Imagine you own a company you keep investing in, one that runs very well and posts substantial turnover. Would it occur to you to ask whether it could be done better still? It occurred to Jiří Pantůček, CEO of Green Idea — at the moment he started thinking about when and how to hand the company over to his children. He enrolled it in the EDIH programme, transformed it — and now expansion abroad lies ahead.
Green Idea goes back to the years just after the Velvet Revolution. This medium-sized company, which makes environmentally friendly cosmetics, food supplements and veterinary products, was growing — in turnover, at least. Profit, however, stagnated in places. The problem was that nobody could tell HOW or WHY it was happening. One of the main reasons was the company's own in-house software. “Over the past 10 years we invested a lot of money in it. On the surface everything worked well, but a closer analysis as part of the EDIH programme showed it was a fundamental dead end. Even though it was connected to Helios, it was in fact hiding important data,” explains Jiří Pantůček.
As a result the company could not plan production or reserve raw materials effectively. Besides various kinds of cosmetics, Green Idea also produces several types of packaging. Converting the format parts from one type to another takes several hours. “If we had to do that three times a day, we would produce nothing. That is why we need to manufacture in cycles, and the raw materials have to be reserved for those cycles as well,” Jiří Pantůček continues. The software shortcut the company chose years ago eventually caught up with it in an unpleasant way.
The solution? A full return to the Helios system. Besides being able to work with data — and so plan production, calculate costs and profit and set KPIs — a major benefit is secured continuity of operating the software, should the IT specialist drop out of any process. The same principle had to be introduced across the whole company, so that no decision rests on a single person, namely Jiří Pantůček. He was greatly helped in this by the external board the company gained through the EDIH programme.
The company therefore split into individual units, each headed by strong new management. “We brought in a top marketing person and a top CFO from outside. We filled the sales director and head of HR roles with internal people and gave them experienced external advisers to work with. And we will handle the operations director role the same way in the near future,” explains Jiří Pantůček. After 2034, when he hands the company over to one of his daughters, he himself will focus on what he has always been strong at: development and product management.
Jiří Pantůček had brought in many people over the years to work on personal development and management skills. He never found confidence in them, and if anything came away more convinced that he wanted no change at all. That shifted only once he started working with JIC expert Martin Dokoupil.
“Martin is the right person in the right place and a very good psychologist. He managed to work with me in such a way that I started to see the shortcomings in the company, and decided to work on removing them,” Jiří Pantůček recalls with a smile. Looking back, he sees that as the most important lesson learned: “Realising that for everything you do there are thousands of people more capable and more skilled, and that there is no shame in asking them. And then building a team inside the company the same way,” he adds.
JIC
“What pleases me most is how visible the shift is in two areas: in how the company is run, and in the owner as a person. They say a company is only as big as its owner. Green Idea has already outgrown its CEO, precisely because he gives the people around him room, trust and the freedom to make decisions.”
The transformation will make the company more stable and more competitive. Its nearest plans therefore point to expansion abroad. “Thanks to Amazon we serve the whole of Europe, and one of our products even became a best seller. Beyond turnover, selling through online marketplaces brings us a major benefit: we can estimate the company's potential on foreign markets,” explains Jiří Pantůček. This year the company will analyse the German and Austrian markets and run a trial mode, and in 2026 it will enter the DACH region market in full.