Where were you, physically, when you decided to join Robopack Group, and what was going through your head?
At the dining table at home, with a good friend over for the evening. I’d been lucky enough to have several options on the table, and I’d been talking him through them. After he left and I sat with the conversation for a while, it hit me that I’d already made the decision. I’d been noticeably more energised when I talked about the Robopack opportunity than about any of the others.
How do you describe what you do to someone outside the tech industry? Your neighbor, your kid’s teacher. What do you actually say?
Every company gives their employees a laptop. Someone has to keep those laptops working, secure, and up to date. We make the software that lets IT teams do that in a user-friendly way that improves the quality of the company’s IT setup.
What’s something most people wouldn’t guess about you from your LinkedIn profile?
I build LEGO to relax. There’s a LEGO city on display in my home office. It resets my head and challenges the creative side of me in a way that work doesn’t.
The career arc
You’ve built two companies from near-zero to over DKK 100M in revenue and sold both. What’s the one thing you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of the first one?
The team you build in the first years sets the foundation for everything that comes after. I was 22 when I became CEO at UnoTel and I learned a lot of things the hard way. The biggest one: hiring the right people, and creating an environment where they can perform, is the single most important thing you do. If I started over today I’d spend twice as much of my own calendar on hiring and keeping the right people, and half as much on almost everything else.
Flexfone was 100% reseller-driven. Every customer came through a partner. A lot of founders would find that nerve-wracking. You made it your competitive advantage. Why did that model suit you?
Three reasons. First, you reach much further through partners than you ever could on your own. Second, the right products fit naturally into a partner’s existing portfolio — there’s real synergy when you’re not competing for the customer’s attention but adding to the value the partner is already delivering. Third, partners are often closer to the customer than you can ever be yourself. They know the local market, the language, the existing IT setup. That proximity is something you can’t replicate from the outside, and it makes the whole model strong.
When Dstny acquired Flexfone, you stayed on and took a group-level role spanning six countries. That’s a very different gear to operate in. What did you learn about yourself in that chapter?
I’m better at building than at administering, and I needed to be honest about that. Running indirect strategy across Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden and Denmark is a different job from founding a company. It’s alignment more than invention. I learned a lot — particularly about how channel models actually differ across European markets, which is directly useful in what I’m doing now — but I also learned I’m happiest when there’s something real to build. That clarity is part of why I’m here.
You’re now available and choosing your next move. You could have gone in several directions. Why this, why now?
Three reasons. The products are genuinely good. There’s no partner channel today, and that’s an area where I have real experience. And I love the stage Robopack is at — the move from startup to scale-up. That’s the most interesting part of any company’s journey, and it’s exactly where Robopack is right now.
Why Robopack Group
When you first looked seriously at the three products — Robopack, SoftwareCentral, Tenant Manager — what did you see that you don’t think everyone sees yet?
They’re not three products. They’re three entry points into the same conversation with an IT organisation. Robopack solves a sharp pain in application packaging. SoftwareCentral sits at the operational core of endpoint management. Tenant Manager gives MSPs the multi-tenant control they can’t get from Microsoft directly. Once a customer or partner is using one, the other two stop being a sales pitch and become a logical next step. Most ISVs in this space have one product and try to stretch it. We have three that already fit together.
The merger between Robopack and SoftwareCentral is recent. Some people from the outside might wonder what it adds up to. In your words, what does this group actually become when it’s firing on all cylinders?
A powerhouse in the operational layer for Microsoft endpoint management. We become the company MSPs and enterprises think of first when Microsoft’s native tooling stops being enough — which, for almost everyone above a certain size, it does.
What would have made you say no to this role?
If the products hadn’t held up under scrutiny. The product is the core of the business — everything we build commercially has to stand on top of that. If that foundation had been weaker than it looked, I wouldn’t be here.
The vision
Partners and MSPs reading this will want to know: what changes when you’re in this seat, and what stays the same?
What stays the same: the product focus and the engineering quality. That’s not broken and I have no interest in touching it. What changes is the commercial side. We’re building an end-to-end partner program — with real economics for partners, proper enablement, and predictability. Today, we don’t have a mature program for partners who want to work with us. Twelve months from now, that won’t be true.
The Microsoft Intune ecosystem is moving fast. Where do you see Robopack Group in that landscape two or three years from now and what’s the position you’re building toward?
The clear leader in our category in EMEA, with a partner channel that drives the majority of new revenue, and a presence in North America that’s starting to matter. Not the biggest. The most useful — to partners, to customers, and to Microsoft. Microsoft has thousands of ISVs in their ecosystem. The ones that win are the ones the channel actively wants to sell. That’s the position we’re building toward.
You’re known for keeping customer churn exceptionally low — below 2% over more than a decade. What’s the actual discipline behind that number? What do most companies get wrong?
It’s not a discipline. It’s a series of small decisions that all point the same way. Hire support people who solve problems instead of closing tickets. Make sure customers actually get the full value out of the product. Let partners fire you if you stop being useful — that keeps you honest. Treat a renewal not as a contractual event but as a quiet vote of confidence you have to earn every quarter. Most companies get this wrong because they treat retention as a function — a team, a dashboard, a QBR cadence — rather than as the consequence of doing everything else properly.
What’s the first thing you’re going to do that customers and partners will actually notice?
They’ll notice that the merger of SoftwareCentral and Robopack lands as one company, not two stitched together. One point of contact, one experience, one product story — with the best of both worlds preserved. That’s the first visible thing. Everything else — the partner program etc.comes after that.
The person
You kept the same team around you at Flexfone for over a decade — 0.8% annual employee churn is almost unheard of. What were you doing that most leaders aren’t?
Mostly listening. People stay where they feel they’re doing meaningful work alongside people they respect, with a leader who’s straight with them. That’s not complicated. What’s hard is doing it consistently for ten years, especially when the company is growing and the pressure is on. I also put real effort into internal communication — making sure people feel part of the company and the journey, not just part of a function.
What kind of leader do you not want to be?
The bureaucratic kind, where everything is about process and every decision has to go through me. That kills speed and it kills ownership. The job is to set direction and trust the team to execute, not to be the bottleneck everything has to pass through.
Outside of work — what are you into? What does a good weekend look like for you?
Uncomplicated. The kids are still small — one of them just turned one — so most of it is built around them. I’ve started running again after a long pause, which I’d missed more than I realised. LEGO with the kids, or when the kids are asleep. A book in the evening.
Is there a decision in your career you’d make differently if you could go back?
I’ve learned how important it is to say no. There have been projects and opportunities along the way that I should have turned down because they didn’t pull us in the right direction or sit with the vision. They cost time and energy that should have gone somewhere else. If I could go back, I’d say no to more of them, earlier.
The close
What would you want a customer, a partner, or a prospective employee to take away from this article? The one thing you’d want them to remember?
That this is a company building something genuinely amazing, with great people who know what they’re doing. The rest follows from that.
Finish this sentence: “Twelve months from now, I want people to say that Lars…”
…helped bring SoftwareCentral and Robopack together into one company that managed to grow and have fun at the same time.
