Strategy work the summer ear -22 came from a completely different angle to any previous one. I had read that creativity comes out when you feel a great sense of security in a group where you should dare to throw your ideas into the ring. I see myself as a doer rather than a softball. For this reason, the threshold to throw myself into this was high, but I decided to dare.
I wished you welcomed the board and the management team to the Strategy Day and asked the first task: "Tell me what my strengths are and what I am good at".
The first half of the strategy day was spent praising each other and extolling each other's strengths. The task was supposed to take an hour, but it took four. That was simply because there were so many strengths.
I remember someone commenting: "I wish I'd heard these earlier." Someone must have got rubbish in their eye, but others politely looked away. After all, we were just ordinary Finnish men.
Of course, I heard a long line of honeyed words myself, but one comment in particular was empowering. It went like this: "You are the right person for this company". Even though I am the founder of a company, I often wonder whether I have grown enough to keep up with the company's growth. I would have liked to have heard that from this particular group of people before.
And so, each of us, feeling empowered, started to ponder the question of the day: what do we want to be in 2027? And ideas flew, megatrends whistled and the direction of the market was probed.
Where did it all start? From the blocks of a detached house.
How did it come to this? We've been brave enough to take on bigger projects.
Where are we going? To become an industrial heavyweight builder, the main contractor for major projects.
Why? Because we want to show the way. Construction, especially concrete construction, is currently wasting our common natural resources in vain!
In pairs, we stuttered through a battery of questions, with the last line of the question: turnover in the 2025-2026 financial year?
Responses ranged from 100 to 200 million. Then we looked at the target, looked at ourselves, looked at the target again, and looked at ourselves again. Someone thought that the resources were probably not enough for two hundred million, but then someone else came up with the idea that we have all the resources in the world at our disposal.
In the end, it was unanimously agreed to be a €200 million exchange in 2027.
The target was chosen, and the real work began. We decided on the sectors and divided the tasks: market shares, competitors, competitive advantages, strategic projects, resources. Everything had to be identified and studied.
By the autumn, the teams had finished their work and, because they had done a good job, it was much easier to believe in the goal. Among other things, we decided to get involved in bridge building, expand the market in energy construction, invade northern Sweden and push through environmentally conscious structural design for all our projects. That is why our mission is to be "worthy of our environment".
We chose the vision of the three P's: the Best Peto Builder in the North - measured by customer experience, employee satisfaction and economy. When I recently presented the vision to the mayor of Kempelee, he interrupted and asked, "is that like a deliberately hard P on that petro builder", to which I replied, "yes it is".
We are now in the first quarter of 2023, and the strategy is being put into practice with a bang, with many of the planned things already done. One of the most visible was the name change - A-Perustus is now Anfra.
Despite all the turbulence, 2022 was a good year for us, and we achieved a turnover of EUR 38 million and met our profit target. We currently have a record high order book, with more contracts on the way.
The sudden slowdown in the construction sector has turned the recruitment market on its head. Many construction companies are downsizing and laying off staff, but once again we have decided to take the plunge.
- Tomi Puoskari, Managing Director
