Build Your Own Competitor

"This year €600 million in revenue. The year before, €700 million. Next year maybe less. Slowly melting, but still profitable. So still okay."

That is how a speaker at MY WAY in Berlin last month described the typical established company. Too many of us know that curve.

Then an executive of a 150-year-old German screw distributor told us what he did after five years of transformation work in the core. He did not stop the transformation. He placed a second bet next to it and built his own competitor. It took three months.

One Insight

The talk used a simple image. When a glass falls over and is empty, most people do not stand it up and refill it. They go and get a coffee. They do something else.

Companies do the same. Sales is not working, so they look for the next new thing: a platform, a service model, a marketplace. The speaker's point was the opposite. Fix the thing that is not working. Just do it outside the existing company.

The host calls this Rekubation. You do not incubate something new. You incubate your existing business, and you build your own digital competitor.

"I want to sell screws"

The executive was clear that he did not want a new business model. "Nobody wants to lease a screw." Screws have sold for 150 years. The market is a red ocean, and he likes it that way: about €25 billion, highly fragmented, with room to grow in a niche without meeting the direct competitor.

So the goal was not to escape the red ocean. It was to win it again, by doing the basics better and bringing the product to the customer differently.

Inherit the customers, rebuild everything else

The vehicle was a small existing subsidiary in special fasteners, with revenue in the low single-digit millions. He did not transform it. He rebuilt it in three layers:

→ Commercial: inherited. Customers, suppliers, brand.

→ Technology: rebuilt from zero. The ERP was 20 years old. "The first thing I did was buy a laptop."

→ People: mostly new hires who had never sold a screw.

The unfair advantage is the data. A transformation has to deal with all of the legacy. Here he could choose. In his words, roughly 60% he took, the other 40% he ignored. He was not a start-up claiming to know screws. He was building on 150 years of knowledge, without carrying 150 years of process.

Prove one thing first

Special fasteners have no article numbers. A request arrives as an email with an Excel file or an ERP screenshot. Someone has to work out who the customer is, what the part is, where to source it and what it costs. A quote takes a week, often two.

The bet: a quote that goes out almost immediately. He made the point twice. This is not about efficiency. It attacks the top line. In this industry, the fastest quote often wins the order.

That focus made everything else smaller. No new warehouse, no ERP migration first. The team mapped the quote process step by step and measured each step by how much of it runs without a person. Asked how many AI agents they use, he said, in blunter words, that it does not matter. He needs a fast quote. The second bet is a sales machine that works like a software company's: hypotheses, funnel data, outbound instead of waiting for the phone to ring.

What it does not prove yet

It is fair to be skeptical. The case is three months old and was told by the people who built it. There is no revenue result yet. Faster quotes are an ambition, not an outcome. The talk was also a pitch for the host's own model.

But the shape is right, and it applies in Switzerland as much as in the German Mittelstand. We saw the same at Faigle, a 90-year-old document services company: within a year it had an AI product of its own and its first customers live, built next to the core.

Bottom line: You do not have to transform the whole company to renew it. Take what works, rebuild the rest, and prove one thing first.

One Question

If you rebuilt your company next to the old one, what would you take with you?

One Opportunity

Most of our builds start the same way: one thing to prove, outside the core, in weeks rather than years. A faster quote. A sales motion that does not wait for the phone. A product the core already has but nobody sells.

You can see how that looked in seven family businesses, from a 90-year-old document services company to an automotive supplier with 9,700 people: dawnventures.ch/cases

P.S. Tomorrow morning we host the Dawn NextGen Circle, Family Business Venturing Edition, with FBN Switzerland. The question: what does the next generation build on what the family already has? If you are on the guest list, see you at 9:00 at the ViCAFE Roastery. If you would like to be at the next one: dawnventures.ch/community

Until Thursday in two weeks,

Lisa