You've started a company and you dream of growing it. You're eagerly looking for your "hockey stick". When it comes, you have your hands and feet full. And worries. Especially if you're financing the entire growth with your own money and you're deliberately turning down banks or investors. How do you go about such a growth phase? How do you handle it? And enjoy it?
There is one example. Shoptet. One of the largest platforms for building e-shops in the Czech Republic. It is said that more than a third of e-commerce sales flow through it today. But Shoptet is also a company. A supplier of Saas solutions. A software house with its own product. And a company that has been going through exactly the above situation for the last few years.
That is why I invited Jan Hospodka, who is the Chief Operations and Finance Officer of the company and who has experienced the entire growth phase and at least financially managed it. I asked questions like...
🔸 What should the CFO role look like in a medium-sized company?
🔸 When to start building professional management?
🔸 What to look out for after a founder leaves?
🔸 How to prepare financially for company growth?
🔸 How to steady the companyculture during growth?
137 | JAN HOSPODKA | HOW TO SUSTAIN RAPID COMPANY GROWTH FROM OWN RESOURCES (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is Zahžeh. If you have a fast-growing company under your hands that is still run by a founder who doesn't know how to build management and how to sustain all this rapid growth, then definitely stay tuned. For these topics, I've invited Jan Hospodka, Shoptet's COO and CFO.
Jan Hospodka
Hello, Martin, thanks for inviting me.
Where does Honza recharge his batteries?
Martin Hurych
Honza, two positions, chief of operations and chief of finance, how do you manage? Where do you recharge your batteries?
Jan Hospodka
Today I probably recharge my batteries most with my two and a half year old son. That feeling when you come home and there's this little person waiting for you, it's great. I also recharge my batteries at the gym, or with my friends who we used to play football with and go to the pub with, but nowadays we are always at someone's house.
What was the path to becoming Shoptet's CFO?
Martin Hurych
What was the reason for you to join Shoptet as CFO?
Jan Hospodka
I've had such a varied journey within the financial field, doing different jobs within the financial world. I've worked in audit, I've worked in tax consulting, and then I did M&A, specifically financial due diligence, for 3 years with the Big 4. Then I moved on to Ondra Tomek, who is now an investor both in the stock market and in startups in the Czech Republic and throughout the CEE region. I worked for him as a CFO for his various startups and one of them was Shoptet, where I was CFO 3 to 4 days a week.
Martin Hurych
What is it like to go from a purely financial position to a normal person, where every office has a different interest?
Jan Hospodka
It's a very interesting process, because up until then I had always been around people who were from the financial world and who thought alike, had similar interests. Suddenly I was in a company where I was the only person who understood finance, or at least the depth that you need to. It was a big bump with the reality of how differently marketing, IT, product people think and there were certainly a lot of meetings where I had to pretend to understand what we were talking about and I knew nothing.
How does he handle the CFO and COO positions?
Martin Hurych
I'm intrigued by your combination of COO and CFO. Even if you don't want to, you must understand the business because you run the operation. What's that phase like? As a pure CFO, I imagine very simplistically that you have primarily Excel in front of you and now you have to understand the business, understand the business and lead those people.
Jan Hospodka
I think that to be a good CFO or a good CFO, you have to understand the company well. If you're in finance in that company, you're one of the people who understand that company best if you want to understand that company because you see into everything in that company. Those numbers somehow weave through all the departments, whether it's the IT department, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales. So if you really want to do the job well, you have to understand the business well too.
The way I got into the operations role was that I was a part-timer at the beginning, the only person in finance at Shoptet. But over time the company grew and at one point it grew very quickly, so I gradually brought in other people under me in finance. Today, the team is something like 8 people. Back then I had other roles, for example most of the legal stuff went through me as well.
But nowadays the legal stuff is under me, we have two great girls in the legal team who do that work. I also have internal IT under me, which again, as the company grew rapidly, was previously under our CTO, but then for various reasons that moved under me and now the data analysts are under me. The operations role is very much about the fact that I have other than the finance department under me and in addition to that, the country manager for Slovakia is also under me. She helps me with a lot of the operations agenda.
