Interview with company successor Benjamin Beloch
Entrepreneur Benjamin Beloch had already been on the market for several years with his geo-marketing company, p17 GmbH in Gronau, when he was offered the takeover of Kastanea, which was formerly run as Bacher Verlag. Together with two long-time employees of the publishing house, he is now responsible for the management and further development of the company. Within the last two years, Benjamin Beloch has been able to implement some of his ideas and further optimise his companies' processes.
In the interview, the Münsterländer gives an insight into the time after the company takeover.
Two years after the Youngstarts Podcast
© Lea Stampfer / film and focus
Our podcast interview is now almost two years behind us. Tell us how you and your company have fared since then?
Yes - the Corona period is behind us: in fact, a lot has happened at our company during this time. Maybe first of all about the company p17: It is not only in our company that we work a lot in a mobile office or in a home office. As a result, the geomarketing offer has declined somewhat. However, as a company, we have completed a kind of "transformation" to become a data provider of market data. By analysing market data, marketing and sales processes can be made more efficient - this makes it possible, for example, to approach customers at the right time. Thus, the p17 has meanwhile developed into a data supplier rather than a map supplier. One simply moves with the times and the needs of the market.
And now to my second company "Kastanea": Here we have spent a lot of time on optimising internal processes. We have relaunched the online shop and also improved search engine marketing. We hope that this will lead to increased sales in the online business. And you can already notice an effect: we are selling more analogue cards again, but the demand for inexpensive cards has decreased, while the demand for high-quality cards has increased significantly.
But what is most exciting is that we have founded a third company: The nice-IT since November 2021. The nice-IT is more or less an IT service provider, among other things for processes that we can also use in the p17 and/or Kastanea. Example: In the course of the transformation to a data supplier at p17, where we currently sell a lot of address data, we needed a CRM system. Here we acquired a lot of know-how - which then led to the spin-off of nice-IT. We have thus gained another level of value creation, we can pass the balls to each other very well within the three companies.
All in all, we can say that we have fully adapted to the current market situation.
In retrospect
Would you approach the succession again in exactly the same way as you did back then, or would you have arranged some things differently in retrospect?
In retrospect, I would have dealt more with the topic of "digitalisation of processes" - that would have given me a huge head start. Especially with Kastanea, it would have saved us a lot of effort and time. Here, after 3.5 years, the analogue processes were relatively stuck. But now we have been able to digitalise some things, for example the automated acceptance of orders and the automatic comparison with portals such as eBay. Of course, Corona has given the online business another BOOST.
Has the relationship with the transferor changed in recent years?
No - with the takeover he was actually directly out. We took over the machines, some of which were developed by him - and if there are problems, he sometimes helps out and also regularly asks about the development of the company.
What happens next?
Do you have plans for the future?
Of course: I would like to found a fourth company. We need, since Corona even more, online marketing support. At Kastanea, for example, we are 99% dependent on online marketing. We have already acquired the skills for this to a large extent. We want to do and offer that ourselves in the future. Of course, one could ask why we don't just offer it within another company, but: we want to avoid diluting the portfolio of the companies. That bears the risk of no longer being perceived as a specialist in the respective field. We don't want any "belly-shop" companies - moreover, we want to be able to check 1:1 which division is working economically successfully and which is not.
Behind the production of the video is the joint project Gründergeist #Youngstarts Münsterland. The project strengthens the start-up intensity in the Münsterland region and opens up new start-up potential and target groups with its offers. The area of business succession focuses on potential successors for taking over a business, who are to be supported in their possible decision for succession. For this purpose, offers such as workshops, networking events and a podcast are available to those interested. It is funded by the European Union and the NRW Ministry of Economics as part of the ERDF call "Regio.NRW".
Frank Sibbing© Münsterland e.V./Anja Tiwisina