“In 1990, I felt as I was living into a desert, where there was no pathway, the wind was blowing hard and the sand was getting into my eyes,” Ioan Budeanu, the owner of Iasi-based company Coseli recollects about his first attempt to establish a business. Last year, his company, with 30 employees, recorded a productivity ratio of more than 1 billion lei per employee.
After the revolution, his friends urged him to enter the field of taxi services, which provided average earnings and required little money. Ioan Budeanu says that he has always focused on production and, after many trips to the banks, he was able to start his own business in puffs manufacturing that year.
“I sold all the valuable belongings from the house then: the cooker, the refrigerator, the furniture, even the TV set,” says Budeanu, who now considers that taking the risk was worth it.
The Iasi-based owner thinks that any product has a definite life span, so the “puffs” age couldn’t last very long. “The products must be periodically assessed to test market demand.
There are products that die and then go back to life and others that last longer,” considers Budeanu, who decided to move to something else two years later.
After a failure in the field of drugs, Coseli returned to foodstuffs making and essences, flavours, vanilla sugar and food colourings replaced the puffs. The housekeepers from Iasi are familiar with the flavours and spices manufactured by Coseli, which currently produces 250 items certified by the EU.
A small and ambitious team of researchers tests the products, gets new ones and improves the already existing products, in a laboratory next to the room where the goods are manufactured.
“Research is Coseli’s spearhead and these people have complete freedom in their work. Moreover, they can even get any information from the Internet.
We are very receptive to the market preferences. Buyers can make suggestions regarding quality and we have paid attention to several opinions,” Ioan Budeanu said. He added that research outran manufacturing by 2-5 years, due to the high number of manufactured products.
The researchers draw the pilot project and the product is tested on the market. If it is welcome, the product is manufactured. Coreli’s management team thinks that a business cannot make headway if it is not based on prospects.
The company ranked first in the top drawn by Iasi Commerce and Industry Chamber last year, with an annual productivity ratio of 1.017 billion lei per employee, five times higher than the previous year. In other words, each employee manufactured goods worth 84 million lei monthly and Budeanu thinks the figures are likely to increase.
Coseli has only 30 employees and a half of them are disabled. When asked why he trusted these people and which was the secret to record productivity, Budeanu replied that the disabled had other assets that offset their handicaps.