What should the CFO role look like in a medium-sized company?
Martin Hurych
Going back for a moment to the finance move that you're sitting on, what is the proper role of a true CFO? What I see in the CFO door is more of a financial manager or controller, not a CFO, and to me there's a big difference between those two positions. So what is the role of the CFO in your opinion and what services should he or she provide for the company, the factory, the software company?
Jan Hospodka
I think, to simplify it, the CFO's primary job is about getting cash flow right. It's about if we have a lot of cash today, if we have a lot of cash tomorrow, if we have a lot of cash a year from now. It's a lot about being able to decide which people maybe it makes sense to recruit into that company and it's a lot about being able to make the right decisions about what to invest in so that that cash flow lasts. Often, especially in software companies, you invest in something today, but you don't really see the profit until a few years down the road. Especially in the software as a service industry, which is Shoptet, even the moment a customer comes in, it doesn't bring you immediate profit. You often wait a year, sometimes longer, before you get that profit. So you really need to understand the unit economics there very well, for example acquisitions, but especially in the big picture you need to understand the cash flow of the company.
What kind of company is Shoptet?
Martin Hurych
That's a great answer, thank you for that. We'll move on to the subject of why I invited you. For the audience, we should probably define Shoptet, what it is, because we were talking before the recording that I was misunderstanding you. So what is Shoptet today?
Jan Hospodka
I think Shoptet is a terribly interesting company that is both a software development company but also an e-commerce company. They're both industries that are very interesting and very fast growing. That combination is why a lot of people at Shoptet are with us. Shoptet is doing the development of the Shoptet platform, where you can set up an e-store in a matter of minutes, and you can sell your goods within that for a monthly fee. At the cheapest stage, Shoptet is free, then in the other variants it's units of thousands of crowns per month.
How to survive an expansion of 100 people per year?
Martin Hurych
The reason you're at Zazeh is because you're a big software studio with your own SaaS product. You told me before the shoot that you didn't join the company at the very beginning, but when you were ±40 and when you were facing maybe a little bit of unplanned rapid growth. So what did it look like in that first phase?
Jan Hospodka
When I arrived at Shoptet, there were approximately 50 colleagues there. It was six months before Covid started. The main reason I came to Shoptet was there was some sort of consensus between the two partners of Shoptet that there needed to be someone in the company who understood finance and was able to start planning for the long term. With Covid's arrival, it was absolutely crazy. Shoptet was fortunate in the misfortune that it was actually a positive for them from a business perspective. Shoptet was already number one in the country before Covid came in and we were often the top of mind option that people reached for when they needed to get into the online world. So in some months we had maybe 1300, 1400 new e-shops.
In one year, over 100 people were recruited. It wasn't easy because there was so much work at a time when the job market was overheated, so it was hard to find those quality people quickly. A lot of the colleagues who had to deal with the onslaught often had burnouts, so Shoptet then decided to offer therapy to its employees to help them cope. On top of that, of course, there was a lot of pressure on company processes, where the moment you take on 100 people in a year, it's no longer possible to have one person making all the decisions centrally. So there was a need to set up some processes to manage the company and not just make decisions from a desk.
Martin Hurych
How many of you are there today?
Jan Hospodka
Today there are about 250 of us.
When to start building professional management?
Martin Hurych
If we look at the journey from 50 to 250 people, there are obviously several phases, so let's go after that level of management building first. When is the right time to start building real management around you as a founder, and when do you need to decide that you and your friends are really not up to it anymore and you need to build some structure?
Jan Hospodka
I think the moment you realize that there are some areas of the business that you or your co- founders are not up to. If you have an area of, say, marketing or sales where you need an expert, you need to find someone as quickly as possible. It doesn't have to be a manager, it can be a specialist, and the moment the company grows, either that specialist will be able to become a manager, or he will remain a specialist because he is good in his field.
