Intervista di Made It al più grande investitore italiano: Giovanni Tamburi, Ceo di TIP SpA

Thank you, thank you to you.

First of all, I was born into a fairly well-off family. I studied normally, high school, university, I graduated quite well. My parents: my mother was essentially a housewife, the mother of four brothers, so there was plenty of work. My father was a diplomat, he worked at the FAO, so things very far from my life. I would say they had little influence on my professional choices; they left me very free. The luck was that through family friends I came to Milan, I had the opportunity to start this type of work, and so indirectly they were fundamental in giving the foundations to this life of mine.

Ah, foresight not so much, because I haven't really succeeded in the sense that Italy is still far behind regarding these three factors, which are indeed my passion forever and which I have tried to cultivate. I have always been someone who read and studied a lot, and so I understood that when dealing with economics, the important things were to help savings, businesses, and the link between them are the markets. So I tried to study these aspects from the beginning, even during university, then I had the luck to work in it, and I tried to do what I could to help this world. I would say I succeeded quite well, but I realize that every day we are few, we are alone, we are more preachers than actually part of a system that truly took to heart the families of savers, the families of entrepreneurs, the families of workers in companies, and this world of markets that, as we have seen with many governments, has always been somewhat neglected. The financial market has always been a bit abandoned, seen as a world of the rich, seen as something to fight rather than protect, because it is part of that type of society that is not really that popular when one talks about politics. And so this has produced the consequences of little help to businesses, little help to markets, and very little help to savings.

Well, I always enjoyed working, even during school. During the Christmas period, I worked in a shop that sold ski equipment, etc. Then during university, I did a lot of work, also consulting in the advertising sector and other things, so I was already in contact with the business world, albeit indirectly. And just after I turned 18, having the opportunity in this shop where I worked to touch many companies, I had to explain why I sold certain boots, certain skis, certain socks, or certain things. I became curious to say, 'But where do they produce these? How do they make them?' It was the period of Toni Gross, so the 'Azzurra Avalanche' that carried forward this flag of skiing very well. So I took the car and went to visit the companies that produced this stuff to understand better, to deepen what as a salesman I had to tell people in a more substantial, deeper, more serious way. And so yes, it was not very normal for an 18-year-old to do these things, at 19, 20, etc., but I became very passionate about it. So I made a long trip to these factories, I brought home stickers, which was one of the few things you could take. And certainly I learned a lot, I learned a lot what it means for a worker in a factory to do the hard work that many times you see a shop, an object in a shop, but you don't know what is behind it: the physical, mental, intellectual effort to invent a certain product. It was a particular season in the world of winter sports, and so people had to understand why a ski would run better, a boot would hold better, etc. And so I became very passionate about these things. It was then a great fortune to continue wanting to go to the factories, because I have always tried to touch the companies personally, not to be part of that London, New York, but also Milanese finance that sits in its lounges receiving entrepreneurs. 'But did you present yourself like that at the factories, or did you call first to organize a meeting? How did it work?' It depends. There were very snob factories where you couldn't get an appointment, so I went there, knocked, and with the excuse of the stickers, I tried to get in, saying, 'I'm curious, I'm a salesman at the shop in Rome of your products, can I take a look?' Sometimes they let me in, sometimes they were very suspicious of this curious kid knocking on the door, but in almost all cases I managed to convince them to let me in and explain some things.

I don't know. Thinking of oneself in such a unique way is difficult. I believe I have the ability to listen a lot. The world of finance, stock market, and business consulting is a world full of know-it-alls, people who have the ready recipe, who tell you what you should do even though they know very little about the companies in front of them. I have always tried to listen a lot, to be there, because entrepreneurs are ultimately the ones who pay everyone's salary with their added value, putting together wood, plastic, iron, etc., producing the things we wear, buy, use to move around with cars, bicycles, etc. So I don't think it's a secret weapon, it's simply a matter of common sense. I have always tried to listen a lot to those who, in my opinion, held the keys to the country Italy as added value for exports, as companies, etc. So entrepreneurs, managers of these companies, who in reality not often are valued as they deserve, they are still valued as they deserve.

