What a strange country it's Italy

Next  post Wednesday September 14th

Before this post, being today the 10th anniversary of 9/11 let's honor those who died and pray for them and their families

What a strange country is Italy. You should be aware of the fact that when an Italian says we are different, (s)he is not lying or overstating. Well may be a little exceeding…

The Italian economy is really based on family business. It was only based on family business since twenty years ago, now it’s mostly built up by small family companies which do really represents the backbone of the Italian business structure.

Just to give you some figures, back to 2010:

94,7% of the all Italian registered companies were composed by less than 10 people (they have 1 to 9 workers/employees)

It means that only less than 100,000 companies out of  about 1,600,000 can rely on a team of at least 10 people.

If you dig further, you can discover that in that range, 1 to 9 employees company, about 66,6%, so 1 million companies, are just one man bands!

Now let’s ask to unavoidable questions:

1)   Why this?

2)   Which are the consequences?

Actually it could be useful to understand the reason of this situation, because that can help us to fine tune the approach to the Italian market.

Italians are individualist: each of us usually believes to have better ideas and better solutions (usually the best) and to be much smarter than anyone else. So as soon as he can, he spins off and founds his own company. I used the male pronoun because that was usually what happened till five to ten years ago, before the e-age.

A talented technician, a production manager, discovered that his ideas where good but that nobody in the company seems to care about. So he got out and found his own business taking care of production and bringing with him some clients from the old company, customers who trusted him more than the brand. Then he appointed her wife as financial director, caring accountancy, and his sons as sales directors. And a new company was born.

Nowadays the e-conomy offers much more opportunity to young people, and the Italian individualism can find even a larger ground to colonize.

Which could be the consequences of this approach? If you can figure it out please share your ideas with us, on the contrary just wait for next post!