Going East to tame Germany's 'Wild West'

Looking back now, it was crazy. I was a naive young student of Shakespeare getting mixed up in Germany's own version of the wild west.

Buccaneering industrialists and entrepreneurs from the west were setting out to tame a virgin land in the east. It was lawless to the extent that the laws and structures of the German Democratic Republic were crumbling and the new ones of the Federal Republic had yet to take hold.

I got involved quite casually, but not unintentionally. They were exciting and uplifting times for young Germans, and I was fired up by the prospect of playing a role in German reunification. Joining the wagon train heading east was an opportunity to do just that.

Berlin 1990, and I needed a summer job to earn some money. An enterprising friend, who unlike me was experienced in industry, had just bought a GDR business for one deutschmark and needed someone to be his personal assistant for a few months. That turned out to be me, and I'm still there 25 years later.

Cradle-to-grave care

What my friend Hubert had bought was a firm called Elmet that made industrial electrical controls in Hettstedt near Magdeburg, in what is now the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It had debts of 4 million deutschmarks to the GDR central bank and employed 470 people.

Or rather, 470 people were nominally employed. GDR businesses were as much community enterprises as business enterprises, so it also supported many others in various ways. The factory provided everything for its employees and their dependants - health, childcare, housing, the football club…

And because unemployment was not allowed in the GDR, some people who seemed to have no economic function (even prisoners) were kept on the books.

By the time of my first visit to Hettstedt in summer 1991, we were down to 120 employees. All the talented ones, those with get-up-and-go, had got up and gone west. We were left with the lemons.

The management team, which we inherited, had also been firing people. As there was no longer a ban on unemployment, they seized the opportunity to get rid of those they saw as dangerous or subversive in GDR terms - or who simply asked awkward questions.

The employees stole like crazy, mainly small tools and building materials. And there was bribery. When managers ordered supplies from a contractor, they always got something on the side - not cash, because cash didn't buy you much in the GDR, but goods, such as new window frames for the house.

Not particularly welcome

To be honest, Hubert and I were not comfortable visiting Hettstedt in those early years. People were worried about the future, so there was tension, even hostility. There was nowhere suitable to stay and the food wasn't good. We lost count of how many times our car phones - those big things the size of a brick - were stolen.

But what kept driving us on was that, unlike many GDR businesses, Elmet still had potential for profit. Its machinery may have been 15-20 years behind the west, but it was still capable of producing goods that were in demand by some large and steady customers, principally AEG and Doepke. Elmet also supplied EAW, a large enterprise that had big contracts in Russia.

But we knew we had to develop new products to survive and prosper. Our business plan was to establish our own line of controls for manufacturing processes, making more of the products ourselves and selling them in new markets.

Like any business, we suffered setbacks in the subsequent years (including that rite of passage of all businesses - the bank calling in its loans). The collapse of the Russian economy in 1994 did us some damage.

And then there was Alexander Lukashenko. We had a small joint venture with the power utility in the Belarus capital, Minsk, and in 1994, soon after Lukashenko was first elected president, we received a visit from his personal emissary. He brought an offer that we were not supposed to refuse: hand over 50,000 US dollars or the joint venture would be ended.

It was only a small venture and we decided we could afford to lose it. So we declined the emissary's kind offer and never heard from Lukashenko or our partners in Minsk again.

Turning the corner

We survived and even made money. Our development team came up with a range of controls for electricity sub-stations, which neatly coincided with the refurbishment of eastern Germany's power transmission and distribution network.

Sub-station controls became our main line of business, and we built up sales in western Germany, the Middle East and North Africa. In 2007, we cracked the US market, and after that, the world started to take notice. Last year, SecuControl, as the business is now called, had a turnover of 4.5 million euros, of which more than 60 percent was exports.

I wouldn't have missed the last 25 years for anything. Hubert and I saved a business and built it into a success. Yes, we only employ 50 people nowadays, but it's the right number for the size of the business.

And yes, I do feel I have played a role in reuniting Germany. The east in 1990 seemed a more authentic Germany, a Germany from an earlier age. German history now makes sense to me, and I find it satisfying and enriching.

And those GDR debts? We're scheduled to finish paying them off in 2018.