Episode Transcript
Peter: Hello and welcome to London Stock Exchange's Be Inspired series, where we talk to CEOs and founders about their journeys so far. I'm Peter Hines, part of The London Stock Exchange's issuer services team, and I'm joined here today by Martin Vohanka CEO of Eurowag. Martin, welcome. It's great to have you here.
Martin: Hello Peter, thank you for having me.
Peter: And so firstly, tell us a little bit more about Eurowag and why did you start this business?
Martin: Eurowag is a 27 years old enterprise. I founded it when I was 19. We were starting as a fuel trader, but then in a few years time, we introduced our first payments. Payment means, we call it fuel card. And we grow with the business and we expand it across Europe. Nowadays, we have 2, 000 employees, we are having 18 offices across Europe, and our offering is much, much broader than original fuel card. Nowadays, we provide navigation services to truckers to find their destination. We provide them software in order to manage their fleet. We allow them to get access to financing. We provide them tools how to pay for other services than fuel, tolls, roadside services, and many others.
Peter: That obviously led to the successful IPO two years ago. What were the key drivers behind that decision? Why did you decide to take the company public?
Martin: When I'm explaining why we decided, I'm using analogy of, building a house. If you are building small garden house, you do not need that many foundations in order to support the purpose, the use of the house. However, if you are building a skyscraper and you, because you have a great ambitions for your business, you would have many people, you need construction which supports that. And that's governance which comes with IPO. Strong, robust governance, risk management, transparency, and all these things which come with that. Indeed, there are many other positives, like access to capital, prestige and many others, but the one which I first, which I mentioned first was really the most important.
Peter: And how did you find the IPO process? Are there any key takeaways for you?
Martin: What I would stress, what is really critically important are maybe two, three things. The first... to have very strong in-house teams, in-house team which has experience. Because you can have a bunch of advisors, but never is the same as the people which are living and breathing with the business and which are always following the company interests first. The second thing is, to consider that the business cycles, I mean, economic general economy cycles do not wait for your IPO. So again, companies has to be really committed and convinced that, all the benefits and as well, the costs of listing is something that they are able to accept even when the headwinds comes.
So this is, another important consideration. And so how have you found the differences between running a public company and a private company? For sure, much more robust, in-house controls, processes, governance. We have a now, board, previously we had a supervisory board with just different functions. So there is, much more of this than in the private world. Some entrepreneurs would consider it; as a burden, as a barrier, as discomfort, but I always consider it as something that is helping the business, to scale, to prosper, to be resilient.
Peter: And what advice would you give to other leaders who are considering the IPO or going through an IPO process?
Martin: I think that the reasons for listing has to be sound. It cannot be something short term, like immediate profit gains, etc. Because this is really commitment. This is large commitment for the business, for the team, for the leader itself. So I think to be really considerate, and thinking long-term.
Peter: You're now at your two year anniversary of the listing, how is the business different from when it floated? And what are the key priorities for the next few years?
Martin: Approximately five years ago, we changed dramatically our trajectory. We were building until then, leading fuel card business, providing payment services to trucking industry. But back then, we said that we can do something much more aspirational, something much more important, something with much greater impact on the industry and broader society. And we decided to build industry first platform, which really integrate/ harness all the, systems, all the products, which trucking companies needs in order to operate, We may speak about total digitization of the trucking industries in order to create/ infuse more efficiencies into the industry, in order to reduce the environmental impact. And when we were listing, we were just in the middle of this process; so it definitely adds to the complexity. However, now we are very close to the launch of this platform, and now everythings coming to fruition. Now we speak about this phase integration. The previous phase was accumulation from fuel cards to accumulate all the competencies, all the bits and pieces of the jigsaw. And now we are bringing it together and we'll be launching it next year.
Peter: Martin Vajanko, thank you very much for your time today. Thank you for joining us.
Martin: Thank you, Peter.
Peter: Thank you for watching this episode of Be Inspired. To see all the episodes, you can go to www.LondonStockExchange/issuerservices.
