Valtteri Lindholm

My speaking started in training rooms. I am good at explaining things, and there was demand inside Varusteleka for training on marketing, social media and online retail. After the entrepreneur award I have been asked to tell the Varusteleka story, and I still do it gladly, because a lot has happened and keeps happening. Varusteleka is also easy to talk about because we are an open-source company without much in the way of trade secrets.

I am a values-based entrepreneur. I believe companies should carry out their owners' values, and that owners are obliged to say clearly what those values are. At Varusteleka the value is taking the side of the good. That is a broad and demanding claim. For someone on the side of the good, it is not enough to avoid doing harm. You put in the work so the world becomes a better place. Owning a company is more than receiving money. It brings power and meaning. That power is worth using.

On leadership Valtteri Lindholm believes that the work rewards the person who does it. Whether the company has a gym, a ball pit or good or bad coffee in the break room matters less. In a good workplace people know what they need to do and know how to do it. They are given enough time and other resources, and also the freedom to do the work in the way they consider best. They also need to know how it went, and what their own share means in the bigger picture. Building that environment is not easy for a leader. It requires stopping the work for a moment and making a plan, and it takes a great deal of courage, trust and control of one's own feelings to let a person do the job themselves. I have been through a hard school in this, and I have failed often.

Showing off wealth does not belong to Finnish culture, and I like living in that culture. The shadow side is a lack of ambition about money. Finnish small and mid-sized companies should be encouraged to grow and to make money, because that is the only way to fund the society around us. I do not put much hope in our listed companies, because they focus on paying dividends, not on growth. The opportunity lies in small and mid-sized companies that have new ideas and the agility to capture markets. Our entrepreneurs should make money boldly, and they should go after that money boldly beyond the country's borders. In a global world everyone is both a potential competitor and a potential customer, and we Finns can be strong in that too.

I am not the first to say that everything a company does is marketing. Every product or service is an answer to customers' needs. Those needs are not only the obvious ones, because in a world of abundance nobody buys a hoodie only to stay warm, or chooses a subcontractor only because they can make a suitable component. The ones who succeed are those who can see every need they might answer, and how to stand out from the competition by doing so.