Schaltkulisse

Schaltkulisse was one of the first companies milbo ever worked with, years before milbo was milbo. We were freelancers then, and in the early days their website alone nearly had us at our limit. What carried it was trust, on both sides, and the plain sense that we would build something long-term together. Over the years that turned into a real friendship, from Villa d'Este to Miami, a lot of shared road.

Back then the shape of it was simple. Schaltkulisse was the established house selling extraordinary cars, and we were the small crew handling a corner of their tech. They were already very good at what they did. What they did not yet have was the digital machinery to match the business, the kind of thing a partner who stuck around long enough could build into something much larger.

There was never a single job. The job was all of it: the entire IT of a company with no internal IT of its own. The website and the merch shop, the CRM, the mail accounts, the password manager, the WiFi router, sales analytics, SEO, audits, whatever came up that week. The point behind it was simple. Keep a Mittelständler from drowning in IT so the team could do the work it is actually good at, and scale. We became the people they called for everything.

Underneath the day-to-day we built a real backbone. A CRM as the single source of truth, where every car, every touchpoint and every listing channel reads from the same record, with fully automated distribution pushing each car out to every relevant platform at once. That gave Schaltkulisse leverage: it could grow the portfolio without growing the sales team, and run Munich and Miami on one system. A lot of it we did not know how to do when we started. We were a small company, so we learned it, job by job, and taking on everything they threw at us is a large part of how milbo became the studio it is today.

We have run that backbone for years. But the world is changing, and the real job now is to set them up for it correctly. Transforming a Mittelständler for the AI era is the current challenge, and we are in the middle of it: a completely redesigned website, an AI-powered IT stack, the company readied for real, valuable automation across every department. Not a classic-car dealer with good software. The Mittelstand of the future.

Schaltkulisse runs a roughly €50M business across Munich and Miami with no internal IT department, because for four years we have been it. Seven-figure cars list across every major platform from one source of truth, the portfolio grows without new sales hires, and the whole operation is now being rebuilt for the AI era.

Four years in, the job is not finished. If anything the real work is starting now, because the trust we built has turned into real transformation. Most studios are a project and then a goodbye. The ones that change a business are the ones still there in year four, building the next thing, not just the first. Schaltkulisse was among the first to bet on us, back when we could barely keep up with their website, and they are a large part of how we learned the rest. If that is the partner you are after, the next step is a call. Schaltkulisse, thanks for trusting us at the start.