Episode 218 mit Ralf Bühler (CEO, Conrad Electronics Group) - Behind the C

Hello, glad to be here.

Further than before, but I grew up around the corner. I'm a Munich native.

Ralf Bühler, CEO of Conrad. I grew up in semiconductors, lived in London and Hong Kong, and am passionate about technology. That's how I ended up in tech.

Yes. About seven years ago we announced a new life stage for Conrad. B2C is under pressure, so we shifted to B2B. The transformation is ongoing. We've been successful, but it's more than evolution—it's a revolution that never ends. We used our strengths, courage, and stamina. Conrad has always had the will to change.

We're a billion-euro company, now 80% B2B. We launched one of the first B2B marketplaces, contributing a triple-digit million GMV. We changed our entire system landscape, skillset, and mindset. Transformation is about entrepreneurship: foresight, courage, and execution. Many people see problems but lack the courage or commitment; Conrad has always had both.

Early in my career, I left a secure job at a large semiconductor company to join a small management buyout. That taught me constant learning and risk-taking. Later, my first CEO role during the dot-com bust taught me the importance of people and restructuring. Third, I always chose tasks larger than myself. These three things—learning, people skills, and ambition—have shaped me.

Don't wait for someone to give you what you want—ask for it. I've gotten roles by being bold and saying I'm ready. Once you have the job, earn trust through transparency, leading from the front, and knowing what you don't know. It becomes a flywheel.

Holistic sales—understanding the customer's real problem—is a fantastic foundation for the C-level. It gives you a broad view, but you also need financial acumen.

Yes, absolutely. You need shareholders who want an entrepreneur and the ability to seize opportunities. It's harder than starting a new company because you have 100 years of legacy, but you can still remake the future.

In a family business, much becomes obvious from daily operations. We noticed fewer people buying in stores and margins shrinking. That was the trigger. We brought in consultants, generated ideas, filtered them, and built a business plan. The idea to focus on B2B came from leveraging our strengths: providing access to technology, multichannel, and consulting. We have a broad customer base in B2B as well, so it was a natural fit. But it required adapting multichannel for B2B, including e-procurement systems.

So instead of employees in the branch, we are talking about field service employees who also advise customers. But in principle, much of what was the core of our business model is now, in a modified form, relevant for B2B customers.

That actually happened before my time. I only had to repeatedly communicate it. People, as humans, many of us are not oriented towards change. We were successful, we had a good business model—why change? I wouldn't call it resistance; I would call it fear of change. What does it mean? Can I even do what is now suddenly required of me? Do we really have to do it? Of course we had to deal with that at the beginning, and I'm not saying it's completely resolved today. We haven't exchanged all employees; we still have people who have been with us for 30, 40, 20 years. The question is how to overcome the fear of contact, how to get the new knowledge into their heads, how to enable the transfer. But there is no more resistance. It takes time; behavioral change in one or two years is utopian in a business environment. At the beginning, there was certainly fear of the unknown.

I think that the cognitive, logical understanding of why we are doing this is now anchored everywhere. As I said, transformation is never complete. We learn something new about our customers every day, which requires us to refine the plan we made five or six years ago. What we try to convey to employees is that it's normal for change to continue. There will never be a point where we know everything; if we reach that point, it becomes dangerous because comfort and carelessness set in, and then the next big transformation is probably around the corner. The cognitive understanding is there, and we have demonstrated through performance and the big shift that the strategy works, so the belief that it's right is much stronger. But we still learn every day.

In the early days, we had what we called business experts—people who helped bring changes into the departments and support them. We set up a PMO to accompany the major changes. We used an online academy for training. We started something we still do today called Transformation Corner, where we gather people once a month to deepen learning on a specific topic. The toolset is now so large that everyone can find their own methodology. There are only a few anchor points, and the PMO was one of them. But the tools are not the deciding factor. We use OKRs and KPIs, but everyone has their own flavor. In my experience at Conrad and before, what works best—and it's rather untypical for Germany—is that instead of making a huge project plan that takes two years before you start anything, we have the mindset of 'let's start.' Naturally, we know where we want to go, but we adapt the path. It's like climbing Mount Everest: there's an ideal route, but weather conditions change, so you have to adjust. We have a clear goal, but we adapt the path. People call it agile, but I don't like that word because agile is often an excuse for chaos. I would call it adaptability: we have a clear goal and adjust the path if needed.

