The four partners
Rudiger Wanck
Buy & build, organisational design — holding-group scale
I spent more than two decades inside WPP, the world's largest holding group, acquiring, integrating and redesigning agencies at holding-company scale, with the reporting lines and politics that come with a listed parent. I trained as a physics engineer first, and an org chart is still a physics problem to me: force, mass, friction. I have sat in the meeting where the transformation deck is presented, and in the room eighteen months later where it is quietly shelved. That gap is why DryDock exists. My job here is the structure: who decides what, who reports where, and what we remove so the rest can move.
- Buy-and-build inside WPP — acquisitions, integrations and redesigns at holding-company scale
- Global organisations run inside a publicly traded holding group
- Organisational design across markets, disciplines and reporting lines
- Physics engineering degree — org charts treated accordingly
Joost Merks
M&A, corporate development & strategic growth — investor scale
I have spent my career on the side of the table where growth decisions become financial commitments. At Azerion I helped build an international digital media and technology group through acquisitions, strategic partnerships and corporate development: finding the right businesses, negotiating the deal, and turning a collection of companies into something worth more together. A signed deal is not a strategy. The real work starts when the transaction closes: aligning interests, making the difficult choices and making sure the economics deliver. At DryDock I bring the investor's eye: where value is created, where capital is wasted, and which decisions turn a restructuring plan into a business worth backing.
- Senior M&A and corporate development leadership at Azerion
- Acquisitions, strategic partnerships and international expansion
- Board-level experience across digital media and technology businesses
- Investment discipline, transaction structuring and value creation
Gerard Ghazarian
Buy & build, organisational design — founder scale
I have been the founder signing the adviser's invoice and wondering where the work went. I built Candid Platform from scratch into an international marcom enterprise across the UK and the Netherlands, through buy-and-build, with my own money at stake. It is the discipline Rudiger practised inside WPP, arrived at from the opposite direction. Transformation survives only if someone builds it into the systems, so I build the systems: the agentic-AI pipelines that produce our diagnostics, models and board packs. They replace the junior pyramid. They do not replace the judgement.
- Built Candid Platform from scratch into an international enterprise (UK and NL)
- Buy-and-build as a founder — acquisitions, integrations, organisational design
- Engineered the agentic-AI systems DryDock works with
- Restructuring from the owner's side of the table
Youri van der Mijn
Naval engineer & architect · data, finance & operations
The drydock is not a metaphor to me. I trained as a naval engineer and architect: how a hull is designed, how a ship is taken out of the water, what has to happen below the waterline before it goes back to sea. Since then, two decades in data, finance and operations leadership, and the finance and delivery systems of Candid Platform, which I co-founded. At DryDock I own the instrumentation: the audited baseline we lock in month one, the weekly numbers the cadence runs on, the board pack that says what moved and what did not. The unglamorous half, which is the half that decides whether it holds.
- Naval engineer and architect by training
- Co-founder, Candid Platform — finance and delivery systems
- Data, finance and operations leadership
- Builds the baselines every plan is measured against
