events, making it easy to get to know colleagues across the organization. I have felt like a part of the Marketer team since day one and have already worked on several interesting and challenging topics.

What kind of projects have you been working on since you started?

Since August, I have spent the majority of my time developing Marketer’s long-term strategy and setting the company’s future target state and ambitions. This includes defining our focus markets, products and customers, and developing a roadmap to realize an accelerated growth path towards our ambitions. Another part of enabling the strategy is to ensure we have the optimal organizational structure, operating model and internal processes. In addition, I have taken part in developing investor material, defining our future M&A and partnership agenda, and assessing the competitive landscape.

Currently, I am assisting our subsidiary EVE Images in ensuring optimized processes and operations as well as aligning EVE’s long-term strategy with Marketer's. We just spent a few days in Berlin, visiting their offices and getting to know the employees. In other words, my first months have been filled with different tasks and challenges, which have allowed me to get to know Marketer, our subsidiaries, and the amazing people across the company!

Mette Liset

Tell us a bit about your background

I studied Industrial economics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) - combining data science courses with a Master’s in finance. After 5 years in Trondheim, I joined BCG in Oslo, where I mainly worked in the energy space assisting with long-term strategies towards the energy transition.

During my studies, I founded Women in Finance at NTNU with a bunch of other girls, a great experience and an organization that I hope will contribute to the gender gap in the finance industry.

In addition, I also started a podcast together with a friend, where we interviewed and analyzed fellow students using a personality test to get to know them a bit better. The podcast is actually still alive, with new hosts, five years later🎙

What do you look forward to with this role?

First of all, I look forward to joining a scale-up with a great history and even greater ambitions. The years ahead will be both fun and challenging, and I look forward to contributing to the company's performance going forward. I am also excited to get to know a new industry with lots of potential, not only in Norway but also internationally.

What kind of competence and experience is necessary to have as a Strategy Consultant?

As a Strategy Consultant, you need to be curious and always try to look at challenges from different angles. You also need to be quite structured to make sure you prioritize the right way and get things done in time for deadlines. I also feel this job gets a bit easier if you know the right people to ask for insights - the key is to be friendly and humble.

What do you enjoy the most about working with strategy?

Working with strategy is both fun and frustrating, especially when you get to solve problems across the whole organization that contributes directly to its performance. Being able to follow and track improvement and see how strategy is implemented in-house is also very rewarding, and something I really missed when I worked as an external strategy consultant.

Our Strategy team. From the upper left: Axel Julius Pritzbauer, Mette Liset and Haakon Dalseth. From the lower left: Jonas Sørlie and Ludvig Kraft.

If you would like to know more about the Strategy team, read our previous article where we asked our Head of Strategy and M&A, Ludvig Kraft, about his ambitions for Marketer’s Strategy team going forward.