Martin Hurych
When was the first real board created in Shoptet?
Jan Hospodka
We started having board meetings around the time I joined. My arrival was also one of those consequences of some efforts to professionalize the management of that company. Soon after I arrived, we started having regular board meetings, where we had part of Shoptet's management and, after we went public, Shoptet's board of directors and owners.
Martin Hurych
Then how did it develop with the further growth of people, when, for example, middle management was created?
Jan Hospodka
The wards mattered a lot. We have two biggest departments today, IT and customer care, where the middle management started to emerge very quickly. So the golden rule is that you shouldn't have more than 7 people directly under you. The moment you have that team of 7 people or more, you should already have someone helping you manage that team.
Martin Hurych
This goes against the lean hierarchy because at 250 people we would be locked in pretty deep. So what does it look like in practice?
Jan Hospodka
I think we're trying to keep it pretty consistent, I think there are definitely some exceptions, but we're trying to keep it consistent that you shouldn't have more than those 7, 10 people at the most underneath you. I know this about myself because at one point in time I had the whole finance team directly underneath me, I had just legal, internal IT, data analytics underneath me and you can't do that. I know from personal experience that you can't give those people enough care and love when you have that many.
What to watch out for after a founder leaves?
Martin Hurych
We are at the stage where there is still a founder in the company. But today, the founder is no longer in the company.
Jan Hospodka
It's not. Míra Uďan, who founded Shoptet and brought it to where it is today, decided at some point to take a break and focus on other projects. Today, he founded the Out of Dark project, they're launching a pilot now, and Shoptet is also testing it as one of their first customers, among other things. He
Peace's departure was sometime in 2021 and Samuel became the new CEO and he and I are two board members. I have to say that the transition from founder has been a very interesting experience, no one will probably ever understand the company as well as the founder. In Mira's case, maybe it was even more so because Mira was very strong in these things and it's really hard to replace that in understanding the customer and the product. I think we've done that today, but it took a long time to fill the gaps that were created in that company after Mira left, even though the handover was gradual and very friendly. Any good documentation that should help the incoming management to take over those responsibilities is not going to help. Because you're never going to get all the intuition and long-term knowledge of the customer and the product out of that head that the founder has because he's been there from the beginning.
Martin Hurych
However, Shoptet has survived this very successfully and continues to grow. Today I found a number somewhere that 1/3 of e-commerce in the Czech Republic flows through you.
Jan Hospodka
That's right. Last year the volume of goods and services that flowed through Czech e-shops on Shoptet was around 60 billion, so about 1/3 of Czech e-commerce.
What is the correct procedure for handing over a company?
Martin Hurych
I'll get back to the founder. Founder's leaving, you can see today how it actually went down. If you had the chance to do it again, what would be the right course of action?
Jan Hospodka
I think I would definitely focus on what the founder's areas of strength are and try to support those as best I can. Every single one of those founder is always skewed in some direction, either they're a technologist, or they're a production person, or they're a marketeer, and logically that founder is looking for people around them to cover those other spots. But he feels strong in that area and those are the areas that need to be best covered when he leaves to make that transition as easy as possible.
Martin Hurych
Is it fair to say, then, that paradoxically what is a founder's strongest point is undervalued further into the firm?
Jan Hospodka
Certainly the difficulty of it is underestimated. The founder has, at least in my experience, a great deal of intuition, which makes it very easy for him to make decisions. That intuition and courage to make decisions is something that no one in professional management will ever have.
Martin Hurych
How long did the transition take?
Jan Hospodka
It's hard to say, the last few years have been so dynamic that you don't really know what's going on. Covid ended, the war in Ukraine started, we went through this crazy growth and transition from a company run by a founder to a company run by professional management. But I'm sure it took months, maybe even a year. To this day, Mira sends us a message when he notices somewhere that he would have done something differently and we are glad for that.
How to prepare financially for company growth?