But it's true, thank you for mentioning the book. After many years, I have written several books in my life that I enjoy exchanging ideas, just like today I am here, then in universities, in associations, etc. I have tried to tell a little about my fortunes, and my latest story is this book that took me 4 years to make. So I tried, in this world of chatter and demagoguery, to demonstrate almost all the statements I made, because too often, even you in the media, try to be very strong in headlines, hit, but underneath there is never that 100% truth that the headline itself tells. So for almost every statement, I tried to demonstrate it with a graph, a table, or something like that. Why doesn't Italy invest? Because unfortunately the Italian is a consumer, the Italian is sometimes a bit superficial. Certainly one can blame the political world. I don't like to blame only the political world, and certainly it has many faults, as I said before, but I won't go back over it because many governments over many years have shown themselves to be more anti-business than pro-business. But also sector associations, entrepreneurs themselves, many individuals, components of the ruling class, because the ruling class is us, we are those who chat around, go to the media, are protagonists of this life, and all of us do very little. All of us should do more, we should consume less of more, reason more on the long term. That's a defect probably a bit in Italy: being a bit short-term, being those who look at tomorrow morning rather than the day after tomorrow. Certainly this comes from a mentality more inclined to take the 'mordi e fuggi' (grab and run) than to build slowly over time. However, I must say that the Italian economy has also been very strong with exports. We have been in recent years after COVID among the most dynamic exporters in the world, because our much-maligned small company eventually managed to export, to be more dynamic than many more structured, larger French, German companies, etc. So in reality, it's not that bad. Certainly, as always, we could do much, much better. And one of the areas where we can do much better is precisely the link between universities, associations, and the business world, which is actually little talked about. What I try to say in the book is: let's make businesses talk more with institutions, businesses with academia, businesses with those who must provide a framework for our production system, to produce our product, do things of this kind. I believe it is very important and very useful, and this is the idea of making system.

Coming together, simply. Making system means coming together. Today we are here recording this broadcast, this podcast that will air. I hope it will have great success around. In this moment, there are also many structures like yours that are doing similar things with other people. Probably we would all be stronger, you would also be stronger if you talked more with those who are competitors, or suppliers, or customers, or those close to you. Because we are very individualistic, we are very projected onto ourselves, many of us convinced we are the best in the world. And certainly the part of entrepreneurs is very important in this. Many entrepreneurs don't think as they tell the company; they tell themselves first. And what happens then in the end, also with children, grandchildren, etc., counts relatively. So making system means trying to reason on how best to come together to do things. Let me give a very banal example: all companies for some years are faced with the theme of digital. Digital is changing the appearance of everything. Now anything can be sold via the Internet, any message can be spread. Is it possible that the single company, maybe small, has to make its own website alone, its own e-commerce alone, and a whole series of things that, if done together among 3, 5, 10 companies, would cost little more but divided among 3, 4, 5, 10, these are very normal things.

