Last year, INTRAVIS GmbH celebrated its 30th anniversary. This year marks the next anniversary. This time we are celebrating 20 years of INTRAVIS Inc. With the founding of the American subsidiary on November 4, 2004, INTRAVIS embarked on a great adventure that has resulted in a strong, successful subsidiary within two decades. To mark this anniversary, we met with Andreas Müller, CEO of INTRAVIS Inc. for an interview.
Initially, INTRAVIS Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia was nothing more than a two-man company, consisting of Andreas Müller and his wife Vera, who came from Aachen, Germany, with the task of setting up the American subsidiary. INTRAVIS GmbH first exhibited at the NPE in Chicago back in 2003. At that time, it became clear that an American subsidiary was absolutely necessary and sensible in order to gain a foothold in the American market.
Over the years, the company grew and the customer base expanded. In 2015, INTRAVIS Inc. moved to its current premises to meet the increased space requirements. Today, the team consists of over 30 employees and additional service locations in Mexico and Brazil. Overall, INTRAVIS Inc. makes a considerable contribution to the success of INTRAVIS as a whole.
Andreas, you have been in charge of our subsidiary INTRAVIS Inc. since it was founded. Briefly describe the early days. What challenges did you and your wife Vera have to overcome back then?
The early days were initially characterized by everyday problems. We had to take care of social security numbers, a company license and many other things. You could say that we did pioneering work there for INTRAVIS.
One issue, for example, was an American driver's license: we initially only had an international driver's license. Buying a company car was no problem, but the cost of insurance with the international permit was five times higher than with a US driver's license. So I quickly applied for an American driver's license.
My wife Vera looked after the office in the early days, while 90% of my time was taken up by service and sales work in the field. In the first two years, Vera made tons of cold calls every day, which led to appointments and later customers. All of them are still among our customers today. She made a huge contribution to the success of INTRAVIS Inc. in the first few years and deserves a lot of credit for this.
We found this time extremely exciting and thrilling. We saw everything as a challenge that we wanted to master as successfully as possible. Incidentally, this attitude has not changed for either of us to this day and we try to pass it on to our current team.
Over time, the first American employees joined our team, who supported us with their experience and input, making many things even easier.
Before you took over the management of INTRAVIS Inc., you worked for the GmbH as a service engineer worldwide. How did your technical experience benefit you at that time and in building up the company?
Especially in the beginning, it helped a lot that I knew our systems from A-Z. Due to the time difference to Germany, I was of course often on my own during service visits at the beginning.
In addition, I was then able to train and support the first service technicians myself, without us always being dependent on feedback from Germany.
Another point that became part of the INTRAVIS Inc. culture over time thanks to my experience as a service engineer in the field: “If the service technician has a problem in the field, everything is dropped and the customer's problem is solved first!”. This is because the technician's time on site is very limited, which is why it is important for us to convince the customer with excellent work. This also means that colleagues in the office sometimes have to postpone tasks in order to help their colleagues on site.
An additional challenge in the early days was finding well-trained technicians. In Germany, I was used to a job being advertised in the newspaper. We had also formulated our advertisement very precisely, as we were explicitly looking for people with previous electrical and mechanical knowledge. As a result, we received over 1,000 applications, which included everything from chefs to train drivers.
We then came to the conclusion that, as a small company, we had to hand over the task of recruiting to specialists. By chance, I met a military recruiter who recommended that we look for veterans in the maintenance sector. And we did indeed find excellently trained people there who were also extremely committed to their work. As a result, we still have many colleagues in service today who received their training in the military.
Choosing Atlanta as the headquarters of the American subsidiary was not a coincidence, but was very well thought out. Can you tell us a bit more about this?
When INTRAVIS was considering moving to the USA, there was a branch of the Department of Economy & Development of the State of Georgia in Germany. At the time, this branch made a great effort to help us and supported us. For example, they put us in touch with lawyers, tax consultants and realtors, which of course made it much easier for us to get started locally.
