Jörg G. Beyer and the expensive business of finding things

Somewhere inside a large company, somebody knows which software runs the business. Finding that person, and persuading all the other people who know the other bits to join the conversation, can become a substantial project. Jörg G. Beyer encountered this difficulty at DHL. The organization moved things around the world. Information about its own technology could be rather harder to get moving.

Beyer was a CIO responsible for the logistics division’s IT strategy. André Christ worked alongside him as a managing consultant. They repeatedly needed information that was not readily available. On one occasion, collecting it meant travelling around the world for workshops with country IT teams. A question about systems had acquired an itinerary.

There is a particular irritation in having to discover what an organization already possesses. The applications exist. People use them. Money pays for them. Yet an accurate account of the whole can remain elusive. Beyer and Christ turned that irritation into LeanIX, founded in Bonn in January 2012.

The customer who became a founder

Beyer approached the problem with experience on the buying side of enterprise technology. His career had included consulting at Andersen Consulting and global CIO responsibilities. He had also led a consulting business before LeanIX. He understood the meetings, organizational boundaries and decisions that surround a piece of software long after someone has installed it.

That background matters because the founders’ problem was practical. Projects needed a usable account of the IT landscape. Too much effort went into collecting and arranging the information before anyone could address the job that had prompted the search.

Existing enterprise architecture tools did not persuade Beyer to buy. They were expensive, complicated and required trained specialists. LeanIX’s founding idea brought software as a service, accessible interfaces and scalable pricing to that work. The buyer had become a supplier, carrying a fairly precise memory of what had annoyed him.

A method before a market

Beyer’s name also appears on a way of assessing applications: the Beyer-Smertnig model, which he co-developed during his CIO career. The method examines functional suitability. It asks people to list an application’s principal functions and assess how adequately they support the business. Comparability is central to the exercise.

That sounds modest until one considers the alternative: a roomful of people defending different systems on different grounds. A shared method gives the conversation a common surface. It helps move a decision beyond the conviction that the application in one’s own department is, naturally, indispensable.

The connection to LeanIX is straightforward. An inventory becomes more valuable when it supports a decision. Knowing that a system exists is useful; knowing which work depends on it, and how well it does that work, is more useful still. Beyer’s earlier assessment work and his later company both addressed that distance between possessing information and being able to use it.

The years before the cheques

The founders initially financed product development themselves. By March 2015, when LeanIX announced its first financing round, the company had already been operating for roughly three years. Capnamic Ventures and Iris Capital invested €2.2 million. In the preceding year, the customer base had grown from three companies to 20, with profitable growth.

Those early customers included organizations such as DHL, RWE, Vaillant and Axel Springer. The proposition had to work in places where technology portfolios were already complicated and where changing an established practice involved more than downloading a promising application.

LeanIX’s early milestones were small enough to count without rounding: its first five customers were using the product in 2013. The first LeanIX Connect Day followed in Basel in 2014. Before the international offices and larger financing rounds, there were individual customers and a gathering where people could discuss the work.

In September 2016, the company won the Pirate Summit’s Walk the Plank pitch competition in Cologne. Christ delivered the pitch. The founders’ prize included a three-day trip to Berlin and London to meet investors. Enterprise architecture had found itself on a stage with a distinctly less corporate name.

The award supplied a moment of theatre. The underlying business remained the patient work of persuading organizations to adopt another way of understanding their systems. For Beyer, that work increasingly meant building the people and processes through which customers found the product, bought it and continued using it.

Boston required a person, too

In February 2017, LeanIX opened an office in Boston. Its US subsidiary had been established the year before, and American customers already included Haworth and Flagstar Bank. Beyer served as interim manager of the Boston office. The initial announcement described a six-person team.

He moved to the United States with his family to oversee the venture. It is an unusually concrete detail in a story often told through financing rounds. International expansion involved a founder changing where he lived, alongside the work of building a business in another market.

“Our company has a strong focus on the US market,” Beyer said at the time. An office could bring the company closer to customers, but an address alone could hardly answer their questions. People had to establish relationships, support buyers and turn interest into business.

In July, LeanIX raised $7.5 million in a Series B led by DTCP, with existing investors participating. The money was intended for US expansion and product development, including strengthening teams in Boston and Bonn. By then, the software served more than 80 customers worldwide.

Making room for other people

Beyer’s contribution extended across sales and lead generation in Europe and the United States. Customer success, demand generation, legal and HR also figured in his responsibilities. The range is a reminder of how elastic a founder’s job description can become. A neat title often conceals a considerable collection of tasks.

His comments about recruitment offered one view of what he wanted around him. He described an ideal candidate as someone enthusiastic about a growing environment, able to contribute to the culture and keen to play a meaningful part in the company’s success. It was a description of participation as well as performance.

There was a physical expression of collaboration back in Bonn. For the company’s new offices, completed in 2018, Beyer and Christ requested smaller meeting rooms where team members could gather. The space also included a central area combining kitchen, lounge and meeting functions. Even a business devoted to mapping software needed somewhere for people to talk.

At EA Connect Day in 2017, 230 participants gathered at adidas’s headquarters. Speakers included executives from adidas, Bosch and SAP. Beyer described the event’s purpose as exchanging ideas about IT architecture and digitization. The product’s surrounding community was developing places to compare experience, too.

A year to leave

Beyer’s departure had a long preparation. In November 2018, he began transferring his co-CEO duties to Christ. He left the business on October 31, 2019. Between those dates sat a twelve-month transition, designed to keep customers and operations running through the change.

His international sales responsibilities were divided among senior colleagues. North American sales, EMEA sales, customer success, HR and legal each had a destination. The distribution offers a useful portrait of the work he had accumulated: an organization had to absorb the different parts of one founder’s role.

Company histories tend to make room for beginnings and transactions. Handovers receive less attention, although they explain something equally important about how a business develops. Responsibilities that once gathered around a founder can eventually be carried by a larger team. In Beyer’s case, leaving was itself an assignment with a timetable.

Another seat at the table

His next public chapters included supporting other founders. Workpath named him among its business angels, alongside Christ and executives from other technology and consulting businesses. Discussing the team around founder Johannes Müller, Beyer emphasized the will, passion and endurance required to grow a company through its challenges.

“Ein Gründer muss den Willen, die Leidenschaft und die Ausdauer haben”

Jörg G. Beyer, on backing Workpath
Will, passion and endurance - excerpt in the original German.

Code Intelligence also identified him among its backers in June 2022. The Bonn company develops automated software testing technology. Workpath and Code Intelligence operate in different fields, but both put him alongside entrepreneurs selling software to organizations with complicated needs.

Code Intelligence had grown out of research at the University of Bonn. Its platform sought to find software vulnerabilities before a finished product reached users. Beyer was supporting a company concerned with what happens inside software, after years spent helping businesses understand the applications across an organization. The technical task differed; both addressed problems enterprise customers needed to solve.

In December 2021, he appeared on House of Trusted Advisor for an episode about selling to corporate customers. It was a subject that connected his time inside a large enterprise with his experience building a supplier. He has described an interest in advising startups on enterprise sales, pricing, organizational growth and entering the US market.

LeanIX continued on its own timetable. SAP completed its acquisition on November 8, 2023, four years after Beyer’s departure. The business he had co-founded became part of a larger software group. His operating chapter and the company’s acquisition chapter sit at different points in the story.

Beyer has also expressed an ambition away from application portfolios and sales teams: spending more time improving his drumming. It is a welcome change of scale. After helping organizations establish what they have and what they should do next, he still has something of his own to practise.