Remo Pedon Pedon SpA

Remo Pedon, President of Pedon SpA, underlines how was important the decision to go abroad. “Once you have managed to do business in Italy and you have succeeded, it means that you can do a business anywhere in the world.”

The entrepreneurial adventure begins

I am Remo Pedon and I am the president of Pedon SpA. We produce legumes, cereals and seeds not only in Italy, but also internationally.

The company was founded in 1984 from an idea of the three founding partners: me and my brothers. I am the youngest of the three and the company was born out of a need in that situation, at that time, to transition from the wholesale of food products, which my brothers had already started in the ‘70s, to doing something for the supermarket chains that in the early 80s were sprouting in our territory and in Italy in general. Thinking about what we could do for supermarket chains, the products that were the closest to our culture, to our philosophy, were legumes and cereals and seeds and from there we started.

We started like so many stories, so many companies in our territory, not, as they say, in a garage, in a basement, that would have been too much, too small, but in a shed, however small, 380 square meters and we bought a second-hand machine with lots of will and lots of ideas and dreams. So we got started in those years and then developed by acquiring two companies in our territory at the end of the 1980s and then moved from the small shed to a larger one, and to an even bigger one, until we arrived here, where we have our headquarters in Molvena, we are currently 20,000 square meters spaces and opened branches and companies and factories in three other continents, because we have a factory in China, a factory in Ethiopia and a factory in Argentina.

The money to start

The money we invested in this new activity came from the activity that my brothers had started as a wholesale of foodstuffs, so it was a fairly small investment, because we already had the warehouse, we just needed to buy a packaging machine to make the bags and we bought it used, so the investment the beginning, it was quite limited. Then it’s obvious that the investments have followed one another and that this new business has grown, so we have begun to progress and we have gradually expanded, investing the company’s profits.

A negative and a positive event

A positive event regarding our company was immediately the year following the birth, when the supermarkets, the supermarket chain “Pam Panorama” trusted us and placed their first order, which was 1,750 cartons of product, each containing 10, 1 kilo bags, so I remember exactly, exactly the first order, because it wasn’t only extremely important for us and large in volume, but above all it was the first chain of supermarkets at national level that gave us confidence.

As for an aspect, a negative event, well we must say that like every company, we make mistakes and we do them every day. What is more important to me, however, is remembering how, if not a negative event, but a situation that could be anticipated was our desire, the date on which we began to travel the world. In hindsight, we could have started much, much earlier or quite sooner. But events at that time meant that we started traveling the world in the mid-90s and not earlier, at the beginning of our, of our history.

Doing business in Italy

Doing business in Italy, for an entrepreneur, is a particularly difficult thing, it is like a mountain climber climbing Everest. Once you’ve climbed Everest, you can climb any mountain in the world. This means that once you have managed to do business in Italy and have succeeded not only in Italy but with export to various parts of the world, it means that you can do business anywhere on the planet. On the other hand, however, there is not only one factor that can be negative, the difficulty of doing business, but still the desire to do it in Italy.

For many years of my life, about 20 years of my life, I spent between Italy and various parts of the world, where our products were produced. However, every time I returned home, it was a joy, because I didn’t only think to have my roots here, but I also considered this my home.

The key traits of an entrepreneur

The first quality a businessman must have is being visionary, then obviously he must know how to listen, he must know how to use all of his skills, he must not fear failure, and he also needs to have another very important gift, perseverance. This is because, especially at the beginning, especially when you start and the company is a start-up, if you don’t have perseverance, tenacity, and it must last for years, before you can succeed, so it is an absolutely important gift. Being visionaries, but not being leaders and not having leadership, obviously you can’t succeed that way. It is necessary for an entrepreneur to be followed, to be followed by his/her collaborators and to create that situation in which the collaborators trust their leader, this is fundamental. Being an entrepreneur does not mean doing business to make money, the economic consequence of your company, it is how well you do your job, how passionately you do what you have to do. Obviously there is the economic feedback and it is a reflection, a subsequent effect. At the beginning when you start, when the start-up is set up, obviously you can’t even expect to be able to earn the money of one of your collaborators, then later, if what you have thought, if at the entrepreneurial level your company works, of course there is also the economic effect. The entrepreneur, usually the Italian entrepreneur, the entrepreneur from Veneto has an ethical characteristic that when he has a project, an idea of creating an office, rather than a factory, in various parts of the world, the commitment at the beginning is to enter on tiptoe, to tiptoe into that Country, into that State and also to understand the needs of that territory.

The future for the new generations

Surely you have to be creative, you have to have the attitude of the dreamer, you need to have the tenacity and the pursuit of well-being.

I would like to start and I would like to open with regards to creativity, which is fundamental for a start-up. I was in Mexico, 20 years ago, in a small town, I was getting out of the church, a church and a little boy, a child approached me, he must have been 4-5 years old: my first thought seeing him was that he was going to ask me for charity. But that wasn’t the case, it was not, he approached me and said: “If you give me 10 pesos, I’ll tell you a poem.” Well, he told me the poem, we sat on the steps of the church, he narrated me the poem and I gave him the 10 pesos. Well, this seems to me to be an example of an extraordinary start-up, because in exchange of a service he asked me for money, but he didn’t ask me for charity.

The Second important point is the attitude towards dreaming, we must never stop dreaming. An entrepreneur cannot stop dreaming, when he stops dreaming he must stop working in his business, this is fundamental. Obviously with creativity and the attitude towards the dream tenacity can’t be left out, a start-up needs time.

Another important aspect is the pursuit of well-being, which doesn’t mean the search of the sole economic well-being, but it is the pursuit of a well-being at 360 degrees, meaning that you like what you do, that you have the passion, you have the fire, as I often say, and that even when Monday morning arrives you have the desire to start again, you don’t feel the weight because it’s Monday morning.

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