Starting a New Season

Five months ago I registered BilboConsult as a company. At the time, I thought I was starting a business. I was wrong — or at least, I was thinking too small. What I’m actually doing is starting a new season of my life, and the business is just one part of it.

Let me back up.

I spent over forty years in IT management — at Nokia, Cognizant, Tieto, HCL, AXA Tech, and a handful of others. Big organizations, complex transformations, the kind of work where you spend years learning how to hold things together when everything wants to fall apart. Crisis management, service integration, governance. I got good at it. I loved it.

Then last year, at sixty, I decided to do something I’d always thought about but never quite dared: build something of my own.

The honest version

I could write the polished version of this story — the one where I had a clear vision from day one, executed a brilliant strategy, and here we are. But that’s not what happened.

The first few months of BilboConsult were messy. I built a website. I wrote a go-to-market plan. I networked. I studied frameworks and positioning and all the things you’re supposed to do. Some of it was useful. Much of it was premature. I was moving fast without being clear about where I was actually going.

So in early March, I did what I’d advise any client to do: I stopped, took an honest look at what was working and what wasn’t, and made a deliberate pivot.

What changed

The pivot wasn’t dramatic from the outside, but it was clarifying from the inside. Instead of trying to be everything — fractional CIO, SIAM consultant, transformation advisor — I asked a simpler question: where does my forty years of governance experience meet the most urgent market need right now?

The answer turned out to be AI governance.

Not the technology side of AI — there are plenty of brilliant people working on models and algorithms. But the governance side: risk management, human oversight, documentation, incident response, compliance frameworks. The EU AI Act lands in August, and most organizations are treating it as a technology problem. It’s not. It’s a governance problem. And governance is what I’ve been practicing my entire career.

That realization sharpened everything. The positioning, the partnerships I’m developing, the content I want to create — it all started to align.

What else is growing

But here’s the thing about starting a new season: it’s not only about work.

I’m learning Finnish. Not conversational Finnish picked up over coffee — I’m in an actual classroom, at A1 level, stumbling through verb conjugations alongside people half my age. It’s humbling in the best way. There’s something about being a genuine beginner again that recalibrates your relationship with competence. You can’t hide behind expertise when you can barely order lunch.

I’m also writing an academic paper. It’s for VikingPLoP, a pattern language conference, and it documents patterns for experienced professionals starting a consulting practice. The strange thing about writing an academic paper on your own live experiment is that you can’t hide behind theory — the results are unfolding in real time, and the paper has to be honest about that.

And I’m working with AI in ways I didn’t expect. Not just studying AI governance — actually using AI tools as a daily operating partner. Building systems, writing, thinking, planning. It’s changed how I work, and it’s given me a practitioner’s perspective that most governance consultants don’t have.

Slow is fine

None of this is happening fast. BilboConsult is pre-revenue. The partnerships I’m building are in early conversations. The Finnish course runs through June. The paper isn’t submitted yet.

A few months ago, that slowness would have bothered me. I would have seen it as falling behind. Now I see it differently: things are taking root. The direction is right. The foundations are solid. And I’d rather build something real than rush something hollow.

I named the company after Bilbo Baggins for a reason. Not because of the adventure — because of the unexpected journey. The one where you leave your comfortable life, discover capabilities you didn’t know you had, and come back transformed. The journey matters more than the speed.

What to expect from this space

This is my first post here, but it won’t be the last. I’ll be writing about AI governance — what the EU AI Act actually requires, how existing governance frameworks map to it, and what organizations should be doing now. I’ll share what I’m learning, both professionally and personally. And I’ll be honest about the journey: what works, what doesn’t, and what I’m figuring out along the way.

If you’re navigating a similar transition — whether it’s starting something new, finding your footing after decades in corporate life, or trying to make sense of the AI governance landscape — I’d love to hear from you.

The season is just beginning.

Martin Kallenbach is the founder of BilboConsult, an independent IT management consultancy based in Helsinki, Finland. He brings over forty years of experience in IT governance, service integration, and organizational transformation.