Leadership is about bringing a team together and guiding it, not controlling it. That’s what I’ve learned since 2015.
Good leadership is worth its weight in gold to your company
Why does good leadership matter so much? When your employees thrive, your company thrives. Overworked employees aren’t productive, and in the long run you risk them becoming unhappy with their work. Everyone loses. I put people first when I lead, and that’s what I talk about.
When you run a business, it can be tempting to look only at the bottom line. The catch is that it’s your employees who create the profit, and they only do that when they’re thriving. They won’t if you preach a ‘work 24/7’ culture.
Only when you prioritise and value every single employee does their success become your success. When your employees are doing well, success becomes something you share.
Happy employees = happy clients = successful company.
Founder and CEO of Amplify, former host of Den Nye Standard
My name is Nicolai, and I’m the founder and CEO of the digital marketing agency Amplify. I started it in July 2015 under the name Webamp, aged 23, with DKK 40,000 from my childhood savings. From 2021 to 2024, I also hosted the Danish-language podcast Den Nye Standard.
From the start, I wanted to create a culture that motivates people and gives them room to learn and get better. At Webamp, that became a culture where fistbumps, table football and a beer at the Friday meeting were a regular part of the week.
It worked. Webamp, now Amplify, was named a Børsen Gazelle in both 2021 and 2022, right in the middle of the pandemic years. We’ve helped more than 350 companies and have turned over more than DKK 80 million since the start, without investors.
In 2021, I was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in the Media & Marketing category and for Berlingske Talent 100 in the leadership category. Both lists celebrate young people who dare to build something.
Leadership when AI moves in
Since March 2026, I’ve been rebuilding Amplify with AI. We’ve got an AI colleague in Slack, and every morning it goes through the ad accounts. But a person approves before anything happens.
To me, that’s leadership in a nutshell. The tools change, but the responsibility doesn’t, and neither does the need to thrive. My formula is still that performance times wellbeing is high performance. It only holds if you have both.
What kind of speaker am I?
What drives a company isn’t cogs and petrol. It’s people. That’s why my talks on leadership are about how to motivate a team.
My talks draw on my own experience of leadership. I’m happy to talk about the times we’ve celebrated success, and I show the other side of the coin too. I won’t tell you how to become the best leader for your team, because there’s no universal recipe.
Along the way, I give you an insight into how I’ve built success by putting employees first and by daring to put myself out there. When you lead as yourself instead of hiding behind models and theories, your employees understand far better where you want to go.
Find out more and book a talk on leadership
If you’d like to hear more about leadership, write to me and book a talk. Tell me what your audience is dealing with, and I’ll build the talk around it.
In the meantime, you can listen to conversations about entrepreneurship, leadership and company culture on Den Nye Standard. All 41 conversations are on the Den Nye Standard page and on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Good leadership and a good culture go hand in hand. If you’d like to hear how I built the culture at Webamp, now Amplify, read about my talk on company culture below.
More talks
Leadership is one of my topics. I also give talks on:
On the talks page, you’ll find all the topics, including ‘AI transformation, from the inside’, ‘Performance and wellbeing’ and ‘Marketing and brand’, and what a talk can look like.