About Us
Jochen Pirklbauer

Jochen Pirklbauer

Founder & CEO, Invictus Advisory

Nearly four decades at the centre of global ocean freight — from the operational floor in Linz to leading billion-euro businesses across Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific. Jochen Pirklbauer has run the rooms where the hard decisions get made. Now he helps others make them better.

What Drives Us

Eight principles. Not values on a wall — behaviours that define how we work and what we expect from the organisations we advise.

Attitude
Ambition
Clarity
Consistency
Confidence
Determination
Discipline
Expertise

Jochen's career in ocean freight began in 1986 — long before the industry had analytics platforms, digital rate engines, or real-time visibility tools. What it had was complexity, pressure, and the need to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

Over the following 40 years, he built one of the most comprehensive careers in the sector. At Kuehne + Nagel — where he spent 18 years — he held full P&L responsibility across Austria, Central and Eastern Europe, Western Europe and Sweden, spanning seafreight import, industrial projects and global customer solutions. At cargo-partner, he served simultaneously as COO for Corporate Processes and Applications and as Regional Manager for Western Europe, with Managing Director mandates in Belgium, Netherlands and Germany, and as President of cargo-partner France.

At Panalpina — where his career began and where it reached its peak — he led Ocean Freight across EMEA (56 countries, €1.1bn in turnover, 1,350 FTEs), then the Americas from Miami (North and Latin America, €800m T/O, 750 FTEs), and finally Ocean Freight Europe as Regional Head: €1.3bn in turnover, over 25,000 active customers in portfolio with 200 Key Accounts controlling 650,000 TEU.

Throughout all of it, one thing remained constant: the analysis, the planning, the performance tracking — all done manually. Spreadsheets. Instinct. Experience, but foremost Expertise. Hours spent building the picture that should have taken minutes.

That is why Invictus Advisory exists — to make our customers invincible — and why 7SEAS 360 was built.

The consulting methodology — the Mindset framework, the OMI diagnostic, the 12-week program — is not theory. It is a distillation of what actually works, drawn from managing organisations of every shape, size and health across four decades and five continents.

The 7SEAS 360 product suite does in seconds what used to take days. Not to replace human judgment — but to free it. So that the time saved on analysis can be spent where it has always mattered most: with employees and with customers.

Career start
1986
Expertise
Ocean Freight · Supply Chain · International Logistics
Companies
Panalpina · Kuehne + Nagel · cargo-partner · Invictus Advisory
Peak role (employed)
Regional Head of Ocean Freight Europe, Panalpina
Peak scope
€1.3bn T/O · 25,000+ customers (200 Key Accounts) · 650,000 TEU
Regions
EMEA · Americas · Asia Pacific
Education
MBA Strategic Leadership, Cranfield School of Management
Languages
English · German (both native / bilingual) · Swedish
Founded
Invictus Advisory, Hamburg — 2020
Invictus Advisory · 7SEAS 360