My Memoirs at EME from 1983 to 2021

To celebrate 37 years at Eme, I have decided to write my memoirs covering this period of my life.

I hope that it will encourage younger generations in knowing that it is possible to start from nothing; and with a lot of hard work, a bit of luck, and the support of people that believe in your dream, all is possible.

CHAPTER 1 (Draft)

Before working at Eme, I had accumulated enormous industrial and commercial experience working firstly with Thorn Lighting Limited, and then later in Italy at SIVI SpA (eventual bought out by GE), and Pollice Illuminazione SpA.

The experience obtained was to be of enormous value to me in the coming years, but also to Eme.

I not only learned how to plan and execute a commercial strategy, but I also taught myself how to analyse the competition and learn from their mistakes.

30 years ago the world was a different place. Italy was then the China of today, and companies were coming from all over the world to have products made in Italy, or just simply to buy. In fact it was very difficult for the Italian manufacturers not to make money. It was often a question of muscle rather than brains, and where brains were required, these were often supplied by countries such as Germany. It was exactly as China today, but with the difference that China has been able to encourage major companies to establish production units within their country; Italy No.

At that time,  Italian manufacturers were generally known for:

• Never being able to say no to an order when they had exceeded their production capacity.
• Always being late on their delivery dates.
• Unreliable, and generally not to be trusted.

At this point, I must underline that this is a generalization. There were a lot of good companies especially in the clothing and textile industries, but also there were major companies such as FIAT that were not. FIAT lived on state aid, and convinced the Italian population that they should buy only FIAT because the spare parts were cheap. The point that foreign imported cars may not have breaken down as much as a FIAT was lost on the Italian consumer. Infact it was generally understood that after 3 years of owning a FIAT, you had a very good car; because after such a period of time, everything that had broken had broken, and nothing else could go wrong with it.