Meet Natascha

I have a low thresh­old for bor­ing things, so it always eludes my log­ic to accept bro­ken process­es or high-effort repet­i­tive work. It always feels like try­ing to fit a square peg into a round hole and repeat­ing it over and over.

The effort in try­ing to make it work could as well be put into try­ing to find a bet­ter way of get­ting it done.

That’s why I organ­ised the messy mate­r­i­al stor­age in my first days of my appren­tice­ship, instead of wait­ing for them to find the right way to onboard me. In week 4 I was made respon­si­ble for man­ag­ing it and order­ing sup­plies. The alter­na­tive would have been sit­ting around and do noth­ing. I chose being use­ful and learn about mate­ri­als on my own.

My innate aller­gy to do things com­pli­cat­ed also led me to whip up a sim­ple sys­tem with File­Mak­er so that we could cap­ture client data and cat­e­gorise who would get a Christ­mas card and who got which type of Christ­mas present. Yes, it could have been done in an Excel sheet as well. But then you would repli­cate the sheet the next year and may have out­dat­ed address data.

From this sim­ple set­up I taught myself to pro­gram File­Mak­er from a 4‑inch (10 cm) thick hand­book, so that we could track phone num­ber orders for clients (insur­ances, banks), print out for­mat­ed order forms to fax them and print out sta­tus reports for inter­nal use. Before that we would man­u­al­ly update reports and have a sep­a­rate process for order­ing, mean­ing the report was always incom­plete.

From there I expand­ed the sys­tem to an expense and cash pay out track­ing sys­tem. With it I ini­ti­at­ed (with the bless­ing of my boss) a fine sys­tem. The prob­lem was that employ­ees would demand their expens­es but not sub­mit their work reports (every 2 weeks). This meant longer cash flow cycles for the busi­ness, pre-financ­ing salaries and expens­es until we could invoice clients based on the reports.

The fines would go into a com­mu­ni­ty pot from which we financed the year­ly employ­ee Christ­mas par­ty. Self-evi­dent­ly, I kept a sim­ple book­keep­ing sys­tem so that employ­ees could track who “financed their Christ­mas par­ty”.

Would this work today? Prob­a­bly not. Although a clever sys­tem, it con­flicts employ­ment law.

I had a great boss who hired me to work as an assis­tant at the New Mar­ket team at the Swiss Stock Exchange, respon­si­ble for attract­ing com­pa­nies going pub­lic for this new mar­ket seg­ment (beside blue chip seg­ment).

But the frus­tra­tion about their Excel spread­sheet, where they tracked con­tacts, meet­ings, mate­ri­als sent in ONE sheet, was increas­ing by the week. In month one I sum­marised the solu­tion to “you need a data­base for that” and no one was (sur­pris­ing­ly) enthu­si­as­tic about this idea.

None of the exist­ing sys­tems at the stock exchange fit either. So I pro­grammed a sys­tem at home dur­ing nights and week­ends — part­ly to learn how the finance indus­try actu­al­ly works, part­ly because I could­n’t leave the prob­lem alone.

Then one day the frus­tra­tion boiled over again in a team meet­ing… I casu­al­ly men­tioned that I had pro­grammed some­thing at home, that it worked and I could demo it.

The eyes of my boss widened in sur­prise. He saw the demo and decid­ed on the spot that he wants it and that our team in Gene­va should also use it.

We rolled out the solu­tion to Zurich and Gene­va. Soon after, the IT police came knock­ing 😅 — they had “heard” some­one built some­thing with­out them know­ing. After the demo they want­ed to know how long it took. I esti­mat­ed about 2 weeks. They sort of lost it. They could­n’t believe how fast I was.

I nev­er got a finan­cial recog­ni­tion for that work, but I get to tell you this price­less sto­ry instead 😏

IT was about to intro­duce a com­pa­ny-wide CRM and asked me to join the pre-steer­ing com­mit­tee. Most mem­bers rep­re­sent­ed the busi­ness side but were not tech­ni­cal and often not the ones using the sys­tems.

One day the com­mit­tee dis­cussed how data should be organ­ised. It got too abstract and peo­ple were mak­ing many assump­tions. I took the floor and gave exam­ples — from my pri­or data entries I could quote names of blue chips, their CEOs, CFOs and investor rela­tions con­tacts by heart and argued the future data mod­el should regard this real­i­ty.

The room went qui­et.

I shaped the data mod­el for the new CRM, inter­viewed oth­er busi­ness enti­ties so that we could reflect their data and process needs and became the test­ing night­mare for the pro­gram­mers 😏

From there I start­ed, unprompt­ed, to write doc­u­men­ta­tion. Then com­pli­ance asked me to train them. Then new hires. I end­ed up trav­el­ling between Lon­don and Zurich as the go-to per­son for the sys­tem.

I got a new boss and he pro­mot­ed me to become the Swiss Stock Exchange’s first CRM Ana­lyst.

What’s not appar­ent of this suc­cess sto­ry is, that I did all this extra work beside my reg­u­lar job as assis­tant of the team. But I liked the “extra” more than the job pro­file I was orig­i­nal­ly hired for.