Martin Hurych
Now, looking at the other part, the financial chair you're sitting in, to manage financially growing 100 people a year is a nightmare, I would guess. How do I prepare for that financially, what do I need to monitor to know that I'm going to have 100 people coming in and I'm not going to be laying them off again in 3 months?
Jan Hospodka
It's about some kind of constant balancing of the needs of those individual teams. How many people do we need in customer care, how many people do we need in IT, how many people do we need in marketing? At the same time, it's about constantly updating some sort of financial outlook for at least a year or two so that you know that if you record these two people, it doesn't mean you're not gonna have anything at the end of the year. Shoptet is specific in that it has never received any investment from its investors, so it has made everything on its own. So we've been working with the cash we have in the account all this time. During this crazy growth, we've been sitting down every two weeks with the managers and the HR department. So we were constantly figuring out who we had just hired, who had just burned out, who was leaving, so we knew where we were going to be with the cash at the end of the year.
Martin Hurych
How far ahead with the casho do you want to see?
Jan Hospodka
Today we are looking 5 years ahead with cash, but we have a detailed plan for maybe 2 years. The Shoptet business is relatively stable because it is B2B and B2B is always stable by nature. Plus, our customers are online and when they want to sell online they use a lot of those services, but Shoptet is the service that they turn off as the very last one the moment it really ends. Even if they're doing less well, they might dampen some of the marketing costs, they dampen the costs of some of the coders that are enhancing their e-store, but they turn off the platform that they're selling through last. So the customer churn rate is not very high in our country, there is an absolute minimum of customers leaving to the competitors, so the business is relatively stable. As a result, we are able to plan relatively well in terms of sales. Even from a cost perspective, the software business is very simple. When I compare it to manufacturing companies, for example, my job is actually very easy because our costs are again mainly about people and these can also be planned relatively well. It's personnel costs, you know how many people you want to recruit, you know how much those people are likely to cost you, so it's actually quite simple I would say.
How much can we trust the 5-year plan?
Martin Hurych
You got me settled on that, because I used to plan for 5 years in corporate, but beyond a year, year and a half, it was divination from a glass ball. If I ask you a snarky question, how much do you trust Excel?
Jan Hospodka
Of course, I realise that if I say here that we are planning for 5 years, all those who are planning financially will tap their foreheads. But we understand the mechanics of our business. We know approximately how many customers come in each month, we know approximately how many customers leave each month, we know how many customers we have today, we know how much those customers will pay us. When you think about it that way, it's not that hard to plan for at least that part of the revenue in the coro part of our business, which is the platform rental.
Of course the numbers may change significantly, but in the last 10 years that hasn't happened, not after the war, not with the advent of Covid, not after the end of Covid.
Recruit people when I earn them, or up front?
Martin Hurych
As a CFO, how social or capitalist are you? Are you hiring the moment you've earned a person, or are you taking a risk and taking a person earlier and knowing you'll earn the money when they've worked out?
Jan Hospodka
I think it's about some healthy combination. In the IT industry you're always going to be hiring some people for projects that may not work out, there's always some research, we have projects that we've been doing for four years for example. We still haven't put out the product that we're planning for customers, but hopefully by the end of this year we'll have it out. It's incomprehensible to me from a financial standpoint, but I trust our CTO to know what he's doing and I'm looking forward to getting that project done in a year.
Martin Hurych
Does that mean that in the planning 4 years ago the project was not scheduled for 2023 and 2024?
Jan Hospodka
In some cases it can be, but in this case it is not exactly the functionality on which our entire business model is based. Of course, what's happening is that we have some new projects, for example, we've been launching our own payment gateway, and now we're going to be launching some cool things in the spring in the AI area as well, and those may shift. I'm not saying that today we have planned 5 years ahead and we know exactly how it's going to be. We're adjusting that outlook every month, but we're working with it in some way so that we know where we're going. I think it's important to have that plan so you know where you want to take the company. If you don't have that plan, I think it's harder to set up some projects today that can start making you money in 3 years.
How detailed is the financial plan for 1-2 years?
