As a business building professional, Nuno Ferreira designs, builds and launches ‘Corporate Ventures’. With hands-on expertise in (hyper growth) scale-ups, he turns concepts into actionable growth with concrete propositions, go-to-market strategies and business cases.
Nuno started his career as business, tech and digital strategy consultant, at amongst others SparkOptimus. Then, he was in various leadership roles at hyper-growth startups across Latin America. However, Amsterdam was always his long term plan so he moved back with his wife and their 50kg Bernese Mountain dog in September 2022.
While he initially kept working as VP of Online Growth for a company in Latin America, he later joined Sweav. Within 2 days, Sweav connected Nuno to Fugro, and things hit off.
Nuno was the first one hired in the Accelerated Business Building team at Fugro. Their strategic mission was to scale selected businesses & products in the technology & software space, particularly key in an asset-heavy company as Fugro. As such, he blended startup agility with ‘big corp muscle’ to develop a geotechnical data management software, called GeoDin.
Nuno states that: “My assignment originally had a duration of only 3 months but I stayed on longer than expected. This project keeps on challenging me with plenty of opportunities for growth for both the client and myself as a professional.”
Nuno mentions that: “In my experience, consulting firms focus on a ton of analysis and insights for strategic decisions, with impressive presentations and documents, but with low accountability and short term-focus.”
He continues: “As a freelancer, I can take full responsibility to deliver and to make GeoDin fly as a substantial part of Fugro. I only made one slide and shared two excel models, and everything else is put into practice.”
Nuno instills a start-up mindset, working for impact rather than perception, having Miro as his team’s most used tool. He created a team of 12 like-minded people that build like crazy, also known as the start-up garage. There is room to be bold and try (AI) tools for speed & efficiency.
Global Director of Strategy, Olga Nefedova, at Fugro quoted that: “His sharp thinking, caring heart and pragmatism are what’s keeping GeoDin’s heart beating. The team loves Nuno. He truly became part of the team and created impact on both strategic and executional level.”
Nuno is a people’s person and he likes to hug. He is also techy, geeky and highly efficient. Speed over perfection. Some may call him a ‘cowboy’ as he doesn’t always follow protocol. But he just goes for it while having fun along the way.
