Giving back by changing minds

P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.

Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.

Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.

BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.

“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”

“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.

Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.

The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.

BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.

For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com

Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19

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At BTS, we’re constantly challenging ourselves to innovate at speed. And right now, it feels like we’re standing at the edge of something massive. The energy? Electric. The velocity? Unprecedented. For many of us, the current pace feels a lot like the early days of the pandemic: disorienting, high-stakes, and somehow exhilarating. And honestly—it should feel that way. Our teams have been tinkering with AI, specifically LLMs, for the past 2.5 years and it has really been in the last eight months that I can see the profound impact it is going to have for our clients, for our services and our operating model.

The opportunity isn’t about the technology. The world has it and it’s getting better by the minute. The issue is people and people’s readiness to adopt it and be re-tooled and re-skilled. It’s about leadership. AI is deeply personal, it’s surgical. In fact, that’s its genius. So, getting full scale adoption of AI, re-tooling everyone in the company by workflow, so that they can invent new services, unlock new customer value, unlock new levels of productivity, even use it for a better life, is the current race. The central question I’ve been wrestling with, alongside our clients and our own teams, is this:

What does AI actually mean for leadership and culture?

And the answer is clearer by the day: AI isn’t just a new toolset. It’s a new mindset. It demands that we rethink how we lead, how we learn, and how we build thriving organizations that can compete, adapt, and grow.

The productivity paradox revisited

Let’s start with the elephant in the boardroom. There’s been a lot of buzz around AI and its promises. But many leaders have quietly wondered: Will any of this actually move the needle? A year ago, we were asking the same thing. We had licenses. We had curiosity. We had early experiments. But the results were modest, a 1% productivity gain here or there. But by April, we were seeing:

• 30–80% productivity gains in software engineering
• 9–12% gains in consulting teams
• 5%-20% improvements in client success and operations

Just as importantly, the innovation unlock and creativity across our platforms due to vibe coding along with new simulation layers, is leading to new value streams for our clients. This isn’t theoretical. It’s not hype. It’s real. The difference? Adoption, ownership, and a shift in how we lead in order to energize the AI innovation within our teams. The challenge now isn’t whether AI creates value. It’s how to unlock and scale that value across teams, geographies, and business units—and do it fast.

Two Superpowers of the Agentic AI Era

In working with leaders across industries, I’ve come to believe in two superpowers (there are more as well) that will unlock the potential of this AI era: Jazz Leadership and a Simulation Culture.

1. Jazz Leadership

Forget the orchestra (although personally I am a big fan.) The successful team cultures that are innovating with AI feel more like jazz. In jazz, there’s no conductor. There’s no fixed sheet music. There are core bars and then musicians make up music on the spot based on each other’s creativity, building off of each other’s trials, riffs and mistakes, build something extraordinary together. This is how experimenting with AI today, in the flow of work, feels like.

For each activity across a workflow, how can new AI prompts, agents, and GPTs make it better, codify high performance, drive speed and quality simultaneously? How can we try something totally different and still get the job done? How might we re-invent how we work? That’s how high-performing teams operate in the AI era. The world is moving too fast for command-and-control leadership, a perfect sheet of music with one leader who is interpreting the sheet music and directing. What we need instead is improvisation, trust, shared authorship, courage and a playful spirit because there are just as many fails as breakthroughs.Jazz leadership is about creating the conditions where:

• Ideas can come from anywhere
• People see tinkering and testing as key to survival and AI failures mean your team is at the edge of what’s possible for your services and ways of working
• Leaders say, “I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll go first, with you”
• People feel “I’m behind relative to my peers in the company” and the company sees this as a good sign because the pace of learning with AI means higher chance of success in the new era

At BTS, we recently promoted five new partners who embody this mindset. They weren’t the most traditional leaders. But they were the most generative. They coached others. They experimented and are constantly re-tooling themselves and others. They inspired movement. They are keeping us ahead, keeping our clients ahead and driving our re-invention. Jazz leaders make teams better, not by directing every note—but by setting the stage for breakthroughs. It is similar to the agile movement, similar to how it felt in Covid as companies had to reinvent themselves. It’s entrepreneurial, chaotic and fun.

2. Simulation Culture

The ability to simulate is a super-power in this next agentic, AI era. Simulation has always been part of creating organizational agility, high performance and leadership excellence. But AI and high-performance computing have transformed it into something bigger, faster, and infinitely more powerful. It means that building a simulation culture is within all of our grasp, if we tap its power.Today, companies simulate:

• Strategic alternatives - from market impact all they way to detailed frontline execution
• New business, new markets and operating models
• Major capital deployment e.g. build a digital twin of a factory before breaking ground
• Initiative implementation
• Workflows current and future
• Jobs to assess for talent and critical role readiness
• Customer conversations and sales enablement motions

With a simulation culture, where you regularly engage in scenario planning and expect preparation and practice as a way of working, billions in capital is saved, cross-functional teams are strengthened, high performance gets institutionalized, win rates increase, earnings and cash flow improves.

Where to get started

Below are a few examples of what leading organizations are doing. Consider testing these in your own organization:

• Conversational AI bot platforms used to scale performance expectations and the company’s unique culture.
• Agentic simulations built into tools so people can prepare and practice with 100% perfect context and not a wasted moment.
• Digital twins of the job created so that certifications and hiring decisions are valid.
• Micro-simulations spun up in hours to align 50,000 people to a shift in the market or a new operational practice.

Final Thoughts

• Lead like a jazz musician. Embrace improvisation, courage and shared creativity.
• Build a simulation culture. Because in a world that’s moving this fast, practice isn’t optional—it’s how we win.

This is a brave new world. Not five years from now. Right now.Let’s shape it—together.

PRESS RELEASE

Stockholm, May 5, 2025

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda. (Nexo), a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.

Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (about 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.

Nexo collaborates with a diverse portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment—supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.

BTS currently operates in Brazil, servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.

“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity, and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”

“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co-founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.

Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.

The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase-price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.

BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening its service portfolio, expanding geographic reach, and enhancing capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.

For more information, please contact:

Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com

Michael Wallin
Head of Investor Relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19

You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”

Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.

‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’

A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.

Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:

• Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
• Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
• Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
• Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
• Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
• Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
• Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
• Merger integration.

Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.

The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs

Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context?  When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.

10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations

With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:

1. Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
2. Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
3. Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
4. Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
5. Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
6. Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
7. User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
8. Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
9. Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
10. Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.

Better Results, Faster

Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.

Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination

Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.

Putting Business Simulations to Work

Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.

Learn more about business simulations

Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.

Fill out the form below to have a BTS representative contact you.

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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.

It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”

Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.

We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?

To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”

For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.

This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.

To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.

The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.

romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.

As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.

As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .

Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.

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Leading with Purpose, Part 1

Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.

When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.¹ They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.

Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.

As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”

I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.

In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”

Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.

According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.