When you think about digital architecture, we considered how to structure this change. We now call it omnichannel access: how can we prevent customers from having to adapt to our systems, and instead adapt ourselves to customers without great effort? That's how we aligned the architecture—to be independent from specific standards and interfaces, to provide omnichannel access as simply as possible. That was the biggest digitalization change. A website is a website; customers find what we preset. In e-procurement, we need to adapt to customers, but without each connection becoming a special project. We didn't know everything at the beginning; we build it step by step. Today we have 5,000 connections across Europe, all slightly different. There are OCI, EDI, API. Our goal is to help digitalize procurement, so we want to be as open to connections as possible.

We always try to start from the customer's perspective. Then you usually run into internal constraints that architecture imposes. Three words describe it best: test, learn, earn. We try to fulfill customer wishes. We test how to best get to the solution, see if it works, ideally scale it, and then earn money. We do that on the website and in e-procurement: maximize testing, learning, and then customer usage.

There are always things you would change in hindsight. I want to point out: when we are in companies with a long history, we have system landscapes that sometimes hinder us. In large projects, you need to be especially aware of what your reality is today and how realistic it is to really accomplish the project. The big problem is writing the specification for the new system. If the spec does not include the constraints of the rest of the architecture, you end up with two systems side by side that don't integrate well. We tried to build an open system from the start, with high abstraction from our underlying SAP. We wanted to abstract our legacy systems as much as possible. We were always for a networked system, connecting many services as microservices. The most important thing is not to say we replace an old system, write a spec that only covers half of what the old system does, struggle to implement the new system, and then find we can't shut down the old one because certain things don't work. We tried to prevent that. There will be no perfect specification, no perfect project without adjustments during the project phase due to legacy systems. You have to acknowledge that early and work with it.

Of course. Entrepreneurs often have gut feeling, but the reality is we looked at market data extensively. This transformation was almost a no-brainer because Conrad's strengths were directly transferable to another market, and that market was so large that the numbers were already apparent on a meta level. We did deeper segmentation later. Courage is not just a property; it involves the ability to implement and persevere. You also need the means. In a listed environment, courage is not always rewarded because results must come quickly. The time horizon is part of courage. Then the economic environment: if a company is highly indebted and wants to change business models, courage alone isn't enough—it must be feasible. In both cases at Conrad, the business case was obvious, the shareholders were willing to support the transformation, and the company's economic situation allowed us to fund it from our own strength. As a family business, we burn our own money, so courage must be calculated. You can't burn hundreds of millions hoping things get better. You have to be intelligently courageous because you pay for growth from your own financial strength.

Like in sports, business is about momentum. It's easy to be persistent when early successes show. You have to work to get early wins so that faith in the strategy and execution is present. You have to watch out for old behavior patterns working against you. Perseverance also means saying no to things we decided not to do, staying on course. Especially now, with the economic and geopolitical situation, perseverance is necessary because the market doesn't help you. It's easy to doubt. Here, the family business's long-term orientation is extremely important. Having the time horizon in the shareholder structure allows for this perseverance. It's a combination of things.

Our topic is indeed to become a leading procurement platform. Let me start from the end. With everything we do, I believe we will be one of those platforms. For me, a platform is not just a website or marketplace; it's a network, an ecosystem of procurement solutions that help business customers save time and money, secure supply chains, and become more sustainable. That's what our platform must deliver. Despite current circumstances, we will generate growth in the coming years. Look at the big themes: the demographic pyramid means fewer people in procurement in the future, so processes need to be as interaction-free as possible, saving time and money. The digitalization of procurement is driven by this demographic effect across Europe, US, Asia. Second, geopolitical situations mean supply chains are no longer as reliable as five years ago. Companies need to better manage their supply chains, which likely means fewer suppliers, clearer requirements, and clearer responsibility distribution. This must be largely digital. Third, we need to become more sustainable. I come from the semiconductor industry, which goes through cycles - three years oversupply, three years undersupply. That's becoming more extreme, as seen during COVID. The availability situation won't get easier. And sustainability: goods are not unavailable globally, but not necessarily available locally. So should we produce goods twice just because they are in China? That's a procurement service we can digitalize. With these three themes - demographic, sustainability, supply chain security - Conrad is on the right track to grow regardless of market conditions because these are the issues we address.

I also enjoyed it, and I hope some people take something away.