He wrote up a small start up for a company of 150 employees. After 25 years, he sold it to a foreign investor. Then he co-founded the Venture Club to keep himself busy. Introducing Hanus Brychta, one of the founding members of the Venture Club.
He does what he enjoys
2N Telekomunikace is well known to people in the industry. Few people know that the name originated from the original headquarters of Na Nivách and that the company, apart from electronics, also published theatre plays, ran a scifi club and founded the magazine Ikárie. Hanuš Brychta and the group around him just like to do what they enjoy.
At a time when they could only do business under Svazarm, the group of friends and colleagues formed islands of positive deviance and experimented with the development of various devices and computers, until they gradually got to the development of telephone exchanges. At that time, Hanuš Brychta, Miroslav Hofman and Roman Pihan jointly founded the company 2N Telekomunikace. The company has been developing, manufacturing and selling telecommunication solutions since 1991.
With small telephone exchanges, the company achieved a 14% share of the Czech market in 1995. In 1998, the company came to the market with the first GSM gateway, which enabled its users to save substantially on telephone calls to mobile networks. At the turn of the millennium, the company began to focus on foreign markets. The goods were gradually shipped to 126 countries around the world. In 2008, it came to the market, as the first in the world, with an IP communicator. In 2011, it built a branch in the USA and exports abroad reached 80% of the company’s production.
Sales of 2N Telecommunications
The owners decided to sell the company in 2013. They went through a round of courtship and negotiations, but in the end no offer seemed interesting enough and so they were faced with the decision whether to embark on new developments and postpone the sale for a few years. In the end, they didn’t wait that long, because in 2015 they received an offer from Axis that they couldn’t refuse. Preparations took six months and the sale closed in 2016.
The condition of the sale by the owners was to preserve the company as a whole, its direction and to keep the people working, including the management, as much as possible.
Axis is a world leader in security cameras. The purchase of 2N Telecommunications was interesting for them to expand their production with voice communications.
The handover of the company went smoothly thanks to the CEO Oldřich Stejskal and the fact that at the time of the sale the owners were no longer involved in the operational management of the company. In retrospect, the owners are pleased with how the company continues to develop. Over the next year, as part of the Axis Group, the company has grown by another 100 employees and continues on its planned path.
Would he do it again?
Would you repeat the founding of your company or project? Would you choose the same co-workers? Hanus Brychta yes! We were most interested in how he looks back on the fact that he owned the company in three. They say that the best number of business owners should be an odd number and 3 is too many. However, according to Hanus, the co-owners managed to find an advantage in being different and focused on different things and were able to capitalize on their differences. Even though they’ve had enough after 25 years and had some harder times during their collaboration, they’d do it again in a heartbeat.
3 essentials for success
When someone tells their success story, it is impossible not to ask what they consider to be the essential ingredients of what they have achieved. And here are the answers:
1. Fun and enjoyment of what one does
First and foremost, a person should do what fulfills them, whether it brings them money or not. As Hanus Brychta said, “Happiness is something you have to manage yourself and money plays no part in it.” Of course, only when we work with passion and love what we do, does it bring us money.
2. Honesty and truthfulness
The story of Hanuš Brychta is an encouraging proof that even with honesty one can go far. Maybe not as quickly as we would sometimes imagine. This probably includes the fact that 2N Telekomunikace never went into debt except for a loan for the acquisition and construction of its premises.
3. Choose the right people
You need to choose the right people for each project, usually people who are better, smarter, more experienced at something than you are. And Hanus Brychta’s attitude is to give all people a lot of freedom and also responsibility for the results. The motivation of 2N employees is based on the fact that everyone knows what the real result of their work is and what it brings to the company.
It is only now in 2018 that all the transactions related to the sale of 2N have run their course and it will be possible for Hanus Brychta to tell us more about it. We are planning another chat. This time about how the owners of the company managed to move away from their management positions in the company and what the sale of the company to an investor actually entails.