Another important point in Atlanta's favor is its location with the largest airport in the world. You can reach 80% of the people in the USA within 2 hours by plane and there are very good connections to Germany. In addition, we were already thinking about the future at the time and realized that many large cities in South America can also be reached easily and quickly from Atlanta.
The next point that spoke in favor of Atlanta as a location was the time difference. While other large cities in the Midwest have a time difference of seven or eight hours to Germany, in Atlanta it is “only” six hours.
Another crucial point was that a very strong plastics packaging industry has settled around Atlanta, so we had our potential customers practically on our doorstep.
And the pleasant side effect of all these hard points: The climate in Atlanta is very pleasant with its mild winters.
And how has the American market developed/changed over the last 20 years?
The American market has always been strong. Even in crisis years like 2009, sales of vision inspection systems were stable. Among other things, this has meant that INTRAVIS Inc. has been profitable in every single year since it was founded - a point that naturally makes me very proud as CEO.
But what we have noticed, especially since the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, is that customers are paying even more attention to excellent service. During the pandemic, many of our customers' employees left the packaging industry. This has led to a loss of expertise there, which has to be compensated for by customer service.
We now have 20 employees working in service in North, Central and South America and have set up service locations in Mexico and Brazil. The reason for this is obvious: to ensure that we can always respond as quickly as possible to all our customers' service requests.
How important is the cooperation with the parent company for the success of the subsidiary, and how has this relationship developed over the years?
Of course, cooperation was and is completely crucial to our success. Especially in the early years, various colleagues - from our Corporate President Gerd Fuhrmann to today's CMO, Markus Juppe, to today's COO, Karsten Vogel - were extremely committed to the success of INTRAVIS Inc. and supported us. They were available around the clock to answer questions and solve problems. That made it easier for us to gain a foothold and grow.
However, it must also be said that the growth of the GmbH is closely linked to the growth of the Inc. When we started in the USA, the GmbH in Germany was still quite small with around 30 employees.
Over the years, the relationship between the head office and us has changed. Initially it was more the relationship of a parent to their child, but today it is much more of a partnership. We have managed to gather our own experiences and become so self-sufficient and independent in many areas that we are no longer dependent on feedback from the GmbH in order to serve our customers. This independent operation is a great advantage for our customers.
What I also find impressive is that both the GmbH and we have grown over the years and have integrated new structures and departments. And yet we have managed to root this mutual supportive attitude from the early years so deeply in both organizations that even employees who have only recently joined us take it for granted.
In your opinion, what have been the biggest highlights for INTRAVIS Inc. over the last 20 years?
If you have always worked profitably since the company was founded, then of course every single year is a highlight.
However, there are other things that I am proud of: For example, that we have always contributed to the INTRAVIS portfolio with ideas from our market. What few people may know is that one of the most successful systems in the INTRAVIS portfolio - the Sample-PreWatcher - is a development based on a need in the US market.
In 2008, Gerd Fuhrmann and I visited a large preform manufacturer on the East Coast that produces exclusively for the world's largest soft drinks manufacturer. There we saw that countless people were involved in the quality control of preforms. So we came up with the idea that this whole process of quality control of preforms should be automated in order to relieve the operators and the companies in this area. As a result, a year later we had the Sample PreWatcher.
Today, the Sample-PreWatcher is an absolute standard in the industry, used by every major preform manufacturer in the US in their production.
And where should the journey take us? What is INTRAVIS Inc.'s vision for the next 20 years?
That sounds like the typical comment of a salesperson, but we are completely serious: we want to remain at the forefront of service and customer experience in our industry and not rest on our laurels from what we have achieved over the past 20 years. I have already said that excellence in service has become even more important to our customers in recent years. And of course we want to maintain this level.
At the same time, we want to advance digitalization in service so that we can respond even better and faster to our customers' needs. We see ourselves as an important catalyst in our industry to further lead and expand the topics of digitalization and service excellence.
If we manage to do this, I am certain that we will continue to be a strong American subsidiary within the INTRAVIS family that continues to grow from year to year.
Andreas, thank you for the interview.