Who We Are
We are senior business professionals with decades of experience across a wide range of industries. We have sat in the same chairs as our clients — we know what it feels like to face complex decisions, misaligned teams and relentless pressure to deliver.
That experience is what we bring to every strategic engagement. Not junior consultants learning on your time. Not generic frameworks dressed up as strategy. Just rigorous, senior-level thinking applied to your specific situation.
How We Work
- Customer at the centre — every decision, every strategy, every solution starts and ends with the customer
- Ambitious but achievable growth — we define what is realistic for your specific context, not what looks good on a slide
- Balanced operations and sustainable profitability — we build for the long term, not the next quarter
- Human capabilities recognised and respected — strategy is only as strong as the people who execute it
- Results that last — we measure success by what actually changes in your business, not what we deliver on paper
Why ValueLab
We have been where you are.
We have sat in senior leadership roles inside major multinationals — facing the same complex decisions, the same pressure to deliver, the same gap between what the strategy says and what the business can actually execute. We don't just understand your situation intellectually. We have lived it.
We build solutions that fit your reality — not anyone else's.
Every recommendation we make is built around your specific challenges, opportunities and capabilities. Not a generic framework adapted to look bespoke. Not best practice from a different industry presented as universal truth. A strategy your business can actually execute — because it was designed for your business, not a theoretical version of it.
We treat your business as our own.
We are not here to deliver a document and move on. We are ROI-focused by default — because we think like owners, not consultants. Every engagement is measured by what actually changes in your business, not what we produce for it.
We see the whole picture.
Growth rarely fails because of one thing. It fails because of how things connect — or don't. We look across your entire business operation: strategy, execution, commercial performance, processes, capabilities, people. We find where the system is working against itself, not just where the most obvious problem sits.
We give you the outside view you can't get from inside.
When you are close to the business, certain things become invisible — not because they aren't there, but because they have always been there. We bring an objective, experienced perspective that cuts through internal noise, challenges assumptions that have stopped being questioned, and tells you what needs to be said — not what is comfortable to hear.
We stay with you through to the result.
Strategy without execution is just intention. We work alongside your team from the first day to the last — and through our Execution Partnership, we stay close while the plan becomes reality, for as long as you need us.
The two partners
ValueLab is built around two senior partners, Márta and Emese, who work together on every engagement.
They share one conviction, proven across both their careers: that helping a business grow doesn't depend on having spent years in its industry. When you put the customer at the centre, the fundamentals travel. You learn the specifics of each business — its market, its constraints, its customers — but the discipline that drives growth is the same whether the product is a consumer brand, a medicine, or an industrial service. Both have proved this many times, across very different sectors.
In fact, it's how they met: at Sanofi, on a patient-focused mission, where Emese was the consultant brought in and Márta led from the inside. They were working on the same idea then that ValueLab is built on now — put the customer at the centre, and the rest follows.
Márta spent 25 years building brands and businesses across leading multinationals — Unilever, Mondelez, Pfizer, Sanofi — at both local and regional level. The thread running through her career is a proven ability to take what works in one world and make it work in another.
She has rebuilt a European family-owned company's entire marketing from the ground up, brought FMCG thinking into pharmaceuticals, and was repeatedly trusted with the work beyond the brief — from M&A due diligence to acting as change-management ambassador and leading R&D alongside the marketing team. Different industries, different challenges, the same hard work and result.
In 2015 she founded ValueLab to do this for businesses on her own terms. She works as an owner would, not an adviser: fully invested in the client's success, with the vision to see where a business can go and the resolve to do the hard work of getting it there.
Growth strategy, international expansion, business transformation, M&A, change management, R&D, leadership
Emese built her career at WPP, the world's largest advertising and communications group — where she was chosen to establish and lead an ambitious new venture: a strategic management consultancy, built to take the group beyond communications and into the territory of the major strategy firms. The business she set up and led locally as Managing Director became one of the group's early pilots for that move globally.
When WPP's priorities later shifted away from the venture, she chose to continue the work on her own terms — founding her own consultancy in the early 2010s and carrying that top-tier rigour forward, now paired with the instincts of a business owner. Across both chapters, she has delivered strategic work for some of the world's biggest brands — Ford, Citibank, Erste Bank, Allianz, AB InBev and Sanofi among them — from local to fully global in scale.
Her focus is on growth, brand and commercial effectiveness: turning sharp strategic thinking into practical, customer-centred plans a business can actually act on.
Growth and expansion strategy, brand and marketing strategy, business planning, sales effectiveness, customer journey
Senior people, exactly when their depth is needed.
Beyond the two partners, ValueLab draws on a small circle of senior specialists — each a principal in their own right — brought in when a project calls for their specific expertise. Not junior support.
Péter brings more than 20 years of corporate experience across sales, supply chain, strategy and business development, built in national and international roles across chemicals and energy. He works where strategic and operational thinking have to meet — identifying the priority areas where change will have the greatest impact, always anchored to the realistic capabilities of the organisation.
Strategy development, M&A, process improvement, sales, B2B marketing, customer-centricity, CRM
Gabriella turns raw, scattered data into a foundation businesses can actually decide on. Her work covers the whole path end to end: mapping and structuring a company's data, fixing the quality problems that quietly undermine every report built on top of them, connecting fragmented sources into working systems, and turning all of it into strategic, data-driven dashboards and decision support. The result isn't more data — it's clarity, and a real basis for the calls leadership has to make.
Data audit and data quality, data structuring and integration, Power Query and data modelling, Power BI and Excel dashboards, KPI and management reporting, data-driven decision support
When we run workshops with our clients, Kata is who we bring in to hold the room. After a corporate career in leadership and project management, she built her own independent facilitation practice — and as a certified professional facilitator, she brings real rigour to the craft. Whatever the topic on the table, including strategy, she keeps the discussion on track, the structure intact and the atmosphere productive, so the session arrives where it needs to by the time everyone leaves. We work with her not only for that discipline, but for the calm, positive energy she brings even when the conversation gets difficult — and because the best thinking only takes hold when the people in the room are genuinely part of shaping it.
Workshop facilitation, session design, group discussion, team alignment
Róbert brings the perspective of a finance leader who has sat inside the business, not just advised it. After more than two decades in senior finance roles across multinationals and mid-sized companies, he works where numbers meet decisions — turning management reporting, controlling and financial planning into a genuine steering tool for leadership. When a project needs the CFO's lens on it — on profitability, cost structure, capital allocation, or the financial case for a strategic move — Róbert is who we bring in.
Financial strategy, controlling and management reporting, profitability analysis, cost structure, capital allocation, CFO advisory
Free Association Research
Everything we do starts with the customer — so the quality of our customer insight has to be beyond question. That's why, when a decision needs to rest on real evidence rather than assumption, we work with Free Association Research.
A boutique research agency staffed entirely by senior practitioners, they have run hundreds of consumer studies of every kind and sat face to face with thousands of consumers across countless focus groups. That depth means we get more than data — we get properly tested value propositions and genuine insight into what customers actually think, feel and do. It's the difference between a strategy that's defensible and one that's merely hopeful.
What Sets Our Work Apart
- Senior professionals on every project — you work with us directly, not a team we manage from a distance
- Cross-industry expertise — patterns invisible inside one industry become obvious when you have seen them across many
- Data, not assumption — every recommendation is grounded in evidence, not gut feeling
- Built-in change management — we work alongside your team from day one, so your organisation is already moving before the strategy is finalised
Want to see what we'd do with your business?
Start with a free 30-minute call — or take the complimentary 2-minute Blind Spot Radar.