The new managing director of Storyteq and Deployteq reflects on personal and professional milestones that led him to ITG, and why he’s ready for the opportunity to disrupt content operations at scale for the mid-market, with enterprise-grade capability, fast deployment, and AI-powered efficiency.
Joaquim Lecha first experienced what a growth vision can do for a business when he was a teenager. His mum ran a video club, renting and selling films, and he could see – from speaking to his friends – that she could grow her customer base if she also offered console games. It was his first experience of turning insight into commercial growth, an attitude that still defines his approach today.
Today, Joaquim Lecha is ITG’s new managing director of Storyteq and Deployteq. In the role for less than a month at the time of speaking, he can trace a direct line from that first experience helping his mum to where he is today. At university in Barcelona – where he studied business and his friends dreamed of becoming investment bankers after graduation – Joaquim was on the look out for “a big company that would send me somewhere and give me the mandate to build a business in that market. So it was always about that capacity to create something,” he reflects.
Creating impact
After landing the role he wanted and moving to Germany, Joaquim got to grips with the reality of being one employee in a company of 100,000. “To actually create material impacts to be noticed through my work and my contribution was going to be very difficult,” he thought to himself back then, he says. He moved to a consultancy where his role focused on helping companies grow while part of a small team. “I chose a consulting company that was not only giving advice but also helping make decisions and then execute those decisions,” he says of the role that saw him work both as a consultant and an M&A advisor.
Joaquim’s career trajectory is guided by his long-held passion for history and a fascination with biography and people in different historical circumstances. “I like to understand how things got here and it gives me perspective,” he confirms. He uses his learnings to inform what’s next, saying “I’m always thinking about the future. So what’s coming? What could be different?” It felt natural to him to start exploring the “growing ecosystem of startups and tech companies, the innovation economy”, with the goal of becoming an executive in a space he thought was going give him the professional challenge he was looking for. The ‘new’ doesn’t scare Joaquim (if anything did in a professional setting, it would be standing still) and he actively seeks out spaces where his interests can be applied, where he can learn something, and – crucially – where he can make a difference.
“I like to learn, that’s what motivates me the most – learning with the purpose of applying, with the purpose of doing something with that learning, so I’m not just learning through books and then keeping that knowledge in my head. I like to apply that knowledge,” he says. “I tend to find new things or circumstances that put me outside my immediate comfort zone and one of the ways has been by taking different roles.”
That’s how he made the transition to startups and roles like CFO which evolved into COO, following a trajectory where Joaquim would come to “understand the business and its strategy and finance, then work to make it scalable through better marketing and better data.” Soon enough, Joaquim was working as a CEO and in his time at Typeform, a service company that specializes in online form building and online surveys, he helped grow the business from $15 million into a global $100+ million SaaS platform, all while continuing to evolve the product, culture and team. Of that time, he says he enjoyed it because he could “contribute a lot”, once again prizing the ability to make a difference within a company above all else.
A new challenge
Joaquim’s interest in new technologies and AI goes back to his time at university, where he wrote his final master’s thesis exploring “predicted financial credit scoring using neural networks, which was an early methodology behind machine learning and artificial intelligence,” he recalls. He has applied this interest and knowledge first by co-founding Supersonik in 2025, a live AI-powered product experience platform, and now becoming the managing director for Storyteq.
Storyteq is the only AI-powered content marketing platform bringing together strategic intelligence, digital asset management, creative automation and content production workflows, so teams can produce better performing content, faster, and on brand. Leveraging the power of AI, it helps brands manage and optimize their entire content lifecycle in one easy-to-use platform. It was recently named a Leader (for the fourth consecutive year) in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Marketing Platforms.
He’ll fuse his interest in AI with another professional philosophy which always centres the customer. “You can’t fail if you make your customer successful,” is what Joaquim believes. “I’ve always been close to these customer-facing solutions and trying to always help the customers,” he adds; when he was head-hunted for the role at Storyteq, it felt like the convergence of all the elements that interested him.
ITG’s size and momentum certainly appealed to Joaquim too, “so I could play an important role within the group,” he says. Meeting CEO Andrew Swinand was the final push he needed to make the decision as he recalls “really liking” Andrew’s vision for the company.
Joaquim’s role will be focused on bringing enterprise-grade capabilities to the mid-market, as yet an underserviced part of the market presenting tremendous ownership and growth opportunities – exactly the kind of challenge Joaquim was looking for. “I am somebody that thrives on ambitious challenges,” he confirms, “especially when it’s in a context of construction and building.”
The way he sees the task in front of him – and Storyteq – is to “create a new category, to disrupt the mid-market space, coming from all that experience already there of what great looks like for the most well-known brands across many different industries.”
The mid-market is ripe for disruption precisely because so few are currently catering to those businesses’ specific needs. “[Those businesses] will not buy, they cannot buy, and they should not buy the same service as, for example, Starbucks, so what we are doing is taking all the knowledge, experience and references, and packaging it for these companies. ”The plan is to enable mid-market clients to produce significantly more content, faster and at lower cost, without the complexity of enterprise-grade systems,” Joaquim says.
To make the product right and appealing to the mid-market customer, a lot of work has been taking place behind the scenes to “simplify, integrate, and configure certain elements,” reveals Joaquim, which Storyteq has been doing for months. The vision is to help empower mid-market businesses to have greater control and flexibility to address local needs while ensuring consistency and efficiency in the process.
“My goal here is to start creating this category,” Joaquim emphasizes. “I’ll be focused on bringing this product to market, and disrupting. I mention disruption because [these businesses] have partial solutions, but it’s all disconnected. So when we speak about an end-to-end service and a disruption of that process for our customers is when we integrate all of this.”
Growth with purpose
The kind of growth Joaquim envisions and is galvanized by is only possible with a team of inspired, motivated people. Team health and culture is then another one of his big focuses.
“It starts with a shared purpose,” he states before adding, “I also believe companies like ITG are formed by talent. We are here together because we share that passion and that purpose.” His plan is to work with the experts there, empowering them to do what he knows they’re great at. “I like to bring people together and define our next best move, create the circumstances where we’re truly working together based on clarity, and shared information and knowledge. Everyone can ask what they need from each other, so that we can unblock each other.”
Surrounded by people “who are talented, confident, and full of energy”, Joaquim sees his role as that of an orchestra conductor. He might say “let’s play the music, maybe with a slightly faster tempo or more adagio, but everybody just plays their instruments which is so enjoyable.” It’s a great metaphor to describe what it’s like to come into a space full of subject-matter experts aligned around a common goal.
For Joaquim, the new role represents the convergence of everything he’s done professionally to date, and the opportunity to aid Storyteq in becoming a leader in a new space with a new product was too tempting for someone of his disposition to pass up.
This article was originally published by Little Black Book. The original article can be read here.
