A11 × BÖLLHOFF

Böllhoff didn't wait to get disrupted. They built the the competitor themselves, in 4 months.

THE CHALLENGE

A 149-year-old family business.

Since 1877, Böllhoff developes and manufactures industrial joining and fastening technology. Today they are a leading global provider serving the industry and automotive sectors, with annual sales of around €750 million.

Alongside the digital transformation of that core business, Böllhoff wanted something else: a genuinely new, independent business, built without the legacy systems and legacy processes that come with running a company for a century and a half.

In practice, that meant building the kind of leaner, faster competitor that might otherwise have shown up on its own.

The result: getspecialfasteners.

THE METHODOLOGY

RECUBATION

That is what we call building your own worst competitor, on purpose.
Together we are launching a second, independent business, run like a speedboat alongside the core business, powered by AI, data and agile units.

Use Commercial Brownfield
Over the years, an interconnected ecosystem of structures, processes, and dependencies evolves, creating a complex brownfield environment.

Build on Technological Greenfield
Rebuilding the business core from the ground up to leverage AI and state-of-the-art technology in ways that are simply not possible within the existing organization.

Applying Product-Market Fit

Commercial Engine

AI-powered testing to validate adjacent market opportunities
Sales and marketing unified in one funnel
Clear qualification stages from awareness to education to selection
Human-in-the-loop close: opportunities converge, but people decide the deal

Data Core

One data warehouse synced with HubSpot, CRMs and Google Ads
Built for production, not just a pilot: Staging environments, automated testing, and monitoring/alerts on every pipeline