A Company Must Not Rely on the Memory of a Few People What Will Determine Which Companies Succeed in
After completing his secondary education at the 1st International School of Ostrava, along with the IB, Jan Kuča went on to study in Gothenburg, spent a semester in Chile and worked in procurement in the defence industry. Today, he values investment fund assets at the investment company TILLER. He also co–founded and leads Eteron Group, which helps Czech companies, particularly those in Moravia and Silesia, break their dependence on emails, spreadsheets and knowledge held only in the heads of a few key people. Why can a company’s figures sometimes be misleading? And what will determine which Moravian–Silesian companies survive and grow over the next ten years?
Did you have your journey abroad planned out from the beginning, or did each step develop gradually?
It wasn’t planned. For a long time, I believed that everything was worse in the Czech Republic and better everywhere else. The longer I lived abroad, the more I realised that the things we take for granted here – safety, freedom, the quality of healthcarecannot be taken for granted at all. During Covid, I was unable to return home from Australia for two years – and for the first time, I realised that freedom of movement was not something I could simply take for granted. I followed one rule: go wherever I could learn the most. And ultimately, that drew me back home.
What did studying in Australia and at the 1st International School of Ostrava give you?
In Australia, for the first time, I experienced a school where you are assessed on what you create rather than what you memorise: projects and long essays that you work on throughout the semester. Your brain learns to work and think more creatively; it is very different from preparing for tests. Returning to Ostrava meant returning to a Czech environment – and the 1st ISO allowed me to complete both the IB, which is based on essays and projects, and the Czech maturita. I owe a great deal of thanks to my teachers for that, particularly Mrs Helebrantová for Czech and Mr Hollander for economics. Above all, though, what I took away from that combination was that nothing is set in stone: a school, a company or even a country can work differently from the way you are used to.
What attracts you to the world of investment and valuation?
The fact that a company’s value is far less straightforward than it may appear from the outside. I want to understand companies from both perspectives – the operational side, which we deal with at Eteron, and the investment side, where you have to determine what a company is actually worth. My internships gave me a grounding in data analytics and accounting – the essential skills you need whether you are running a company or valuing one. At TILLER, an investment company specialising in projects involving highly complex transactions and requiring significant expertise, I am learning how companies are valued and financed in practice. In the long term, I am interested in what will happen to Czech companies established in the 1990s when their founders begin handing them over to the next generation. I would like to be part of that processand to do so, you need to understand both the value of a company and how it operates.
What do the numbers reveal about a company’s true health, and what can’t they tell you?
Numbers are the foundation: revenue, profit, cash flow and, above all, how they develop over time. But forecasts are always someone’s opinion, and comparisons with similar companies can only ever be an approximation. Numbers also reflect the past, so there is always a time lag – they show what has happened in a company, not what is happening in it right now. That is why the qualitative layer is crucial: the quality of management, an assessment of where the industry is heading, and company culture, which is the hardest thing to judge from the outside. You learn the most when you are as close as possible to both management and employees. People say that numbers don’t lie. Sometimes they do – and when they do, there is usually a reason behind it that you won’t find in a spreadsheet. The qualitative perspective therefore acts as a check on the numbers.
When does a company’s reliance on emails, spreadsheets and a few key people become a real risk?
Most companies like this are used to operating that way and it never occurs to them that things could work differently. As long as nothing changes, it works. It becomes a risk at precisely the moment when the company needs to change: when it wants to grow, when the owner wants to hand it over to the next generation, or when they want to sell it. That is when it becomes clear that the company cannot function without the owner and two key people, and its value is far lower than the owner expected. The departure of a key employee creates the same problem, only sooner.
The aim is to build a system that runs on its own, rather than one that relies on the memory of a few people. In my view, three things will determine which Czech companies survive over the next twenty years and which ones grow: whether they can operate without their founder, whether their business is transparent and understandable to banks and investors, and whether there will be someone to take them over.
Where do you think companies in the Moravian–Silesian Region, and the region itself, will be in ten years’ time – and what would help them most?
The pressures are real and they are not going away: low–cost manufacturing from Asia, AI that is reducing the time needed for office work, and Europe continuing to impose additional rules on itself. Czech companies often cannot compete with Asia on price. Where they can compete is on speed, quality and proximity to the customer. Industry is in our region’s DNA. We have people who know how to make things and many companies that have operated for thirty years on the experience of a single individual. The next ten years will determine how many of them transform into companies that function as systems. What would help most is for owners to start preparing earlier – not wait until the year they want to sell their company. And for students who have gone abroad to study to come back – not out of nostalgia, but because there is something worth building here. And I believe there is.
If you returned to the 1st International School of Ostrava today and could tell students preparing for their final exams one thing you did not yet know at their age, what would it be?
I believe that our future is decided much earlier than we think or realise. Your maturita and IB results determine which university you can attend, what kind of environment you enter and, importantly, the people you will be surrounded by. Personally, I am convinced that at university, grades matter less than who you spend three years sitting in the same room with. It is the atmosphere, the people and their mindset that influence you and ultimately shape you more than what you learn from a textbook – and they do so at a time when you are still particularly open to being shaped. It is difficult to make up for that later. So choose a university for its environment, not just its name. The work you put in now determines how wide your range of choices will be. As John Spence says: ‘What you do today determines who you will be tomorrow.’