Her next goals: to establish building with large formats in the Czech Republic, to build up Construction Services as a business segment, to complete her MBA, and to finally find the perfect recipe for macerons.
Looking at your Linkedin profile, one gets the impression of a woman who is very passionate about building materials and architecture. How did that come about?
I fell in love with civil engineering when I was a child because my father and my grandfather worked in engineering. And I was always fond of architecture, interior design - not only in buildings but also in materials. How it was developed, how it is produced and how to improve it. The good news: I am good at it, too.
You started your career quite early.
Yes. My father had his own company for building houses, so as a child I was often on construction sites. When I was young, I already wanted to build homes for people. When I started studying civil engineering, I pursued the holistic approach to build a house: the materials, the spaces, the architecture, and the design.
What was your first job?
When I was in my second year at university, I started to work in a small company. It was specialized in insulating roofs and after a few months I became the right hand of our head of construction sites. It was great as I got a lot of space for learning new things, creating in all parts of the company as we were just a small team. I quit because I needed to finish university and write my master’s thesis.
How did you come to Xella?
This took some time. My first job after university was at Hochtief, my first contact with a corporate company. It's a big difference compared to my previous job. After six months, I started my own company, where we focused on due diligence projects and preparing building projects for developers. In the financial crisis, I wanted to work for a bigger company again to get more stability.
After a few months in my new job, where I established my own team in a new department and prepared three large buildings in one year, I got the job offer from Xella. I started there as a key project manager.
How did you become project manager of large scale products for the Czech Republic and Slovakia?
It's been a development. When I started working for Xella 8 years ago, I was responsible for a part of the Czech Republic. As a key project manager, I was looking for opportunities to apply our products. The combination of technical consulting, business skills and social contacts is a good way to succeed.
Gradually, I also got involved in internal projects, such as Customer Value Maximization, which gave me a lot of ideas on how to be more successful with customers. More and more, I came across the need for a product suitable for multi-family homes. If you want to build such houses and have a quiet life - you need Silka because of the acoustic climate in the room. And with the next step I found myself in the field of large-size products and started to introduce these technical solutions - Silka and large-size products - to the Czech and Slovak market and to our Xella team.