The pat­tern repeat­ed itself: I got hired for a job role and did “more”. In hind­sight the “more” was always a true call­ing, it took some time for me to realise it and I con­tin­ued to find oth­er cre­ative out­lets.

I worked in pri­vate equi­ty, ran the fund report­ing project and organ­ised the gen­er­al assem­bly for our inter­na­tion­al investors. Beside my reg­u­lar duties, I built an investor track­ing sys­tem with File­Mak­er so that the com­pa­ny could see which investor was invest­ed in which prod­uct — and print out tai­lored his­to­ry reports that pre­pared them for their fundrais­ing tours.

But the cre­ative side in me was under­nour­ished. I dis­cov­ered cake mak­ing, taught myself bak­ing and dec­o­rat­ing skills, and even­tu­al­ly turned it into a small busi­ness — Fleur de Sucre.

That meant teach­ing myself to build web­pages, tak­ing great pho­tos and com­ing up with a cake menu. Then peo­ple found me googling and want­ed cakes made. Sud­den­ly I need­ed process­es for client nego­ti­a­tions, design find­ing, cake tast­ings at home, and deliv­er­ing wed­ding cakes on time.

Quot­ing and pro­duc­tion plan­ning took too much time — I was still work­ing a reg­u­lar job and pro­duced every­thing evenings and week­ends. So nat­u­ral­ly, I built a pric­ing sys­tem that could cal­cu­late the price per square cm based on ingre­di­ents, size and labor. Then a pro­duc­tion plan­ning sys­tem in File­Mak­er, where one click print­ed out tai­lored recipes per tier. Hang them up in the kitchen and get bak­ing.

I even won a cake prize for my designs.

But the food busi­ness is only finan­cial­ly viable at scale — lim­it your prod­uct options, repeat pro­duc­tion with cheap labor. My busi­ness was the oppo­site: cus­tom made, one-of-a-kind, and there­fore too expen­sive to be prof­itable. This mod­el only works as a pro­fes­sion­al hob­by.

While this insight was slow­ly dawn­ing on me, I noticed that I liked being heads down in build­ing the pro­duc­tion sys­tem more than being hands deep in cake bat­ter and shap­ing sug­ar ros­es.

After real­is­ing that my busi­ness mod­el isn’t sus­tain­able, tak­ing up too much space at my home (the entire pro­duc­tion was ran from my home kitchen) and that I spent more time fine­tun­ing my pro­duc­tion sys­tem and web­page — I stopped it.

Hard­core style tossed every­thing into the curb. Packed my car to the brim with cake stuff and drove to the dump site.

I did­n’t know what to do next, but cake it was­n’t. I con­clud­ed that I would fig­ure it out as well.

Instead I attend­ed dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties of like-mind­ed peo­ple.

Then one day I attend­ed a com­mu­ni­ty meet­ing where some­one demon­strat­ed how they run their ser­vice busi­ness with Notion.

See­ing a demon­stra­tion how to use Notion for a ser­vice busi­ness, I imme­di­ate­ly clicked with Notion. I could imme­di­ate­ly draw from my pri­or tool knowl­edge from File­Mak­er.

I start­ed to learn every­thing about Notion and helped oth­ers out in a Face­book com­mu­ni­ty.

Then one day Notion’s com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er reached out and asked me if I want­ed to become a Notion Ambas­sador.

With­in a few month I became Switzer­land’s first Notion Ambas­sador and first Ger­man-speak­ing Notion Cer­ti­fied Con­sul­tant in 2021. The 24th inter­na­tion­al­ly — of today’s 130+.

I real­ly like Notion. But some­where along the way I realised that my job isn’t about Notion — it’s about what hap­pens before and around the tool.

Every com­pa­ny I’ve worked with has the same under­ly­ing chal­lenge: peo­ple need sys­tems to run their work, sys­tems need to reflect actu­al busi­ness process­es, and peo­ple need the aware­ness to describe those process­es in the first place.

The tool comes 3rd. It always has. Even at the Swiss Stock Exchange, the real work was under­stand­ing how peo­ple actu­al­ly oper­at­ed — the pro­gram­ming came after.

Today I run Sys­tem Smart, a busi­ness sys­tem con­sul­tan­cy based in Zurich. I’m a Busi­ness Sys­tem Con­sul­tant — and look­ing back, I always was. It just took a few detours through clothes­pins, learn­ing to pro­gram, cre­at­ing a cake busi­ness and dis­cov­er­ing Notion to get here.

AI is a pow­er­ful new class of tool. But it’s a mul­ti­pli­er — it ampli­fies what­ev­er base­line it sits on. Feed it a mess, you get a faster mess. Feed it a clear oper­at­ing sys­tem with well-defined process­es, and it becomes gen­uine­ly use­ful.

If your sys­tems haven’t kept up with your team, you’re prob­a­bly feel­ing the fric­tion — infor­ma­tion scat­tered across tools, process­es that live in peo­ple’s heads, and new hires who take months to get up to speed. That’s the base­line I’m talk­ing about.

I map what’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing, design the sys­tem archi­tec­ture, and build it with your team in Notion — not as a one-off set­up, but as a 6‑month trans­for­ma­tion that the team actu­al­ly owns after­ward. The sys­tem becomes the foun­da­tion. AI becomes the accel­er­a­tor.