About Kent Karlsen

Kent Karlsen is partner of TON Business Performance Consulting and the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Hurricane Spa – the Norwegian manufacturer of luxury bathroom products for private homes and hotels. His responsibilities are planning and executing marketing strategies and activities, business model development, eCommerce sales channels, implementing go-to-market plans and building reseller networks.

Mr. Karlsen has over 20 years of experience as employed, entrepreneur and consultant: Planning and executing digital marketing activities, international sales and technology development to become more competitive in the market. As an entrepreneur Mr. Karlsen is a visionary leader and create value from his energy and strong combination of marketing and technology knowledge. His global business experience makes him suited to work well together with people from different cultures.

Managing teams are often related to processes with digital transformation (challenging), digitization (easy), software development, Software as a Service (SaaS), digital marketing, marketing research, M&A and restructuring of the organization. Mr. Karlsen recently earned his certification in blockchain use cases from ConsenSys and a certification from MIT Sloan in business transformation. He has experienced both success and defeat, and he also has some thoughts about what is not working very well and what are the important factors for success.

Mr. Karlsen has done consulting for different industries; software, manufacturing, online trading/eCommerce, finance, auditing, accounting and consulting. He has performed board work for small-and medium-sized companies in the growth phase. He has documented skills in transforming ideas to new products, managing a cross- functional team and to lead and implement business projects on time.

Mr. Karlsen is a citizen of Norway and has been fortunate to work with people from all over the world (Scandinavia, USA/UK, France, Austria, Bahrain/Saudi-Arabia and China). His personality type in Myers & Briggs system is ENTP.

Mr. Laupsa has worked with many global, pan-European, African and GCC businesses to develop and implement winning operating models, typically leveraging the power of technology and insight as a platform to improve commercial decision making, optimize operational efficiency and establish a culture and discipline of continuous improvement.