The Uncle

Okay, to answer Branimir and other’s questions: What did my Uncle say? He told me his story, which was quite impressive, and which I’d never heard before.

The short version is that he built Scandinavia’s largest producer of industrial paint by focusing on high-quality, customized paints. If a standard paint was adequate, he’d pass. He also got hold of the best engineer there was very early on, and held on to him.

With everything he’s done, he’s been lucky or smart to get in on a time where a significant change was happening in the marketplace, and got to ride that wave. It’s classic Innovator’s Dilemma. With paint was the entire Danish industry that started to grow rapidly around the time, and the other paint shops ignored them in order to focus on the consumer/standard paint market. Dres picked up that slot and stayed with it. With his import business, he started just around the time when supermarkets started opening up, and all the other importers refused to sell to those. Dres seized the opportunity and stayed there.

There was a lot more, of course. Maybe I’ll get around to that later.