Martin Hurych
To what level of detail do you have that plan worked out for the next 2 years, 3 years?
Jan Hospodka
We have some reporting within Shoptet that is specific to SaaS companies. The structure is such that you have a planned billing value at the top and a planned revenue value below that. This is because in SaaS companies like Shoptet, they often invoice for a longer period of time in advance. Often those startup SaaS companies rely purely on that billing, they don't address the revenue because the moment you invoice today for 4 years ahead, you have 48 times the billing, but you only have the revenue 1/48th. So they are living off the cash flow that comes from that pre-billing. We've been able to get a little bit of that in Shoptet. I think a lot of startups rely on that cash flow from that pre-invoicing and then it's relatively hard for them to get to that monthly invoicing at the point where the growth is not as fast. Shoptet managed to get out of that last year, so today we don't depend on that long-term pre-billing at all.
Then underneath that you have gross margin costs and those are mostly software, company set. The cost that's in the gross margin is typically customer care, the cost of the servers, the cost of the IT team that takes care of the infrastructure, and under that you've got some three basic cost categories. The first one is R&D and product, that is the IT team and the product team. Then there's the group of teams that make money, that's sales, marketing and customer success, and below that are all the other costs. The very basic view of those 5 years ahead is actually in this form.
How did Shoptet manage to switch to monthly billing?
Martin Hurych
You surprised me with the monthly service charge. How did you manage to switch to monthly billing?
Jan Hospodka
That long-term billing works for you when you're growing fast. Developing software to be of high quality and to stand up to some global competition is expensive and costs you much more than the customers will bring you in the beginning. So you have to invoice them a long time in advance to get that cash to pay for today's development. But the next month you have to pre-invoice again to pay for the next month's development, and that only works when the business is growing fast. We have been able to calculate that after some time the growth rate will slow down a bit because the market in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary is not unlimited. So at the right moment we decided to start focusing on offering monthly rentals to customers. We know that the cash flow as planned for 2022 can bear it and the cash flow in 2022 was relatively bad because we were moving to this monthly billing.
Martin Hurych
Does that mean you've done away with pre- billing altogether?
Jan Hospodka
We haven't cancelled it, we just don't actively offer it to customers anymore. You can still order it, but both our sales department and customer success will no longer call you and offer annual billing.
What should I do if I deviate significantly from the plan?
Martin Hurych
How does the debugging process work in your company, that you have a plan but you end up with something? What do you do when you start to deviate dramatically from that plan, change the plan?
Jan Hospodka
We're changing the plan. The way it works for us is that sometimes at the end of the year, in the autumn, the business plan for the next year is approved. It is approved at the general meeting of the company and then we try to follow it. So every month we report to our owners how the company is doing and in addition to that we sit down with the managers of the different departments and confront them with how the plan is coming along. At the point where those costs are higher than planned, we tell that manager that they need to keep an eye on it in the coming months because we want to end up somewhere at the end of the year.
Martin Hurych
If something changes dramatically on that revenue side, do you change the plan or do you leave the year like that because it's something you didn't count on?
Jan Hospodka
We're changing the plan. Typically, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we changed the plan. The war in Ukraine didn't so much affect us in that customers were somehow leaving, but it did affect us in that even fewer customers just started prepaying ahead. They wanted to protect their cash flow, which led to the fact that we were completely fine from a P&L perspective, but from a cash flow perspective, suddenly there was a pretty big hit for Shoptet. So we had to reforecast, change and get a new plan approved from our board in June 2022 that reflected that cash flow was going to be worse. So that laid off some people, stopped hiring for some positions, cut back on some marketing expenses, and so on.
How to change financial processes as the company grows?
Martin Hurych
If you look from those 50 to 250 people, how have those financial processes in the company changed, for example, as the company has grown?
