TB Partner Talks | Eloi Planes (Fluidra) | Tech Barcelona

Well, look, in 1960... there were four families, each connected to a different business—one was in ceramics, another in tennis courts, and so on. One of them knew someone who ran the third family's business. They got together and started manufacturing products for themselves first. From there, they realized that making products just for themselves wasn't enough, so they opened up their manufacturing to other companies in the Spanish market. And practically within two years, they had already opened up the entire international side of the company.

It started by finding a partner in Italy, a partner in France—someone the client knew, or someone savvy who could help open that market. They were given a stake, and from there markets just kept opening up. But as I said, it was about packing a suitcase and getting on the ground. The world was our market—wherever we needed to do business, that's where we went. From the very beginning, I believe the four founders immediately had this vision: where is our market? The whole world. That led us to, at first, very aspirational goals, but little by little we walked that path. In fact, we truly closed that path in a real and powerful way in 2018 with the merger with the American company Zodiac, because we had achieved significant global penetration in virtually all markets. The American market is the largest in the world—it represents almost 50% of the global pool market—and we entered it through a merger. We had good but limited presence there before 2018.

I've lived through an important part of this history. Now when I look back, I'm second generation, but I've been leading the company for over 20 years—nearly 50% of its history. When you look back, you always remember the good parts: the continuous growth, the opening of markets. But it's true there was one very difficult moment—the crisis of 2009, when we had been listed for less than two years. That was a very hard and difficult moment for the company. We had to accept that the market had changed and that the company needed to make an adjustment. At that time, with the IPO, we had also made what I consider a strategic decision that turned out not to be correct: diversifying away from pools into irrigation and water treatment. So we had to accept that and redirect. That was perhaps the most complex moment. But we always understood that it was an attractive sector and that the company had the capacity to keep consolidating the market. So we put on our raincoats and kept going.

I'd say it has helped. The first steps usually helped a lot because opening the French market—our headquarters is in Perpignan, which is very close, and that helped enormously. France is a global market, and it was relatively close, which allowed us to gain scale. I think Barcelona is an attractive city for many people from any country, which means people want to come here. It's good for client relationships and also for talent attraction—it's a city that helps you on this journey.

When you put in parallel the story of a second-generation family business with four families who had no family relation among themselves, I always say—it's easy for us because being four forced us to build a series of key elements: transparency, having a common objective, and agreeing on where we're heading. That agreement is crucial, because if the four of you don't have this common vision, it's very difficult to govern anything afterward. It's about knowing how to differentiate what it means to be a shareholder from what it means to be the entrepreneur or the chief executive—the person leading the company forward. You have to be very clear that these are two very different hats, and there are decisions you must take with one hat and others with a different hat. This exercise of transparency, common vision, and separating management from ownership are key to sustaining this not just for one generation but for two. Also, over time, with problems and opportunities, partners need to find their own path out or find flexibility. The minority shareholders I mentioned earlier—who started with my father and the other families—had created a lot of value and had also been executives who needed to change at some point. The IPO gave them the possibility to give their shares real value, which helped with that transition. People can't feel trapped in a project if they don't want to keep going.

I think regardless of whether you're a family business or not, you have to abstract and manage with a medium and long-term vision. We are here to generate value—not thinking about this year but thinking about the future. You have to do this in a market that sometimes is more perfect, sometimes less so, because it's a market that also has a sentiment component—how things are going, how they're perceived. Sometimes the market damages the messaging companies communicate. But if you're consistent, explain things well, and are always present in the market—in good times and bad—the market understands you. I think, perhaps now with the perspective of 15 years, I've learned that here it's about generating trust over the medium term. Time counts, the ability to communicate, explain things as they are, and be coherent. At the end of the day, the stock market investor wants to know what the company is doing, that it has a future, and that it's confronting things head-on.

Well, I've been a poet since I was young. I actually have a self-published book of poetry. The Fundació Catalunya Cultura—I believe there are several elements that are very connected to the world of entrepreneurship, startups, and business projects. A cultural project is essentially an entrepreneurial project: someone has an idea they want to realize, carry out with their passion and creativity. But what we often find is that the world of creativity and culture lives somewhat apart from all the business systems and processes that could help make the project more solid and go further. So our foundation's primary purpose is: how do we help these projects become more sustainable? How do we ensure that out of the 25, 50, or 100 projects being created in our territory, more of them reach a good outcome? We try to give them the tools to help them advance. We run an annual program where these companies go through, we help them, give them training hours. As I said, we try to provide this external support. For the business world, I think the return is very clear: companies need to look at the world with this medium-to-long-term sustainability vision, and culture is a key part of our world. I can't—and I think no one could—imagine a world without culture, without music, without being able to read a book, see a painting, or enjoy photography. We don't realize it, but it surrounds us, and we're living off it. A country with a strong culture is a stronger country, a country that advances, where people are more comfortable. It's a key element, and there's a great return on that investment.

