Be Talks The Shapers: Giovanni Tamburi | La strategia di investimento del “Warren Buffet italiano”

Good morning. Welcome everyone.

No, no, no. They believed in me a lot. I put in my part, but if I hadn't had very good mentors, both before Euromobiliare and at Euromobiliare who believed in me, not only that, but at Euromobiliare for example they wanted someone to launch the M&A sector, mergers and acquisitions, because in Italy in the 80s it wasn't found, actually at the beginning of the 80s, late 70s, I was at Bastogi and I was a young journeyman at Bastogi. After looking around a bit, they turned to me and said, 'Well, you come, we can't find anyone better, we'll pay for courses around the world' and they paid for courses around the world. 'We'll train you, we'll make you study, we'll give you all the necessary tools because clearly for what we need you don't have the right skills, the right experience, and we'll bet together.' I said yes, I thanked them very much because certainly it wasn't easy to find someone who invested in me so much, and so the great merit is certainly theirs, not mine.

Well, our formula was born because we trust entrepreneurs, perhaps we trust them more than they trust themselves. Private equity funds that typically do majority operations, even in many cases with leverage, so by putting debt, they take for granted that the presumption of the fund manager is such that he is able to put the right people, make the right business model, make the right strategy, etc., etc. What I instead, in the first part of my life, the one more based on M&A, understood, is that we should give trust to entrepreneurs who were already good in themselves, who needed an additional support, but not to be replaced and not to have someone who sends you the CFO, puts the CEO, puts the general manager. So this was a formula that at the beginning was heavily criticized because clearly it is difficult in an Italy of the 90s to tell this story and have positive feedback from this story. We tried, it went well. The second part of your question is how to exercise influence, the very right word influence through listening. I believe that when you talk to an entrepreneur who is typically alone, who typically compares himself with family or with the accountant, with the banker, etc., etc., he never has someone with whom to have a comparison, quote unquote, on equal terms, because that someone who bet as a minority in your company, leaving you the entrepreneur the majority, means that he blindly trusts you, so you are in his hands and he is in yours, and this allows us to go forward very, very well, at least for us it has allowed us in almost 30 years as investors to go forward very, very well. You have to be very careful, very scrupulous. Earlier someone pointed out that I had noticed a detail about a person participating here today. So, you really have to be very careful, listen to yourself, listen to others, eh, never be presumptuous, never be those who give you a little lecture. So, what entrepreneurs or managers of a certain level cannot stand is that someone arrives from a famous university or because he attended an exceptional consulting school and gives you a lesson. They should give us a lesson. They know how to make the product, they know how to run their business. So, these in my opinion are the right recipes for doing this job. Bending Spoons is among other things one of the realities

Well, the story would be very long to tell. We had entered a company called Data Service, which had problems one fine day. The person for whom, because also there we bet, we invested in a person, Rocco Sabelli was called to Alitalia and so I found myself as, let's say, an important, almost exclusive investor in this company having to replace the management. I remembered that a few years earlier with Carlo and Stefano Hackerman we had done a startup operation, we are right here in the right place, which went very well, then we sold the company to Reply, both Carlo and Stefano had gone elsewhere, etc., so I called them and said, 'Why don't you give me a hand? Because you are among the closest people I have known in my life in this sector.' Carlo said yes immediately. Stefano, who was president of Capitale Informatica, so he had an amazing, very important career, was a bit more reluctant because he said, 'But I'm very well here, I have an incredible position, Stefano was very young at the time.' Then with Carlo we convinced him, he came and they did a masterpiece. They were brilliant, they multiplied revenue, profits. Moreover, the company at the time didn't even make money, it was in loss, so they were brilliant in organizational aspects, brilliant in strategic aspects, and from a commercial point of view Stefano is truly monstrously good. So that was the story.

But you know we never sell anything. That is, out of 6 or 7 billion in value today including club deals we have done, we would have sold for a few hundred million. So we don't have the perspective of a fund that must buy to sell, but also the B operation was an operation to merge B into Engineering and to do an operation that had industrial sense, and we remained shareholders, the Hackerman family and us. So also there it was an intelligent, profitable evolution honestly, but to make the system even better on an even larger scale. Returning to your question, first of all we never put in contracts, as almost all private equity operators put, a clause like if you don't exit within a certain period we automatically have the mandate to put the company up for sale. Absolutely not. This is the most frustrating thing an entrepreneur can have. If there are sale decisions and we have sold something over the years, we take it together, we decide together when the right moment is, what the right way is, what the way that doesn't disturb the company is. We always put the company at the center of our attention, we never put ourselves nor the entrepreneur himself, but it is the company that pays us our salary and the company must be the heart of everything.

No, absolutely not. We look for the good ones. If tomorrow morning I understand that you are very good at making pinstripe jackets, we'll talk and maybe we'll spend some years together. Incidentally, speaking of years, we have some investments for 24 years. Many of our investments, the bulk of our package today has 12, 13, 14 years of period. Moncler, Amplifon, these types of companies are really many years that we are in, we have no intention of saying run away or take home the enormous profits that theoretically on paper we have made.

But they are all good, they are all good. We are good at making these tables because in design we are the first in the world, we are good in robotics, we are good in electromechanics, we are good in many things, right? I believe that categorizing things is always a bit too generic, always a bit too superficial. I believe that one must go into the individual reality and discover who is better and who is less good.