Entrepreneurial Stories – A Cure for Editorial Depression

Twenty years ago, when we launched the business weekly Lider and decided on the sections we must have in every issue, one of the fixed features was a mandatory story about entrepreneurs, owners of small businesses. Do we really need to include this in every issue, and on four pages, the same amount we allocate to large corporations in another section? There was no negotiation.

We knew that smaller entrepreneurs would be our most numerous readers and that, on one hand, we needed to acknowledge what they do, and on the other hand, the experiences of those who have succeeded are invaluable to those on that path full of traps.

Thanks to stubbornness on one side and the success of editors and authors in searching for good examples on the other, we have published over a thousand entrepreneurial stories to date. Reading Lider’s archive, it constantly shows how rich the entrepreneurial scene in Croatia is – full of enthusiasts, geniuses who recognized the demand for the most incredible products and services, partnerships that last for years, family projects, ups and downs, and rising from the dust…

Real Journalistic Goods

And as we are now in the jubilee, twentieth year of Lider’s publication, here is a little secret revealed. When an editor and columnist, under an avalanche of bad macroeconomic forecasts, political scandals, institutional collapse, and lack of strategic thinking, reaches the brink of journalistic depression, a reliable remedy is reading entrepreneurial stories. They restore hope for a better tomorrow. That we felt the ‘real goods’ two decades ago is confirmed today by many podcasts, led by Lider’s, in which the interlocutors are precisely successful micro-entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs.

Examples of entrepreneurial stories? Here are a few from this year. In the previous Lider, we wrote about the Dream Factory (Pluma Studios) of Andrijana Majstorović and Goran Galetić. They are pioneers of personalized picture books in which the main characters are the children of the clients. When they started in 2011, it took them 14 months of attempts to develop a hybrid model with the technology available at the time. They printed personalized text on already printed illustrations.

Ivana and Daniel Dičić (Mativo) are surviving in the textile industry. They produce bedding, pillows, duvets, quilted blankets, and similar items, with their customers being hotel and retail chains as well as laundries. They have 44 employees and a revenue of five million euros. No matter how established their production is, the co-owner goes to suppliers in Pakistan at least once a year. This is evidence of what is happening in global trade. Once, it took ninety days from order to delivery; today, it takes six to seven months.

Our entrepreneurial stories demonstrate the connection of many companies with tourism. We had a story about Ivo and Tomislav Tabaj (Tabaj), who timely noticed the labor shortage among hospitality providers. They offered them pre-cooked meat products. It took a lot of persuasion, but in the end, they succeeded. Just like Ivan Ivanović, a returnee from Austria, who took several years to convince investors in Dalmatia that they indeed needed a pool by the sea.

From Dryers to Robots

There are also examples of entrepreneurial projects based on specific innovations. Miroslav Žakula (Euclid) produces high-efficiency dryers for fruits, vegetables, medicinal herbs, and pasta. The daily capacity of the dryers produced so far is 140 tons! In a conversation with him, we received an early signal: orders funded by EU funds have decreased. Žakula believes that European redirection of money into military equipment is already underway.

The family company INETEC specializes in robotic systems, among others for nuclear facilities. Owner Zrinka Čorak is an example of an entrepreneur who did not want to specialize narrowly while buying parts from others. She opted for vertical integration within the company, from robotic systems to the software that drives them.

Zvonimir Sedlić also has a technology-based story, as he has significantly advanced his project for producing proteins and starch from fava beans. It took a lot of courage to embark on this. At times, the project was at a dead end, but then it was recognized by the Swedish fund Summa Equity, which became the majority owner, while Sedlić remained in the shareholding structure.

Most of those we have written about are cautious businessmen. They carefully plan growth and development, which is their right. However, over the years, thanks to our fixed column, we see how much potential exists. Most of them could be persuaded to pursue more aggressive growth. But for that, the state would need to be a much more interested partner that knows how to help small businesses grow into medium-sized ones and medium-sized into large ones. This is how GDP rises healthily.