This article is extracted from the book "Royo. One family, one company, one legacy", written to mark the 50th anniversary of our business activities.
Every month, from Invext Corporation, we share a snippet of our history, full of multiple learnings and values that help to understand where we come from, how far we have come, and what we want our next steps to be. We hope that sharing our vision can help or inspire other family businesses to believe that the best way to honour a legacy is to create a new future for it.
Can you read the previous chapter here
Pascual, without realising it, always championed professionalisation. He is a person capable of tackling a lot, but what he has always done best is delegate to those who know how to do things better. The first steps towards professionalisation came with Mari Carmen joining Royo to support her husband with accounting tasks. While Pascual focused on fulfilling more and more orders with his own hands, she organised the administrative and accounting side, thanks to what she had learned at the company where she previously worked.
What Pascual did best was surround himself with good people, growing to have a company with 250 employees, around 1,200 points of sale in Spain, and a successful start in export activities. But as it continued to grow, it needed to create a solid structure, and for this, it turned to Raúl, the eldest of the brothers, who had just completed training in new business management models.
Pascual and Mari Carmen always knew what they wanted for us: the education they hadn't had. At the same time, from a young age, they guided us towards effort, and in the summers, they made us make sacrifices. I remember whole days spent assembling crates and learning about the different types of work in the factory. Without effort, there are no results. Effort is a value we learned and have always seen in the company. It's one of the lessons that my siblings and I apply, both personally and professionally.
Growth
Revenue, collections, points of sale, employees, and the number of countries they exported to all grew. In 2004, Raúl was appointed managing director and drove a management team of external professionals, with proven experience in larger companies, who had our father's backing to sustain everything. Things went well, and Pascual clearly saw that passing the baton was one of the keys to the company's growth and evolution.
The family office from the family, Invext, also followed the same professionalisation process. Pascual drove the projects and we added a layer of systematisation and professionalisation that allowed those ideas to grow and scale. But that's not always easy, because it depends on the founder's willingness, their vision for the business project and their trust in the next generations.
Pascual always says that there are many business owners who resist change when things are going well, thinking that no one can do it better. He trusted Raúl first, and later Silvia and me. They were brave decisions, like many others he has made in his life.
From this stage, we can extrapolate several business lessons:
1- Organisational excellence and professionalisation. In a company, it's not enough to just do things well; you have to do them perfectly, or at least strive to. Investment is needed in the best talent, tools, machinery, and management team.
2- Generosity and trust in the next generation (in times of prosperity).Delegating responsibilities and exposing oneself to change is not always easy. The worst enemy for the prosperity of a business project is ego. Founders must recognise their limitations and cede areas where decisions are made to other people who have greater training and judgement to take the next steps. The key is to know where one adds value, to exercise detachment from power, to trust the chosen people and to generously cede decision-making.
Santiago Royo – CEO of Invext Corporation