Jan Hospodka
Probably the most systematic process that we put in place was the workflow of documents received. At the beginning of that company's life, every incoming invoice is usually unboxed at least notionally by the CEO. But the moment that company is bigger and maybe the founder isn't even there anymore, it's not possible. No one in IT understands what marketing invoices to approve, so we've put in a digital process for approving incoming documents, where every invoice that comes into the company usually goes to some sort of mail collection. That invoice is then automatically forwarded into this system where there's already an automatic path that it's come from the marketing supplier, so it goes to the marketing director for approval. The moment there's an amount over £25,000, it then goes to the me, and I have to undo it. If I'm not sure what it is, I send it to my financial controller to verify that it's actually in the budget and if it's over CZK 100,000, it goes to our CEO.
Martin Hurych
You're kidding yourself. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just imagining how many blow jobs a month it must be.
Jan Hospodka
I don't know exactly how many pipes I give, but I don't really mind because it keeps me in check. We are gradually increasing the boundaries for what I have to approve or what our CEO has to approve, but it gives me a sense of security that I know what's going on in the company. During that time at Covid, when the company was growing insanely fast, it was very easy to fall into a state of not knowing what was going on in the company.
Martin Hurych
In terms of, for example, the structure of P&L, were you already a brute in those 40, 50 people and did you impose the same structure as you have today?
Jan Hospodka
We are gradually fine-tuning the P&L structure. I think we've been fine-tuning it for the last two years, at most we've been adding new departments or when a new project comes up. But the basic SaaS structure, where we calculate the gross margin, is the same.
Martin Hurych
What other processes have changed the most in that time?
Jan Hospodka
We set up various applications, for example, to share passwords within the company and share credit cards. Shoptet and I'm sure a lot of other companies use sub-hundred apps. Someone in marketing needs a tool for something, someone in IT needs a tool for something else, and so we use an awful lot of apps. I actually don't get sleepy about how many apps we use and most of the time you pay for them with a card and you don't want to give that one card, which is mine, to every single person in the company to buy something.
So we have introduced a tool that allows you to generate virtual cards. When someone comes to me that needs to buy something, the moment we agree that it makes sense for the company to buy it, I generate a card that has some fixed budget on it. It's right on that particular and I know what the card is used for. It doesn't give anyone access to that main bank account where we have some balance that we wouldn't want to lose.
Martin Hurych
If somebody listens to us and now has 40, 50, 80 people and would like to grow, where should they expect the bottlenecks to be procedurally?
Jan Hospodka
I think that certainly those receipts are a topic for everyone, also given that you do get fraudulent invoices coming into your business from time to time and you need to have some sort of system over that. We then put in place a process for approving payments because by being professional management, we don't want to have that responsibility completely on us anymore when we don't have to. So there's a process for approving payments, there's a process for meeting with management on a regular basis and having some sort of mutual awareness of that budget, whether or not the numbers or the team is actually developing as it should. There's definitely an important collaboration between HR in hiring and finance so that we know in finance how many people are hiring from that original plan. At least in Shoptet's experience, you don't usually get the hiring done, so you move those costs around over time, which from a finance perspective I'm always a little bit happy about, but obviously it's not good for the company because you're not hiring the people you need.
How has the company culture sustained growth?
Martin Hurych
That trip from 50 to 250 people takes how long?
Jan Hospodka
I'd say it lasts about two years.
Martin Hurych
That's crazy, and it's crazy for the company culture.
Jan Hospodka
I'm sure. Even given the fact that to a large extent this transition happened remotely, that we were at home for a year and some of these people were coming in and they didn't even come to the office. At the same time, Míra Uďan, the founder, who was very popular in the company, was leaving, so it was not an easy period from that point of view.
Martin Hurych
How did it work with the culture, what did Shoptet look like two years ago and what does it look like today? Did you get corrupted?
Jan Hospodka
That's a good question. I think it is important to say that processes are important in the growth of a company, but on the other hand it is important to remember that not everything needs a process. Often that company will be more flexible if you rely on having smart people in there who can figure it out. I often tell people in our interviews that if they like to work in an environment where everything works, where there's no chaos, Shoptet is not the place to be. Because sometimes there's chaos there, and I think sometimes chaos is good because sometimes people think better in chaos than they do when they have a clear process. If you recruit the right people who are able to come to you and tell you what's not working and how to do it differently, I think you can let them create a good culture and a good environment.