As I was saying, I believe there are two things in Fluidra's DNA that are very clear: internationalization and innovation. Internationalization as a willingness to go out, expand, and see the world in all its breadth. And innovation as an element—we want to deliver responses to our clients, to the end user, so that the pool truly becomes the best possible experience for them. At home, with our engineers, we started trying to work and push things forward. In the beginning, by copying—because ultimately we were improving what we copied—trying to expand the product range. We'd look at what the Americans were doing, what others were doing, and figure out how we could do it. There was innovation in what we did, in production processes, in the product itself, always trying to achieve what we envisioned. With this internal vision of doing things ourselves and learning as well, though it's true we were in an era where things moved at a slower pace than today. Then this evolves in two directions: at some point, you go from being a follower to being a leader. And when you're a leader, you don't know who to copy anymore because you're out in front. That's when you have to change the way you innovate—you need to open up to the world, see what's happening in other sectors, go learn elsewhere. That's where we entered this phase of openness. I had the opportunity to be an independent board member at Acciona when their innovation centers weren't yet separated, but they were starting to be, and we visited both. I remember coming back and telling David: I swear, just with what's here, just with the growth in these tech centers, we can innovate for the next 20 years in our sector. Then we moved to this more open phase—looking at what's happening in the world, trying to find solutions outside. And that's a lot of what our relationship with Barcelona comes from: looking for doors that open to ecosystems of entrepreneurs, startups, or companies facing similar challenges, helping us move forward.

Generating new business, new solutions, creating value in different ways—I believe those are the things that will win. There's this pressure you start feeling, but here it's about advancing. You face a great challenge: you have to learn. For example, with circularity, you have to learn how it impacts you and change your mindset to get there. Water in a pool is lost passively through evaporation or through filter cleaning—those are the two main points of water loss once a pool has been filled and properly treated. It can last a long time. You can reduce this water footprint by working on filtration and cleaning systems that are faster and more efficient. Sustainability is one key element; connectivity is the other. Connectivity and pool automation—which can go together or separately—connected pools give you data, and automation simplifies life for everyone. I always speak of three pillars for us: the end user, who uses the pool, and connectivity allows them to connect to the electrical grid at times of better pricing, keep the pool well-treated, use the pool remotely, turn things on, heat it—a whole series of interactions. The pool professional, the installer, who also does maintenance—connectivity makes their life easier too. Until now, maintaining pools required driving out, arriving, checking. Now you can monitor pools remotely, see what's happening, and in many cases, if the pool is automated, act remotely. It facilitates usage. And for the manufacturer, it gives us visibility we never had before—we can start seeing what the end user is doing, how they're using the pool, what they have, what they don't have, why one user experiences one thing and another doesn't. We get information, we can do preventive maintenance—this pump is going to fail this weekend. For industrial companies, this represents a great challenge because it's a leap: not just toward digitalization and connectivity, but a leap toward service. It's no longer just selling products—these products now have associated services. For an industrial company, that's a complicated leap. And it's a leap toward data: how do I use this data, and what do I do when I have bad data? That's another leap for industrial companies.

I think we have several. We've been looking at some of them, but it's complex from an ecosystem standpoint. But I believe that ultimately the challenges come from... you have to keep incorporating people with knowledge the company doesn't have. We didn't have software engineers 7 or 8 years ago, and now we have a large team. We didn't have data people, and now we have a whole team for data analysis. You have to bring in talent, make all the talent work together, and above all, as an executive team, be very attentive and create the ecosystem that allows this to advance within the company.

As we were discussing, we've opened up enormously. When we started this outward opening, we began by working with... for example, our startup addresses a technical problem: underwater communication or energy transmission without cables. Elements that from a technical standpoint could provide innovative solutions. Where do you find these solutions? Who in the world, in other sectors, might have a solution that's applicable? We go looking very quickly, present the solutions to the team, and then test some of them to see if they could be applicable—both from a technical competitiveness standpoint and from business challenges or transformation. We've been at this for about two and a half years with a structured approach. We organized it because we were already doing this, perhaps not so formally—putting people together, training them, having a separate team from the rest of the organization, with a separate governing body. We have a board that José Cucurella manages, and it's helped us with this openness. I think we have two or three areas—not all of them may be that disruptive, solving a technical problem in some product—but two or three elements that I believe can give us a competitive advantage looking ahead in the coming years. If what we're seeing comes to fruition from Barcelona, we'll be delighted. And we hope this relationship continues. We'll be very attentive to all the projects you launch and will be by your side to support you. We encourage all startups and corporations, as we always do, to share knowledge that can benefit everyone.

For us, it's this door to the ecosystem—the entrepreneurial ecosystem of startups and companies, because companies also have these challenges, which in some cases can be quite similar. This is the door where we can find solutions that we're often looking for and need to find.