Learning to sell: ENZ Ingenieurbüro and LTB Lasertechnik Berlin
“Curious”, he replied when asked to describe the initial period in retrospect. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in autumn 1989 it quickly became clear to the qualified engineer Fred Enz that his employer, the East-Berlin Institute of Automation in Adlershof, would soon be liquidated. Today his engineering office has five employees and a long list of successful projects in the field of measuring and control technologies. At about the same time, and under similar circumstances, there also began the success story of Matthias Scholz and LTB Lasertechnik Berlin, a specialist in the development and production of lasers, spectrometers and laser aided measuring technologies.
Enz was highly qualified, in his mid-thirties, and was married with a secure income: in April 1990 he set up on his own – with an initial capital constituting his own qualifications and work experience. He had no money: “I didn’t own a home, only an old car.” At first he didn’t even think of approaching a bank. Nor at first did he apply for promotional funds: As a one man enterprise he felt he wasn’t promising enough. Instead he took the “hard way”: acquisition as a service provider. “You have to have ideas. And you mustn’t be afraid. But you must know your limitations,” he explained.
Fred Enz is a doer, one of those who get active and get to work: Besides his own office he used to represent a South German company in East-Berlin, he joined forces with two former colleagues to seek an investor and set up a limited liability company. He learned from customers and business partners in West-Germany: “How did you start?” “I got useful answers from everybody,” he summarised. “Most of them found it interesting that somebody from the East was doing it that way.” Yet engineering knowledge alone is not enough to maintain an engineering office, and so Enz also studied marketing, accounting and taxes.
In a globalised world, also a small company like ENZ Ingenieurbüro had to learn to provide its services on an international level. When orders were pressing, it was work around the clock, including weekends. In this initial period, his wife too had to help out at times, stripping cables, screwing equipment together, sending circulars. Today it is his daughters who are in demand: Both have studied mechanical engineering and on occasions the father seeks their engineering advice.
Shortly after Reunification, also Matthias Scholz ventured the step into entrepreneurship – after 20 years at the Institute for Scientific Instruments in Adlershof. Together with two former colleagues and his wife, a business administrator, he founded LTB Lasertechnik Berlin GmbH. Now they had to produce and sell what before they had been developing. “That took some getting used to, but nothing that good old common sense couldn’t handle,” recalled Matthias Scholz. They too raised the money for their start-up from private funds. “In 1990 the situation was relatively unclear. There was really no other choice but to see to things yourself,” explained Scholz. However, fortune proved particularly perfidious: Because they had founded their company in the GDR, the monetary union halved their capital over night. And yet again, they contributed the lost sum from private funds.
by Tina Heidborn