Meet our People: Olli Korpelainen, CEO

A somewhat accidental path into the Microsoft world 

My route into the Microsoft ecosystem wasn’t exactly planned.

I graduated in Business Economics and spent the first five years of my career in the telecommunications industry. I started in sales, moved into pre-sales and, somewhat by accident, became the main user of our CRM system. 

That turned out to be a surprisingly important accident. 

At some point, a recruitment consultant suggested that I might make a good CRM project manager. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but apparently the idea wasn’t completely terrible. I took the opportunity and moved from the telecom world into CRM consulting.

What started as a project manager role turned into a journey of one month short of ten years. Along the way, company acquisitions meant that I technically had three different employers: Mepco, Accountor Enterprise Solutions and Digia. My own role changed even more. I moved from project management to consulting and team leadership, and gradually started taking on broader business responsibilities, including offering development and other aspects of running and developing the business.

Looking back, the evolution was quite natural. I’ve always been interested in the space where technology, people and business meet. Technology itself is rarely the most interesting part for me. What matters is what we can actually achieve with it. 

Joining Forward Forever 

In 2022, an opportunity came up that was simply too good to pass. 

My former colleague Lasse Teeriaho had been leading Forward Forever, but as the company was growing, he wanted to focus more of his time and energy on technology. That created an opportunity for me to take over the CEO role. 

I joined Forward Forever as CEO and shareholder in June 2022. 

For me, it was genuinely a chance to jump into my dream job: a growing company, great people, familiar technology that I believed in, and an opportunity to build something meaningful for the long term. 

Of course, “dream job” doesn’t mean that every Tuesday morning is particularly dreamy. But that’s probably true of most dreams once you turn them into an actual job. 

How I think about work 

When I introduced myself to the Forward Forever team in 2022, I shared some thoughts about my personal values and how I think about work. Looking at them today, surprisingly little has changed. 

The principles are quite simple: be honest, communicate openly, keep your promises, respect other people and try to leave a positive mark on the people around you. 

I also believe in working smarter rather than simply harder. Good ways of working matter. Trust and responsibility matter. Happy, skilled and motivated people tend to create happy customers and good results. 

And while I like ambition and achieving things, work shouldn’t consume everything else. 

For me, perhaps the most important measure of working life is actually quite simple: 

How do you feel when you start work in the morning, and how do you feel when you finish your day? 

Not every day will be great. There will always be difficult projects, stressful moments, uncomfortable decisions and things that don’t go according to plan. But over time, those two moments tell you quite a lot. 

Do you generally look forward to the day ahead? And when you finish, do you feel that you did something worthwhile without using up everything you had? 

If the answer is usually yes, many other things are probably quite well. 

That’s something I try to keep in mind when making decisions at Forward Forever as well. We want to be ambitious, grow and build a successful company. At the same time, I don’t think business results and a good place to work are opposing goals. Ideally, they reinforce each other. 

And one principle deserves to be kept especially simple: 

Have some fun. It’s really not that serious. 

My day at Forward Forever 

There really isn’t a standard day in my job, which is probably one of the reasons I enjoy it. 

A normal week can include customer meetings, sales, recruitment, financial planning, strategy, developing our services, working with Microsoft and other partners, internal discussions, and solving whatever unexpected problem has appeared since the previous week. 

And quite a few Teams meetings. 

I like being close enough to the actual business to understand what’s going on with our customers and people. At the same time, an important part of my role is looking further ahead: where should we focus, what should we improve, and what kind of company do we want Forward Forever to become? 

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that companies rarely suffer from a lack of ideas. The more difficult part is deciding what genuinely matters, getting people behind it, giving them space to lead and then actually making it happen. 

That’s probably one of the parts of my job I enjoy the most. 

Life outside work 

Outside work, life revolves quite a lot around family. I live with my spouse and our 14-year-old daughter, and in January our family got one member bigger when we adopted a rescue dog from Ukraine. 

Like many parents, a surprisingly large part of everyday life is spent driving someone somewhere. I’ve decided that instead of seeing it purely as an obligation, it can also be considered an opportunity to spend some extra time with my daughter. At least until she gets her driving licence and makes me redundant. 

Travelling is something we enjoy together as a family, in many different forms. We also travel with our camper van, and one of the highlights of last summer was a road trip to the Norwegian fjords. There’s something I really like about packing the van, heading somewhere and having the freedom to change plans along the way. 

I’ve always enjoyed sports, although the more sweat-inducing ones like ice hockey and volleyball have unfortunately become less frequent lately. Golf has survived better, and I still play actively. Annual FF golf championship is always one highlight of the year for me.  

Last summer I also finally ticked off one of my childhood dreams: I got my motorcycle licence and bought a bike. 

The Finnish riding season is unfortunately quite effective at keeping this particular hobby under control. The bike will soon go into winter storage, but I’m already looking forward to getting back on the road next summer. 

Having an active social life has always been important to me as well. I really enjoy spending time with friends, even if arranging it seems to require increasingly sophisticated calendar management these days.

What matters in the end 

I don’t think I’ve ever had a detailed master plan for my career. Becoming a CRM main user wasn’t one. Moving into consulting wasn’t one. Becoming CEO probably wasn’t one either, despite feeling like a natural direction to steer towards. 

But I’ve tried to stay curious, take opportunities when they’ve appeared and work with people I respect and enjoy spending time with. 

That approach has taken me from selling telecom services to CRM projects, consulting and business leadership, and eventually to Forward Forever. 

So far, it has worked out pretty well. 

And if I can continue to start most working days looking forward to what’s ahead, finish them feeling that we achieved something worthwhile, and still have enough time and energy left for family, friends, golf, travelling and the occasional motorcycle ride, I’ll consider that a pretty good result.