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 immensely. I contributed my part, but if I hadn't had very good mentors, both before Euromobiliare and at Euromobiliare, who not only believed in me—Euromobiliare, for example, wanted someone to launch the M&A sector, mergers and acquisitions, because in Italy in the '80s you couldn't find anyone, or rather in the early '80s, late '70s, I was at Bastogi and I was a young professional at Bastogi. After looking around, they turned to me and said, 'Well, you come along—we won't find anyone better. We'll pay for courses around the world.' And they paid for courses around the world. 'We'll nurture you, we'll have 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 let's bet together.' I said yes, I thanked them enormously, because it certainly wasn't easy to find someone who would invest so much in me, and so the lion's share of the credit is certainly theirs, not mine.

Well, our formula was born because we trust entrepreneurs—we perhaps trust them more than ourselves. Private equity funds that typically do majority deals, even in many cases with leverage—meaning they add debt—take for granted that the fund manager's presumption is that he can put the right people in place, create the right business model, develop the right strategy, and so on. What I understood in the first part of my life, the part more based on M&A, was that you should trust entrepreneurs who were already good on their own, who needed an additional support but didn't need to be replaced, and didn't need someone saying 'I'll bring in your CFO, I'll put in your CEO, I'll put in your managing director.' So this was a formula that was initially heavily criticized, because clearly it's difficult in an Italy of the '90s to tell this story and get positive responses. We tried, and it went well.

The second part of your question is how to exercise influence—the very right word is 'influence'—through listening. I believe that when you talk to an entrepreneur who tends to be alone, who typically discusses things with family or with their accountant, their banker, and so on, they never have someone with whom they can have a discussion, so to speak, on equal footing. Because someone who has invested in minority, in your company, leaving you, the entrepreneur, with the majority, means they trust you blindly. So you're in their hands and they're in yours, and this allows you to move forward very well—at least for us, it has allowed us in almost 30 years as investors to do very, very well. You have to be very attentive, very scrupulous. Earlier someone pointed out to me that I had noticed a detail about a person attending today. You really have to be very attentive, listen to yourself, listen to others, never be presumptuous, never be one of those who give you a little lecture. What entrepreneurs or managers of a certain level cannot stand is when someone from a famous university or who went to an exceptional consulting school comes along and gives them a lesson. They should be the ones teaching us. They know how to make the product, they know how to run their business. These, in my opinion, are the right recipes for doing this job.

Well, the story would be very long to tell. We had entered a company called Data Service, which had some problems one day. The person for whom—because there too we had bet, we had invested in a person—Rocco Sabelli had been 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 right here in this very place that had gone very well, then we sold the company to Reply, and both Carlo and Stefano had gone to other places, and so I called them and said, 'Why don't you give me a hand? Because you are fundamentally among the closest people I've known in my life in this sector.' Carlo said yes immediately. Stefano, who was chairman of Capitale Informatica—he had had an extraordinary, very important career—was a little more reluctant because he said, 'But I'm perfectly fine 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. By the way, the company at the time wasn't even making money, it was running a loss, so they were brilliant in organizational aspects, brilliant in strategic aspects, and from a commercial standpoint, Stefano is truly monstrously talented. So that's the story.

Well, you know, we never sell anything. I mean, on six or seven billion in value today, including club deals where we've done operations, we would have sold for a few hundred million. So we don't have the fund mentality of buying to sell. And even the B operation was about merging B into Engineering and creating an operation that had industrial logic, and we remained shareholders—the Hackerman family and us. So there too it was an intelligent, profitable evolution, honestly, but to build a system even better on an even larger scale. To return to your question, first of all, we never include in our contracts—as almost all private equity operators do—the clause that says if you don't exit within a certain period, we automatically have the mandate to put the company up for sale. Absolutely not. That's the most frustrating thing an entrepreneur can experience. If there are selling decisions—and we have sold some things over the years—you take the decision together, you decide together when the right moment is, what the right way is, what way doesn't disrupt the company. We always put the company at the center of our attention; we never put ourselves or even the entrepreneur—it's the company that pays our salary, and the company must be at the heart of everything.

No, absolutely not. We look for the ones who are good. If tomorrow morning I realize that you're excellent at making pinstripe suits, let's talk and maybe we'll spend a few years together. By the way, speaking of years, we have some investments that are 24 years old. Many of our investments, the bulk of our portfolio today is 12, 13, 14 years old. Moncler, Amplifon—these types of companies have been with us for truly many years. We have no intention of saying 'I'm out' or 'let's take home the enormous profits that theoretically on paper we've made.'

They're all good, they're all good. We're good at making these tables because in design we're first in the world, we're good at robotics, we're good at electromechanics, we're good at so many things, right? I believe that categorizing things is always a bit too generic, always a bit too superficial. I believe you have to go into each individual company and discover who is better and who is less good.