Brave new business world (part2) – experiences with not beeing able to travel

First of all I must tell You that since the Covid-19 forced me, to cancel my multiple international flights already booked – for the most part already in advance last year – until the end of this year, many of my friends, business partners and colleagues ask me, how I handle this and whether I had become depressed because of this totally unplanned new situation. They all ask that because they know that I have been travelling almost uninterruptedly during the last years and that many of my international business development activities depend massively on my conditions to travel to the countries, where I carry out my different projects. 

Actually, since I had finished my academic studies as an engineer at the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, formerly called Technical Highschool of Karlsruhe) at the end of 1984 and started my professional career, to travel to other countries has become a very normal and ordinary activity within my work routine and culture. 

During the 10 years as project engineer (at the beginning) and as project manager (later-on) in Henkel`s corporate engineering department, I have participated in many capital investment projects for the extension, revamp, debottlenecking and modernisation or construction of completely new production plants and warehouses for detergents, adhesives, chemicals and cosmetics all over Europe. During these years, to fly to other places quite frequently for a couple of days or weeks became my normal working and travelling rhythm. 

When I came back from Brazil to Europe at the end of 1998 after the successful conclusion my 3 years stay as project & engineering department manager at Henkel`s chemical and adhesives plant (later-on part of Cognis, now belonging to BASF) in Jacarei/Sao Paulo, I took over responsability as plant manager of Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s freshly aquired cosmetics plant La Toja in La Coruna, Galicia, Spain. 

Initially I was reporting in this function to the regional HQ of Henkel Iberica in Barcelona, but at the same time, as a member of the management board of Schwarzkopf & Henkel Production Europe, it turned normal for me, to fly very frequently from Spain to all other places in Europe, where we operated our sister production plants and – for sure – to our corporate HQ in Düsseldorf, Germany. 

Once having left Henkel and Europe for Mexico, where I  became the Managing Director of – one after the other – two different german automotive suppliers, I became deeply introduced into the North American automotive industry and business and started to travel endlessly within Mexico, the US and Canada for visiting our customers and many suppliers allover there. 

Imagine that we supplied our products from out of our plant in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, to all North American car manufacturers (OEMs), means to in total 48 different car assembly plants in Mexico, US and Canada. Our average distance to a customer was impressive 1.600 miles. This might give You an impression of the intensity of my travelling routine during the in total six years from 2003 to 2009, during which I lived and worked in beautiful Mexico. And I did not mention yet my also quite frequent flights from Mexico to our german HQs and to our sister plants in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slowakia, Hungary and Romania. 

During my time as Managing Director of GEA do Brasil (2011-2014) in Franco da Rocha, Sao Paulo state, due to the suffocating deep economic crisis in Brazil throughout this time, I kicked-off our Latin American market and business development and sales expansion project together with my brazilian sales team members and therefore started travelling very often to Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, besides my normal frequent flights to our HQ in Germany and to many of our in total 56 worldwide GEA Heat Exchangers sister plants. 

Freshly arrived at our company and factory in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, Brazil, in my new function as President of Vulkan do Brasil, I did not loose unnecessarily time – in full analogy to what I had already done quite successfully just before at GEA do Brasil – for getting started on  our business development and sales expansion allover Latin America, this time comprising Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and all South America. 

You can imagine, what this meant for me from then on with regards to travelling. And at last in November 2018, during our annual global management meeting at our HQ in Herne, the CEO of the Vulkan Group invited me, to develop and launch an aggressive market and business development project for the increase of the sales of our Vulkan Drive Tech (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/drivetech) division (product portfolio: all kinds of couplings, brakes, backstops and mounts for all kinds of industrial mechanical power transmission applications like f.e. in mining, iron & steel, sugar & alcohol, pulp & paper, oil & gas, bulk solids transport and handling, energy generation in thermal, hydro and wind power stations, cranes, hoists, winches etc.) allover Australia and Africa, to where I have been travelling almost uninterruptedly since then in addition to my travels to our Latin American markets, where we are running very successfully own sales & engineering offices in Bogota, Colombia, and Mexico City and where we have set up a wide network of highly active sales and distribution partners during the last  5 years. 

Now You know the full background for all my friend`s and colleague`s question, whether I was depressed because of finding myself paralized now by Covid-19 and my resulting complete lack of opportunities, to travel anywhere since mid March this year and – even worse – without any previsibility, of when this will become possible for me again. 

It is not a lie at all if I tell You, that this new situation has left me so far totally relaxed and that I continue with all my international projects and plans almost unchanged and practically uninterruptedly. To be true, I like very much to travel and I have got pretty used to travelling to other places during the last decades. 

But I have never raised any doubts about the fact , that my by far best travels have always been my holiday travels together with my wife and our children. Getting up very early, sitting endlessly in taxis, hanging around hours and hours at airports, running to departure gates, passing boring airport safety checks again and again, sleeping in sometimes lousy and loud hotel rooms, eating and drinking much more and totally different things, than usually at home, working 14 hours and more per day, sleeping badly and little, withstanding diarrhea, toothache and other little quite frequent travel tortures, suffering from the loss of my suitcase for days, beeing notoriously absent during my wife`s and our children`s  birthdays, our wedding day anniversaries, our neighbor`s barbeque parties, the school events of our sons and – last not least – not beeing able to maintain a routinary contact with my familly`s and my personal great and wonderful circuit of friends, are unfortunately and undoubtedly the other side of the coin. By the way – I really love this wonderful brazilian proverb: “There is no coin with just one side – all coins have two sides”. It explains so many situations in live so beautifully. 

But please believe me, Covid-19 with all it`s restrictions for our business and private live, did not at all succeed to refrain me from the continuation of my multiple projects, no matter whether this refers to the several currently happening further development projects for our brazilian business, company and factory, or to our international expansion projects in Latin America, in Africa and Australia. Vulkan do Brasil has become like New York – we (almost) never sleep !

Indeed I have made so many good and important contacts of new business partners, customers, distributors, representants, colleagues from other companies, service providers, personal friends and other nice people during the last two years wherever I went, especially in Africa and Australia, and I can now very nicely get in touch again and communicate – thanks to Zoom, Teams, Cisco Webex, Skype, Whatsapp and my mobile fone – with all these wonderful people and discuss and develop joint interests, opportunities, activities and projects. 

And all this is happening at my beautiful and cozy home office, which I have installed meanwhile more than three months ago – soon after Covid-19 hit us –  in the open barbeque area in our beautiful garden. You can hardly imagine, how happy my wife Selma, our sons Geywison (23) and Gabriel (15) and our golden retriever Luke (4) – I mentioned this faithful companion in my post no 2 – are! This is a completely new beautiful life experience for our complete familly, which does not reduce at all my conditions and motivation, to proceed at full speed with all my  professional activities. That`s a wonderful example for a real “win-win” life balance solution. 

Hope You enjoyed this description of my exhaustive travelling experiences and my quick, nice, highly comfortable and productive adaptation to the current new live and work frame conditions imposed by Covid-19.. 

See You here in my blog hopefully again tomorrow. I wish You a highly productive day with lots of fun and success.