Kateřina Beránková (Awec Group): How a girl from Fiji became a leader in the engineering industry
Kateřina Beránková explains how she built a supplier to Audi, BMW and Porsche, why she seeks partners rather than a successor and how she handles costly mistakes.
In this episode of the CEO na ostří nože podcast, we talk to Kateřina Beránková, founder and owner of Awec Group. The group, with revenues in the hundreds of millions of crowns, includes engineering companies supplying Audi, BMW, Porsche and Bentley, as well as service, real estate and hospitality businesses. Beránková studied at a faculty of arts, not management or engineering, and built the company on personal relationships. The values that connect the whole group are teamwork, openness and friendliness.
She started in 2008, when many companies were going bankrupt after the financial crisis. The company earned the trust of automotive customers through reliability. For two years in a row, it didn’t miss a single delivery, and parts sometimes even travelled by taxi to arrive on time. As a result, customers trusted it with ever larger orders. For some, it was able to cover their entire demand, which is unusual in automotive, where risk is usually spread across several suppliers.
She also talks openly about what didn’t work. In the start-up phase, she was comfortable as a crisis manager who leads in an agile way and decides quickly. In her own words, she isn’t suited to the stable phase of a company, when people need to be patiently brought into processes. When the company was generating around half a billion crowns and wanted to move towards a billion, she tried at least three times to find a successor. Managers from the service sector had soft skills, but the team didn’t accept them because they weren’t from manufacturing. People from manufacturing, on the other hand, lacked soft skills. Splitting her role among three people didn’t work either at a time when electromobility demanded quick reactions. In the end, she took back control and founded the parent company Awec Group, where she feels stronger in the role of visionary and leader. For new projects, she now looks for partners rather than successors and is willing to offer them up to a 50% stake.
Working at Awec Group is, in her words, above all a demanding school. People quickly get a lot of responsibility, whether they work at reception, in logistics or in sales, and are expected to be independent. She describes the company as “the opposite of a corporation”. She knows that her impatience and fast pace can be tough on more analytical colleagues. That’s why she relies on close collaborators who give her feedback and know how to “translate” her instructions.
Mistakes are a strong theme. In an industry where a single faulty part found during inspection at Porsche can stop a production line and cost millions, zero defects is a necessity. Even so, Beránková says people must be allowed and forgiven mistakes, because that’s how they learn responsibility. But there is a limit: “Three strikes and you’re out.”
What else will you learn in the podcast?
How to combine a friendly company culture with zero defects in automotive
Why the founder didn’t manage to find a successor, even on the third attempt
Why a company needs different types of leaders at different stages
How reliable deliveries helped the company grow after the 2008 crisis
What “the opposite of a corporation” means for employee responsibility
Where to draw the line between forgiving a mistake and saying “enough”
Kateřina Beránková’s story shows that a founder doesn’t have to be good at everything. What matters is recognising what stage the company is in and what kind of leadership it needs, and being able to admit when it’s time to hand over control. A culture built on trust and responsibility can then work even in an industry that doesn’t forgive mistakes.