Ah, but a beautiful question. I have been to America many times to visit factories, and I was upset because they are old, inefficient, with uncoordinated floors, pieces of factories attached somehow with maybe a wall knocked down a few weeks earlier. It's a shameful thing, truly shameful, the American industrial system understood as factories. So I understand the husband who says, 'I am in a world that if it were in Italy would be completely different.' A slogan I often say, and I'm sorry to repeat myself many times: the Italian product is the best in the world when it arrives at the factory gate, then it gets lost on the way. Let's try to elaborate this fact. It's clear that the usual faults are infrastructure, bridges, roads, tunnels, because we have the Alps, we have the Apennines, etc. But I believe the issue is also another. I believe the issue is that the American has the luck that there are 3350 million people with the same language, the same culture, with a whole series of things that make life easier. The company from Brianza that has to sell its furniture, this table or this armchair, already to go to Germany or to go to Austria, attached here to us, Switzerland attached here to us, it has to change language in Switzerland, it has to change currency, it has to have a different mentality, a different culture. So this is a very strong handicap. Lately, we talk a lot about Europe. I don't want to make a political speech because I'm not capable, but certainly we talk about Europe. Europe doesn't exist. It's a chatter of people who have understood nothing of 27 or 28 or 29 states, let's see them as we want, but who play tricks on each other, have different languages, have very different cultures, have a completely different economic, political, but above all social substratum. And in this context, selling a product is very difficult. The American takes it and puts it on sale very easily. So these are objective and subjective aspects that contribute to this situation, which, by the way, cannot be remedied quickly. Because we see many times also in Europe the other day I was talking with a very important person at the level of the European Commission, just out, and he told me that what we decide as politics, even as laws that we make, and they have made too many and too wrong laws, and he admitted this. Then the bureaucrats, the implementers of this stuff, do the opposite. So there is even within Europe not only a difficulty of coming together, and we saw it with the last Nine, from a political point of view, many people in the commission, the European Parliament, etc., but there is even a bureaucratic class that almost boycotts, and certainly goes its own way in a completely different way from the political guidelines. And this is a monstrous obstacle.

10 years ago, I posed the problem, since I had been quite lucky with my activity on medium-large companies, etc., that we need to create a sort of 'Tip of the startups'. And I found and looked for the company that could have the most similar model to ours, also because many startups around the world are from private equity funds, venture capital funds. I have always been against funds because the fund starts but ends. Not only that, but the better you go, the more quickly the fund manager wants you to monetize his share. And so I have something against the company. I know this is a quite minority theory, but I am convinced that it has its role, and I have invested 40 years in this direction. So I went to look for a company that had this type of line, and I found Digital Magics, in which I did no due diligence, I did nothing, I asked only one thing: 'You should list on the stock exchange as quickly as possible,' and they committed to doing it and they did it. So Digital Magics listed many years ago. At the time, I don't know how many startups it had in portfolio, certainly few, but still a decent number. Then it grew, it grew a lot. We spent many years convincing another company similar to Digital Magics, called El Venture, which we then merged with great difficulty, and the result is called Zest, also listed on the stock exchange. Moreover, since El Venture was listed on the most important market, while Ital Medic was a less important market, we chose the path of merging into the company on the most important market precisely to tell this story better to those who might be interested. Today, this structure has 150 startups under it, a wonderful, unique, exceptional thing. If you look at what it is worth on the stock exchange, it's ridiculous. If we were in the United States, but also in England, also in other countries, it would be worth 10 times, 20 times, 30 times as much. So it's a shame. Why is it a shame? Because the market of investors does not have the desire, the time, the patience to look at these things. It sees it as a small thing and forgets it. Not only that, but in parallel to this, what has happened in recent years? Every region, every province, some industrial association, some group of entrepreneurs with this fashion of club deals, etc., has founded an incubator, an accelerator, all these little things that serve no purpose, that maybe in some cases can give a hand because if they are lucky or good, they might have grown some company. But they should all converge. This is making system. All converge. Not necessarily in our structure, but in any structure a bit big, a bit weighty. Because even if you don't have 250 startups, you have 50, 30, 60, whatever it is, you can make system. You can say, 'If 10 go bad, I don't worry. As long as one or two do well, I gain on that, I give a return to investors of this type.' This is not done in Italy. It is an excellent example of how we could do much, much, much more. And so I hope that with this merger, with this listing of Zest on the main market, someone will notice this structure. For the moment, the failure is total. In the sense that it is a huge effort to convince people to invest money. It is even more difficult to say, 'But I don't want to sell my shares,' because we are the majority shareholder and we have no desire to sell. On the contrary, it doesn't make a difference in our numbers to say, 'I sell a share, we do capital increases, we do capital increases also with contribution of startups from others, with contribution of structures from others that may be interested in entering this combination.' It is very difficult. And so also the world of you younger, more dynamic, more technological, more innovative, you are a bunch of lazy people, you are people who make a huge effort to say 'make system'. You stay in your niche, your small thing, and you want to try to see if you are good at bringing home returns on this thing. But much more needs to be done. It takes a real effort. That is where it is even more important to make system.

