Patric Sawada (澤田)

I married into a Japanese family (澤田), which gave me a perspective on Japan-Europe business that most consultants read about in textbooks. That firsthand experience shapes everything I do, from how I approach market entry to how I read the subtleties of business relationships across Europe and East Asia.

I started my career in 2014 as a marketing manager at Ciber, an international IT firm, working on the Netherlands market. In 2015 I founded Silkdrive, and have since led growth marketing for 50+ clients across 30+ industries in European, East Asian, and South-East Asian markets. One engagement shaped how I work more than any other: two years as the external growth advisor to a Belgian telecom's marketing team, reporting to the COO, advising on strategy, experiments, systems, and channel tactics, and keeping their performance agency accountable through a weekly report.

I trained in growth hacking at Growth Tribe (2016, with advanced programmes in 2019) and hold a post-graduate BSc in Digital & Online Marketing from Beeckestijn Business School (2015), the experimentation-driven approach I still apply to every engagement. I've written on cross-cultural marketing and digital privacy for outlets including Frankwatching, Hackernoon, and Eurobiz magazine (the EU Chamber of Commerce in China), where I covered China's PIPL privacy law and its implications for European businesses.

As an external expert for the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation, I regularly speak at webinars helping European companies understand the Japanese market. Through their Market Access programme I delivered the “Cross-Cultural Growth Marketing for Japan” webinar to Polish and Czech SMEs in June 2025 and to Swedish SMEs in September 2025. I founded Silkdrive to bring together everything I'd learned, combining growth marketing expertise with genuine cross-cultural intelligence to help companies expand internationally with confidence.