I think we try to have a very open culture at Shoptet today, so every month we present the previous month's results to the whole company. As management, we go to the monthly company update, which is in English, because we also have Hungarian colleagues. There we present a detailed view of either a new project or a department and the financial results for the previous month. At the end we use the Slido app where anyone from the company can give anonymous questions to the management and we answer them. I have to admit that sometimes it's hard
and some of those questions are very challenging.
What new features is Shoptet planning?
Martin Hurych
Sounds like corporate-controlled punk. That's a positive thing for me, because punk is where there's still some energy, there's still something going on, there's still no boredom, but from a certain level onwards it can't be managed as punk. What do you have planned for the next 2 years? What's in your financial outlook?
Jan Hospodka
We've got a lot of interesting stuff in there. Unfortunately I've been banned from talking about it, but in the next few months I think we're going to launch some really big features for our customers. As I mentioned, one of them will already be with AI, kind of our first AI product, so there's definitely something to look forward to.
Martin Hurych
Are there any expansion plans, growth plans?
Jan Hospodka
At the moment Shoptet is in three markets, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. We're not actively preparing for expansion into another country right now because we're going to be launching some big things this year and early next year as well, so that's where our main focus is. Moreover, the economic situation is relatively uncertain and foreign expansion is difficult and has a very long economic payback. So we are not actively preparing expansion into other countries at the moment.
Martin Hurych
That's really interesting, because for a lot of startups it's a wet dream to go abroad. So for you it's purely a financial question, is it worth it or not?
Jan Hospodka
You could say that it is. I would certainly like to be the world's biggest player in e-commerce, but even in Hungary we can see that it's a long run. That company today, to be able to keep delivering quality service to its customers and coming up with new technological upgrades to that platform, can't afford to start expanding in several markets at the same time. Hungary today is still in the start-up phase. So we decided to be more careful and give a better service here in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary rather than improve our PR by opening up all possible markets at any cost.
How would growth change investors?
Martin Hurych
Don't you ever wonder what it would be like if investors stepped in and now brought in these big wads of money?
Jan Hospodka
Of course, on the one hand it would be great, the possibilities of the company would be different, but on the other hand I think that the culture of having to earn everything ourselves is actually healthy. It teaches you to think a lot more about the profitability of individual projects. I think it's challenging in the scale of all the things that Shoptet is preparing or has already started, to have the best possible return on all those projects. At the point where you still don't care how much money is going into them, I don't know if I would want to work in that environment. I think that being able to make your own money is healthier.
What would Honza have done better today?
Martin Hurych
When you look at your entire financial career, or purely at Shoptet, what's the one thing that keeps you up at night that maybe in hindsight you would have done differently and better?
Jan Hospodka
Shoptet keeps me up at night. I love my job so much, I go to sleep thinking about Shoptet, wake up at 3am thinking about Shoptet and wake up at 7am still thinking about Shoptet. Certainly from my perspective in my personal life, I think I made a big mistake when my son was born and I went back to work the very next day. I think I should have been there for at least some time with my wife and child, because to this day I am rightfully blamed for that. From a professional standpoint, at the rate that Shoptet was growing and a lot of things weren't going as fast or didn't go as fast as they should have, I think in a lot of ways I neglected to take some care of those people on my teams. It almost led to them leaving the company, even though they were some of the best people in Shoptet.
There I was very much on the verge of making some big mistake in just that approach to the people in my team. But I think I've learned a little bit from that and I'm not making that mistake again.
Martin Hurych
Congratulations, because I've made a few. I've had a few people quit because of me. Honzo, thank you so much for that,for being here and for the insight into Shoptet. Thanks a lot.
Jan Hospodka
Great, thanks a lot.
Martin Hurych
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