171 People It s not necessity that drives companies out of Germany but greed Ms Trinkwalder what makes someone an entrepreneur When I close my eyes I see something and then I ask who wants to join in En trepreneurs need to have a long term vision That s really all there is to it Are there a lot of them No the opposite is the case Overall entrepreneurship is in decline There are a lot of start up founders who want to launch their idea as quickly as possible and then sell it just as quickly to monetise it But that has nothing to do with sustainable entrepreneurship What s missing We entrepreneurs have a business idea which is usually based on a need in society You can t sell off something like that quickly What you want to do is use your idea to bring society foward So you have to think in the long term I m forty one years old now and I ve founded five companies so far and not sold a single one of them This creates a close bond with the employees who work there I can t just sell that people are not for sale But that s something that happens quite frequently Yes but it doesn t work very well This is shown by the way that every company sale seems to go Look at Pukka small company great idea And then they flog it to Uni lever and lose their credibility Because no one believes anymore that they are going to keep on being small and sweet that wouldn t fit at all in the portfolio of a major corporation Another example is Bionade A beer brewer has a great idea and starts making a fermented soft drink Then the company is sold and suddenly it doesn t contain organic sugar anymore just non organic sugar And then it s sold again and there is more management and fewer people there who really identify with the company With every sale the founding idea of the company is diluted You say that entrepreneurs should do more for society That has to be what people expect of us entrepreneurs Within the neo capitalist system we have been exploit ing humans and Nature for too long It is well past twelve o clock we have to pull the emergency brake We need new economic indicators and have to stop thinking solely in terms of revenue Companies have to be measured by how valuable they are to society Doesn t this contradict the idea of competitiveness My company hasn t been operating under the pressure to be competitive for ten years now It doesn t interest me either We re taking a completely different approach We are in the black and doing well We produce textiles with the entire value chain here in Germany We are not even close to being internationally competitive For the price of one Manomama shirt you could buy ten shirts from Bang ladesh at two euros each And yet it works Don t you have to grow as a company After a visit from a management consultant a perfect ly healthy medium sized company suddenly has to pro duce in China because the margins are higher there It s not necessity that drives companies out of Germany but greed But that neglects their responsibility to the region Another example is the restructuring of the labour market The only sector that s growing rapidly is temporary work That has nothing to do with corporate social responsibili ty Corporate social responsibility means that I always of fer my employees a permanent contract Because I am making a commitment to shaping the future with them A POT OF TEA WITH Sina Trinkwalder Entrepreneur who employs people who have few opportunities on the job market

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