Kvido Štěpánek is one of the richest Czechs, owning the company Isolit-Bravo, which supplies plastic parts to the automotive industry and manufactures kitchen appliances and whose annual turnover exceeds one billion crowns. However, Štěpánek remains a modest person who takes care of the development of his native region, supports charitable projects and helps disabled families.
“I’m most impressed with stories about children, they make up the majority we help. We support about 200 to 250 families with disabled children a year, each giving 20,000 crowns,” says Kvido Štěpánek in the podcast For the First Time, where in addition to his charitable activities he described the beginning and developing your business.
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After completing his studies in 1981, he began working as a designer of single-purpose machines at the OEZ Letohrad plant, which was part of the Isolit-Bravo company. Then came November 1989, the whole of Czechoslovakia began to change and national companies had to undergo a change until then. “Isolith was looking for a new director, but no one wanted to do it, only the old director, a communist, signed up,” he describes the beginnings of the rebirth.
In addition, his colleagues at the time were afraid that the old director might return to the old order, so they began to persuade Štěpánek to apply for a new head of the company.
In the end, he was the only one who could stand up to the old communist and run for director. “I understood it as my duty. And when it was just me and the old communist, I had to win. This made me the first post-revolutionary director of the race.”
But he soon found out that the company would have to carry out privatization. “In the first round of the public competition, no one applied, then people in white and black Mercedes started to come to us and the employees got scared. It is said whether I am doing something or it will turn out badly,” Štěpánek describes the circumstances why he finally decided to participate in the public competition. .
However, after the successful transformation of the national company into a private company, other problems began to emerge. Kvido Štěpánek believed that the employees would be as enthusiastic about the new times as he was, but they were not. At the same time, the economy at the time was not in very good shape and many companies were struggling with insolvency.
In the next part of the podcast For the First Time, Kvido Štěpánek told how he managed to overcome the difficult 1990s, what product helped him get enough funds to invest in production, why he does not currently apply for subsidies and also where he wanted to help those in need.
Previous podcast episodes are available for the first time on our website in the Podcasts section and also in mobile applications Spotify a Apple Podcasts.
