We are delighted to feature Managing Consultant Olli Kilpi from our Helsinki office in this edition of Friisberg’s Employee Spotlight series. Olli joined the Friisberg family in August 2025, bringing with him more than 25 years of leadership experience across FMCG, the restaurant business, and retail. With an extensive international background including 15 years living outside Finland, Olli has worked with global brands and played a key role in the internationalization of two Finnish companies.
Prior to joining Friisberg, he served as CEO of a fast-growing Finnish retail company operating in Finland and Germany, and spent 13 years with McDonald’s, most recently as Managing Director for Norway then Sweden. At Friisberg, Olli focuses on senior-level executive searches across organizational functions, with his particular expertise in B2C industries.
I’m a newly appointed Managing Consultant for Friisberg Helsinki, in this role I’m in charge of the strategy and quality of our executive search team - I’m lucky to have a strong team who I am proud to represent.
I really enjoy meeting lots of different talented people and enjoy discussing the challenges and opportunities that companies face. I also enjoy understanding the values and cultures of different companies.
It’s rewarding to talk with talented executives to build an image of what motivates them, what kind of leadership styles and team roles they bring to the table and to identify their particular strengths that can help the companies grow.
One key trend is the tremendous volatility in different markets. This requires new skills from executives: resilience, clarity, ability to lead change, empathy. In particular - in the age of AI, leadership requires boldness to evaluate the impact of modernizing the business model on all levels. This creates uncertainty and even fear in organizations. Visibility and empathy of leadership is needed, as well as clarity of communicating the direction. In many cases, a manager with a ready and fixed agenda is not the ideal candidate. Instead, adaptability and agility are characteristics of a leader that can navigate the best in the era of uncertainty.
I’d like to start by saying, that there’s not really a single winning quality for all purposes. Instead, we must understand the client. What’re the values and culture that exist in the company, and do they want to change the culture to a certain direction? What phase is the company in? Are they looking for a turnaround leader or perhaps someone with a track record of building sustainable growth? What does the team look like, are there particular personality types that are missing in the team that would make the decision making more dynamic and the discussion richer?
Having said that, nothing beats attitude. It is hard to teach a winning spirit and willingness to challenge yourself, constantly learn new things and aim for a higher performance. I always love to see behaviour, which demonstrates a strong winning spirit!
In the end, it is always about the people. You can’t win without the right team around you. No matter how good your product or service is, it is not sustainable without the right people. Invest in them, believe in them and grow with them.
McDonald’s taught me so much that I can use in my current role. The McDonald’s leadership is a beautiful combination of long careers, people that have grown within the company, and new hires, people that bring new ideas and challenge the existing. We used to say that we are in ‘the people business’, the co-operation between the franchisees (and their staff), the corporate employees and the suppliers was the key to success. During my 13 years in the company, I learned a lot about building winning teams, evaluating and hiring talent and developing teamwork. McDonald’s really invests a lot in people. The company also invested in me, and I was privileged to participate in world-class leadership development programs.
The experience that I am most proud of was how we, under my tenure as a Managing Director, together with our franchisees, turned the business around in Norway and created and executed a new strategy that led to a sustainable profitable growth. It would not have been possible without the right people, in all areas of the business, that understood the vision, believed in the strategy and executed with excellence. This required also recruiting new talent. We brought in executives that had the skills and seniority required to lead the change and elevate our standards, but they were also a nice cultural fit. That experience confirmed my belief that winning in the end is all about having the right people around you.
I have a Masters degree from the School of Economics in Helsinki, major in Marketing and minor in Finance. I have also conducted exchange studies at the HEC in Montreal and La Sorbonne in Paris. This has given me a solid base as I grew within the ranks in sales and marketing, 15 years after my graduation I took my first role as a Managing Director of a market. Finally, prior to starting a new career as an executive search consultant, I was Group CEO of a fast growing and internationally operating Finnish company, backed up by Private Equity.
In my opinion, academic learning has of course given me a good theoretical thinking of how to approach different situations. I still regularly quote Philip Kotler. And as I discuss with my son, who is a second-year student at the School of Economics, majoring in Finance and Investment, I notice that I still remember the courses in Economics as well as Finance and these courses have helped me both in my work as a Managing Director, and to a certain extent also in managing my personal finances!
But I mostly value the learning that came throughout my studies. The longer-term learning of how to acquire information, how to process it, analyse it and develop opinions. And how to debate and defend the different perspectives from the data, all to form better conclusions and more mature decisions. This way of being critical to available information, ability to ask questions and process to form opinions was something that I continued to develop seamlessly after graduation at my first employer Procter&Gamble. P&G was an excellent continuation to real life after an academic learning.
