• 06/10/2020

Co-entrepreneurs

LIQUI MOLY Managing Director Ernst Prost on being a co-entrepreneur instead of a co-worker

Greetings, dear colleagues!

“Hammer ten nails into this board and, when you are finished, I’ll give you another task.” A fine example for the classic employer and employee roles. This is not meant quite seriously, but in essence hits the nail on the head :-) Personally , I prefer the co-entrepreneur. We have almost 1,000 of this type here. For more than a quarter of a century, I have been cultivating our cooperation within the company on the basis of this corporate philosophy. Still, not everyone understands that working as co-entrepreneurs yields a thousand times more benefit than just being a co-worker or employee.

The word co-entrepreneur is put in quotation marks by some people, and I often have to explain that this is not a case of false advertising, but a true description of our way of working as a team for the benefit of the company – and thus for the benefit of everyone. Being co-entrepreneurs means we undertake things together. Now that’s really cool. Because it is not necessary to tell entrepreneurs which hammer to use to knock which nail into which board. They already know that themselves. Saving costs, increasing turnover, generating profits – the supreme disciplines of entrepreneurship are performed by co-entrepreneurs a thousand times more independently, reliably and with greater commitment than by mere recipients of orders. We are good to the company and the company is good to us. A simple description of mutual care to the advantage of all in this community.

My Liqui Moly / Meguin family worldwide is also often set in quotation marks. But please tell me: what form of living together brings more stability, care and helpfulness for the individual members than the family? Of course, there is sometimes also discord in a family, but family members stick together and help and support each other. This part of our corporate architecture is also based on our company philosophy of humanity. No one is forced to believed anything and no one is left in the lurch. No one is just a number and there are no sacrificial victims of rationalization with the aim of increasing profits. And it is precisely because we are 1,000 co-entrepreneurs and have united all our customers, business associates and partners in the large worldwide Liqui Moly / Meguin family that we achieve outstanding economic successes year after year.

Neither selfishness, nor egoism, nor rivalry determine our actions, but cooperation, friendship and service to the common good. To borrow from Robert Bosch, who said: “I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.” The monetary aspect still counts as much as the appreciation, respect, cultivated cooperation and goal-oriented work of all those who all have a common goal, namely that the company is doing well, so that jobs are secure and work is fun.

Warmest regards,

Ernst Prost