Axel Roth
Born 1982. Entrepreneur since the age of sixteen. Two founding stories: the first during school, the second after studies in Neu-Ulm — information management and corporate communication — and a two-and-a-half-year detour into renewable energies. The detour produced one clear finding: I don't want to be employed. Since returning to self-employment, I have only worked for myself — in a small, fine setting that fits me.
That setting is called arocom. A digital agency. People, clients, a craft. I have led it since 2012 and in that time have seen roughly everything that can happen to a digital entrepreneur — waves that carried, and ones that didn't. The most recent, the agentic one, carries the strongest. Anyone who dismisses it as "yet another trend" has overlooked something fundamental.
arocom as testing ground
What I advise at arocon I first did myself at arocom. Not in a research corner, but in day-to-day business. I have rebuilt workflows, re-cut roles, redistributed budgets, convinced clients, motivated staff — and in other places found the courage to leave things off.
That's not a hero's story and not free of friction. But it is real, and it is measurable. If you ask what agentic work costs a Mittelstand company, what it brings and what it means, I answer from my own shop — not from a study.
How I work
I am introverted, feel finely, speak little of what I think — until it can be said properly. For most of my counterparts, that means slowing down, getting more precise, and daring to reframe the question with which an entrepreneur enters the room.
I most enjoy working with people who carry their responsibility personally. Owners, board members, managing directors, heads of public offices, association chairs. Not because titles mean anything, but because the pain that makes arocon a topic is felt there: no longer being able to delegate what you used to delegate.