Jan Hanuš (honzahanus.com): At Agrofert, I met an extremely tough and competitive environment. At PPF, I learned to see things differently

In this episode of the CEO na ostří nože podcast, we talk to Jan Hanuš, who has run companies in two major Czech groups with very different cultures: Andrej Babiš’s Agrofert and Petr Kellner’s PPF. He also led Mall when it was being taken over by Poland’s Allegro. Today he works on company transformations as an interim manager.

He joined Kostelecké uzeniny as roughly its eighth CEO in ten years. The company had just been through two acquisitions, started implementing SAP a month before he arrived and closed the year with a loss of CZK 320 million. The brief was clear: turn the company back to growth and profit, or it would be sold. Hanuš didn’t know the meat business and can’t stand the sight of blood, yet he managed it. He learned not to panic, to set priorities and to make decisions without delay. He describes Agrofert as combative and extremely competitive. The owner focused on the group’s weakest companies and texted them at the end of each month, a practice known inside the group as “the Eye of Sauron”. In his view, the group’s success rests on deep industry knowledge, choosing the right experts and a relentless drive that the owner passed on to his people. Work-life balance wasn’t a topic back then.

He built resilience through decisions that went against the majority. The first was removing someone from the team who seemed indispensable but wasn’t doing his job. The company didn’t stop, and Hanuš gained the credibility to make further changes. “Fog ahead doesn’t mean there’s no road,” he says.

PPF meant a completely different way of thinking. Where Agrofert focuses on scale and doing things as well as possible, PPF looks for businesses that can be done in a completely different way. Hanuš describes Petr Kellner as an inspiring leader who gave people a mandate and full trust, including room to make expensive mistakes they would learn from. He could take a presentation back one slide and change the direction of everyone’s thinking in the room.

According to Hanuš, Allegro’s acquisition of Mall showed how a clash of cultures can put a deal at risk. At the very first meeting, employees were told nobody would lose their job, which undermined their trust. Key people were incentivised to stay just one year for the integration, and most left afterwards. Decision-making at Allegro was very conservative. Amazon’s six-pager turned into 360 pages of numbers for a weekly meeting, and decisions didn’t get made. Allegro also ignored that the Czech and neighbouring markets expect fast delivery, while Polish customers mainly look for the lowest price.

What else will you learn in the podcast?

• How to turn around a loss-making company when you don’t know the industry

• How Agrofert’s culture of internal competition works

• Why resilience is the foundation of every transformation

• What Jan Hanuš looks for when he asks candidates about their failures

• How thinking at PPF differs from traditional business

• Why promises made at the start of an acquisition can hurt integration

For Jan Hanuš, a successful transformation isn’t built on grand visions or chasing numbers. It starts with staying calm, having a clear view of all the options and a clear answer to why the change is happening. As long as that reason holds, it pays to stay on course, even when the road ahead isn’t visible yet.