In 2022, Filip Nemeth was vacationing with his husband in Uganda when something caught his eye—fields and fields of unused, raw sugarcane.
“In other parts of world, like in Brazil, you see people on the street juicing the sugarcane and selling the juice,” Filip explained. “We were like ‘why don’t we do that?’”
They partnered with their Ugandan guide to open a small shop in Bwindi, Uganda, that produces and sells fresh juices. The shop has a couple employees, and profits help support local education access.
As a Partner on AlixPartners’ Retail team, Filip leads holistic company transformations and organizational design and end-to-end process optimization projects for retailers, but his side hustle encapsulates how his passion for travel led him to his consulting career, and how his knack for cross-cultural dot-connecting is helping him thrive.
Raised in Bratislava, Slovakia, Filip studied abroad in Lubbock, Texas, as a 17-year-old exchange student. The birthplace of Buddy Holly offered plenty of culture shock—the lack of sidewalks still lingers—but the friendliness and openness of the people made a mark.
“I was in this small city in the middle of Texas, but I felt more connected to the complexities of different people and different cultures than I did back home,” Filip explained. “It was the first step in realizing that I wanted to leave Slovakia.”
Filip moved to London for university and business school and initially targeted consulting because he wanted to travel. But as an associate in the Prague office of a Big Four firm, Filip remained tethered close to home, often only supporting the Central European branch of a multinational.
He moved to the U.S. to work more directly with the global decision-makers and joined AlixPartners’ New York office in 2017. Filip thought that AlixPartners was “a special place,” with lots more crossover between practices and regions than his previous firms.
“It’s driven by how we are set up and how we talk about ourselves, but it’s also about the people,” Filip explained. “Everybody is willing to help. I can’t think of a time when I reached out to someone in a different region or practice and they were too busy to meet with me.”
He took advantage of that openness to build a broad network early on. As the global lead of the firm’s PrideMatters employee resource group, he worked with colleagues around the world to improve the firm’s internal policies and benefits for same sex couples and launched recruiting initiatives in the US and UK, among other activities.
That proactive relationship building helped him establish a global platform, and he increasingly has opportunities to lead projects abroad.
The work travel is satisfying his wanderlust—he has worked in the UK, the Netherlands, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China in the last year alone—while also making him a better consultant and leader.
“Being in Asia has been exciting because the work culture is completely different. I had to adapt my communication style and learn to navigate different sets of rules and practices. Some of the directness and assertiveness that works in the US will not get you far in countries like Japan,” Filip said.
His consistent, deliberate work to widen his perspective led him to Harvard Business School, where he completed a year-long Program for Leadership Development last summer.
Filip said the in-depth discussions he had with his cohort, comprised of individuals from different industries, from all over the world, challenged him to think differently about how he approached his client work.
“It changed how I lead projects, how I work with clients, how I look at problems,” Filip explained. “Now, when I go to a client, I think more holistically about the problem they brought us into solve. I think about what the company is going through, where they are now, and where they want to go.”
HBS proved to be an intensive microcosm of the experience he was curating for himself at AlixPartners, and a testament to why AlixPartners’ one-firm culture works.
“We just won a new project in Tokyo and the client told us it was because we were able to bring in a truly global team. It’s beautiful how we work.”