If you see a man on a stand-up paddle board navigating between the Allianz and the Offenbacher Schleuse on the Main when the sun is shining, it could be Sönke Reimers.

The manager also sees this sport as professional training: staying upright, anticipating dangers, reacting to waves in good time.

Reimers is spokesman for the management of Deutscher Fachverlag - one of the two spokesmen, as he always emphasizes.

He sees himself on the best of terms with his colleague Peter Esser, as well as with the entire management team, which consists of four people.

Actually, Reimers should have taken over his father's Edeka shop in Nortorf, a town of 6,000 people in central Holstein.

But Reimers, who was born on October 28, 1963 in Rendsburg, pursued the professional goal of journalism early on and, even as a schoolboy, gained experience as a freelancer for 20 pfennigs a line and 20 marks for a photo at the "Schleswig-Holsteinische Landeszeitung".

During internships as a journalist, he also got to know the business side of journalism, thought it could be done better, and henceforth aspired to publishing management.

After two years in the armed forces (lieutenant in the reserve), he studied economics and business administration in Hamburg and Brussels and began his professional career in November 1992 at Axel Springer in Hamburg.

Reimers made the detour to the Belgian capital because of love.

His current wife, Dominique Petre, works as a cultural officer at the Franco-Allemand Institute in Frankfurt.

The couple has three children, aged 22, 20 and 17, all of whom attended French school.

At home people talk in a jumble: "We start a sentence in French and end it in German or vice versa." Reimers could also switch to Platt if necessary.

The German specialist publisher is unique

He quickly made a career at Springer, becoming, among other things, the publishing manager of the newspaper group “Bild”, left in 2002 and became self-employed as a consultant for various newspaper houses, including the “Fränkischer Tag”.

From the Upper Franconian province, he soon ended up in Frankfurt, where he took up one of the most challenging posts in German publishing: the task was to clean up the ailing “Frankfurter Rundschau”.

Reimers experienced this exciting phase between the SPD investment company and the autocratic publishing culture as a further learning experience and finally found his professional home in August 2010 at Deutscher Fachverlag.

The house on Mainzer Landstraße with its more than 800 employees is unique in the German publishing industry.

Family-owned since 1946, which means it also has a duty to be particularly loyal to the workforce, it publishes more than 100 specialist titles, from the “Lebensmittel Zeitung” and “Fleischwirtschaft international” to the “Reorganization Advisor”, the “Opernwelt” and “Uhren & jewels".

Above all is the heading “Quality Journalism”.

The specialist publications are intended to make readers more successful in their jobs.

The "display channel" is irrelevant as long as it reaches the target groups.

Naturally, the digital is on the rise, the revenue from digital products is to be increased to half of the total revenue by 2025.

Events play an important role - digital, hybrid and face-to-face.

Reimers sees his job as teamwork and a multitasking challenge, for which the well-trained fifty-eight-year-old keeps fit through all kinds of sports.

He likes to go to work every day, by bike. He can say like few others that he has turned his hobby into a career.