And among other things, one of the virtuous examples that we, also thanks to a bit of stubbornness, managed to participate in is Bending Spoons. That is, we can count that we started almost by chance. I didn't know this company. I was told that they were very smart people, and so we went to see them. They received us, they snubbed us a bit from the first moment, saying, 'But what do you want?' etc. But then, in their growth, they called us back and said, 'You are among the first who thought of being able to give us a hand, and you are among the first that we call.' And today we are among the most important shareholders, certainly apart from management, by far the largest Italian shareholders. And then they have developed all over the world, and above all the large shareholders are American. This is an example. An example that precisely for their path, for how they expanded capital, for how they managed to make system in their world and in the world of investors, system should be a symbol to follow. There are many other companies that we may not have entered, either because they didn't propose it to us or because we were perhaps afraid to enter, that have succeeded, are unicorns, worth more than a billion dollars. There are these examples. We must follow them as examples, we must pursue them as a capacity to find the way to do truly interesting, innovative things, but extended to a public that is decent, not something very restricted like many end up being forced to do.

But first of all, companies are victims of a system, because it's not that company A, B, or C decides to pay people little. There are contracts, and honestly, when you have a contract, I can pay the person 100, I pay 100. Then there are bonuses every year, you hear about bonuses taken in Ferrari or other companies, totally discretionary bonuses based on performance. But it's clear that the cage in which a company finds itself is that one. Not only that, but the entrepreneur or shareholder when he says, 'But why do you have to pay people more when the contract allows you to pay them that amount?' Luckily, COVID opened a completely different front for better or worse. After COVID, people want to work less, they want to work in a very differentiated way in time: smart working, particular types, some hours, some days, etc. So everything changed a bit. Not only did everything change, but as I write at a certain point in the book, the desire of people to change exploded, because everyone discovered that their company has some problem, doesn't satisfy them enough. And so the dynamism of people within companies has increased enormously in the last 3-4 years. And what has this created? First of all, it created the fact that many companies needed to keep people, because many times you pay them what you think is right, then the person leaves, and you either pay the replacement more or you have to call a headhunter to find them. And just what you give to the headhunter would probably have allowed you to keep the person who left. Not only that, but there is also a matter of training. The person who worked in your company for 5 years, 10 years, 3 years, etc., has accumulated a baggage of knowledge and skills that is difficult to recreate from one day to the next. Or at least it's a gamble to think that whoever you hire can have this baggage ready the next day. Maybe sometimes they have more, they have better, no problem. But certainly one must try to safeguard this loyalty as much as possible, if only for economic reasons, sometimes also for substantial reasons. And so what we try to preach in our companies, for what we can do as important but always minority shareholders, is to say: let's pay people a bit more, because then they are more loyal, happier. We give welfare in many of our companies, there are attentions to the family, to children, to training, to all these very important aspects. And I believe this can make the difference in the future. It's clear that we can afford it because our almost 30 companies are all profitable, with little debt, with a good market position, etc. But I believe that these companies arrived in that position also because they behaved in a certain way, and not thanks to us, but thanks to the fact that the approach they had was of a certain type. So to the question 'How can it be done?' one must simply say: 'I want to keep my employees. Yes, so I don't care about the contract, I'll give them 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% more, and we'll achieve greater loyalty, greater happiness of people.' Also because we see it, for example, in the Varese area, how many people who live in Varese go to work in Switzerland and come back because, for the same work, they earn double. But there are the costs of Italy. Also, we should remember an aspect that is sometimes forgotten: 85-90% of Italians, if I don't know the exact recent statistics, own their home. So compared to the Swiss, the German, who may own their home at 40-45%, there is that piece of income that you save. So there are actions due to...