They haven't yet emerged from the COVID restructuring. The first generation is older, and the younger one isn't pushing in. We went from 300 million to 6 billion annually. I'm on the supervisory boards of five companies including Modivo, Rainbow, Exotic, and others. Together with partners at GCG Partners, we are developing a company that helps with transformations, scaling, and extracting profitability. When I look at what caused success, it was the truth of time and the truth of the screen. On the screen we often show 300-400 slides about strategy. An omnichannel customer, with the same number of transactions, had 80% higher value.
We built the feeling that we are awesome.
We bet that we would triple his sales year over year on the marketplace, and it turned out to be 20 times. So one of the key elements and mistakes is focusing on too many topics and areas. Can you point out some repeating errors you see when entering organizations? The Slovaks grew 14%, the Czechs grew 13% empty. That spring of destructive change wound up so much that there's no margin for error. Scaling a business without tightening the operating model and generating OCF is just scaling a model that will fail, calculated by very professional people signed in blood. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Grow Scale Automate podcast. My guest today is Marcin Czyczewski.
Hi Marcin, thanks for being here. The weather in Krakow is average, but that makes this an even better time to talk. Before we dive into business mechanics, for those who haven't met you, what are you currently involved in?
First, we are developing with partners at GCG Partners a company that helps with transformations, scaling, profitability, and acquisitions. Third leg is a new company we created in recruitment. Besides that, I'm on the supervisory boards of five companies including Modivo, Rainbow, and Exotic.
So you're a serial entrepreneur and you've seen a lot in business. But before we go deeper, I'm sure you have some decompression space from all these threads.
A very boring one, but I've always loved politics, geopolitics, strategy, military, and US politics. I dive deep into these. Classic knowledge, unnecessary but needed.
Entering the business mechanics, you formulate phrases like 'strategy is really the budget, management time, and talent.' How would you explain that?
Well, it's a polemical statement. Real strategies are not what they claim to be. There is the truth of time and the truth of the screen. On the screen we show 300-400 slides, but after closing the strategy, money flows to the same places as before. Those elements shrink and die. Following the money, where the budget, the most expensive people (management), and teams go, that's where the real strategy is. Often there's a gap between what's written and what actually happens.
So the real focus is where management has attention. I need to dig deeper because it's fascinating. From your experience, have you often seen management poorly exposed to priorities?
I think it's like muscle memory. Operational people come from below and excel at specific things. They don't process that they now have a larger, more generalist responsibility. They over-focus on their domain. But there's also the pressure to deliver results now, which is easier than looking at tectonic shifts of mega trends. So there's a tendency to focus on the present because results pressure is immediate.
That's one element. Fortunately, it's often visible because we work a lot with entrepreneurs. They understand it's their money, so the factor of 'we can't grow' disappears. Now it's about shifting to a smaller but more profitable growth, and if you go from profitability to cash-generating growth, that's good.
Essentially, it's okay. We build organizational strength and value, preparing for a better sale. When you have cash, it's an opportunity in bad times, not a threat. I see a shift from expecting revenue growth to expecting profitability growth and margin improvement.
You have quite an ergonomics...
You also formulate the Value Creation Plan within GCG. As I understand, it's a substitute for a strategy with many pages that is unused and unimplementable. How does it differ from your perspective?
In this mix of strategy and execution, you get a better proportion. Less philosophical rumination, more channeling attention and holding people accountable. Then you see faster whether your players are delivering. You make quicker decisions on who fits the team. Everything starts to align. You move from a stagnant dance to a good pace. That's VCP for me. It stands in dichotomy to philosophical strategy spread over 360 pages about everything and nothing.
Let's channel that attention and hold ourselves accountable.
Whether they are delivering or not.
And then you consistently make personnel decisions faster. Everything starts to fit. You exit the hole of stagnation and move to good game pace. That's VCP for me.
That's interesting. You point out initiatives, and five per department seems like a lot.
Yes, yes, yes. From our experience, we repeatedly did too much. We chased too many initiatives. Now it's just a few for the whole year, reviewed quarterly. We burned out by underestimating the level of engagement needed to deliver.
I grew out of that culture. Kanman Ferbes from Volkswagen taught me 'you get what you measure.' It's key to look at numbers. I remember Gerald Enen from Volkswagen, a demanding boss who had all management methods in his finger. He applied them at the company level. I was logistics director and we couldn't achieve absurd efficiency on one line. We needed to produce 30 shifts a week, impossible mathematically.
There's some psychology...
But if everything went perfectly, it could. He went to two bottleneck spots, where women were working. He graciously greeted each person, pulled out a flipchart, noted the first number they produced, and left. That was the first time we achieved that efficiency. Just having a flipchart with visibility made it happen.
Only that information that we start measuring something made it work. For me, that's a lesson: if you want execution, highlight it.
As if someone shot me in the ear about how it works.
Working from Z to A based on the Amazon model, which someone in the UAE suggested. If you want an effect, look at what leads to it, track input variables. Don't look at the output, look at the main feed. Manage through KPIs, not measuring everything at once. Data management is my strong topic. It will become more important as businesses need more data about their performance and customers.
If you want the effect here, see what leads to it. Like Amazon, they have jobs on input variables. Don't look at the output, monitor the main feed. I've talked about this a lot.
Exactly. And Oskar, just in case someone believes my words, it's important. Many would laugh that I love data but I also love action. It's important not to analyze yourself to death. Look at key numbers, but move and correct based on them in motion.
