The entrepreneurial adventure begins
My name is Andrea Babetto, I am 54 years old, I have two children, I’ve been in Criocabin since ’99. The company was actually founded in ’84, by five members, who at the end of the 90s started to have problems, problems of cohabitation, and I entered precisely in ’99. I was a rich kid, my father had several companies and like all the sons of entrepreneurs in the north-east I started working in my father’s company in ’84. After about six years, my father sold the company and from there, I have to say, my business history started, because the company was sold to a multinational company, this German multinational gave me the opportunity to gain managerial experience, very useful for my training, but also to understand what were, what are the limits of a “daddy’s son”, a businessman from the North East. It was helpful to understand that sometimes we need to respond to goals, to a leader who demands results, otherwise you stay at home. And this experience led me towards the end of ’98, with my two other partners to set up a small company that produced refrigerated cabinets, refrigerators for the commercial refrigeration sector, very much addressed to customization, to very special products. This company, coincidentally, was born near the headquarters of Criocabin, Criocabin that, with other partners, we were not present in the corporate organization, had a difficult time. I entered a bit as a challenge in this company, with the goal of setting up, creating a sales network, a product network. Understanding how it worked, trying to revive this company. After a short time, not even two years, we merged the two companies, namely Criocabin and the company we had founded, acquiring all the shares of Criocabin and starting with a single brand in the commercial refrigeration sector. Today we are a 170-employee company, we work with about forty countries around the world, we are present in all five continents, we are growing not only organically, but also externally, so we have important medium-long term growth projects.
The money to start
How did it start? Well, banks certainly do not give you money. When we started to buy shares, to buy shares in this company, I was lucky enough to have my father who lent me the money. My dad, I’ve always had a bad professional relationship with him, but a good personal relationship, the father/son relationship and he told me “I’ll give you the money, as long as you give it back to me”. In about ten years I gave back the money he had borrowed me. I am obviously proud of it because, because I feel I have done it somehow by myself.
A negative and a positive event
I learned the negative aspect along the way. I am a man who, professionally speaking, really likes sharing goals. We have a management team, so a group of executives and managers, we are eleven, we sit around this table where we share the most important choices of the company. I have a small group of executives with whom I really share the strategy even in the long term, and the negative element is certainly not having understood, over the years, that a company is not a democracy, that is, a company works if there is a leader, a leader especially if he has charisma, if he can lead people and if he can do the boss. This I understood late, because I come from a managerial experience where my associates were my colleagues and only with years I understood where the company could have gone and who could have brought it. So this was the negative experience for me, it took me some time, I lost time and resources to manage this relationship. Fortunately, today, I solved it because in Criocabin it is clear who the boss is, but it was certainly an element that was disturbing, especially for the market, for the internal structure that represents the Criocabin.
As a positive event, certainly, I put first the crises that we suffered, that all companies suffer over the years. The crisis brought, brings, leads my company, my team to question themselves. The questioning means trying to overcome a moment of market difficulty, of organizational problems, confronting with original ideas, ideas that come out of the group and that allow you to do what in the period of good times, we say, does not come out, does not come to light in the company. I always see the periods of crisis that precede a leap in quality of the company, so this is really a positive moment for me. When there is a moment of difficulty within the company I always tell my colleagues this is the time to team up, to get around a table and to decide what the future of this company will be.
Doing business in Italy
For me it is obvious to do business in Italy. We are in a world where design, where beauty is very important. I never thought, despite being a lover of different cultures, of the world, of traveling, of being in contact, with curiosity, of other nations, of other peoples, never I thought we could, us Italians, do something different from what we have inside our DNA.
Our sales manager was traveling to Siberia, we were negotiating an important order when the owner of this large supermarket chain asked: “Stefano, you are Italian, please give me a courtesy, come with me this afternoon because I have to go and choose tiles for the bathrooms of my house. ” I know Stefano well, I know he has no taste, certainly in choosing tiles, but only for the fact that he was Italian he was seen by this Russian client as a bearer of design, culture, beauty, the Italianness that surely we have within ourselves.
For us if we travel to Venice, to Florence or to Rome, we take everything for granted. It should not, it is something that is part of our being, so absolutely Made in Italy is part of us and could not be otherwise.
The key traits of an entrepreneur
The most important aspect that an entrepreneur must have, at least from my point of view, is knowing how to read the market, knowing how to interpret the various world markets well and above all know how to adapt very quickly to what are the requests and the needs of the various markets.
My father was an entrepreneur, the business and his success have marked the development of an exceptional and unique product idea, that allowed him be successful and sell the product. I believe that today this is not enough, I think it is knowing how to respond to a need, a question that in the vast majority of cases is hidden, is not explicit. A need, a request that the market has, what market places you must know how to grasp.
An entrepreneur must have curiosity and originality. The substantial difference I see between a good manager and an entrepreneur, a good entrepreneur, is this: originality! Knowing how to make some choices, not always apt, but that allow us to be, that allow the company to be original. I am a convinced anti-global, because I believe that only by making original products and making counter choices, you can have an excellent company, otherwise we will always finish second, we will always have a mediocre company.
Another very important aspect of being an entrepreneur, I would say, perhaps, the most important is to surround yourself with good managers, good figures, who know how to interpret very well what is the “vision” of the entrepreneur and turn it into activity, in business. On this, I think, I work, I spend more than 90% of my time. The management of human resources and above all the managers and executives of the company is certainly the most important activity to carry out within the company.
The future for the new generations
I think young people should not be afraid to be themselves, to speak out of the chorus, they must have courage. Today I see that there is more and more, unfortunately, standardization, more and more people following, young people who follow the masses. But within groups of young people there are many and many people, many talented people that often do not have the opportunity to emerge. The piece of advice I give them is to be themselves.
We have an Academy, within Criocabin, where we grow young talented people. We have always had difficulty finding engineers or finding people for certain positions. The Academy allows a group of 10-12-14 engineers or graduates in economics, people who can serve our company, to join this working group, which works transversally in the organization of the company. They have the opportunity to express themselves with great freedom, they have the opportunity to make mistakes, they have the opportunity to compare themselves, also in a sort of race, and have the opportunity not only to build experience, maybe after going abroad, or going to other companies, but also to grow and stay within the company. Normally no more than 15-20% of this group stays in the company. But, those who stay, are really the top, those who have been able to pull out the courage, to go out and say their opinion, even if it was contrary to what they got from those who have grey hair like me.
So, young people have to, must have, the courage to express themselves with great freedom, because young people do not have blinders as we have.
IP Crew
