THE COMPANY IS LIKE A BIG FAMILY Bircan Atılgan is Vice Chairman of Kastas Sealing Technologies, headquartered in Izmir, Turkey. In our lounge, he told us why he believes in shared responsibilities, especially in a family business. In addition, he explained what the long-term strategy of Kastas looked like and how it comes all together, today. Mr. Atılgan, please introduce yourself. My Name is Bircan Atılgan and I am Vice Chairman and Executive Board Member of Kastas Sealing Technologies. I studied Economics at the Sabanci University in Istanbul. From my childhood on, I was involved in the family business. After finishing university in 2008, I started working with our sales branch in Istanbul, which is the largest Kastas branch in Turkey. During that time, I gained a lot of hands-on-experience, especially when it comes to application cases of our seals. In 2010, I joined the headquarter in Izmir and since then, I am mainly focussed on business development, sales and marketing, digital transformation and general management tasks. MENSCHEN UND MÄRKTE Kastas is a family owned business. What are the advantages of a family owned business, in your opinion? What are the disadvantages? There are definitely more advantages than disadvantages. The biggest advantage, from my point of view, is the fact that the company is always run accordingly to the family‘s vision and targets which, in the case of Kastas, are growth and continuous development of the company. We are not concerned about short-term success or optimizing our share prices on the stock market. We can solely focus on our goal, which is the healthy growth of our business and What was your favourite project at Kastas? One great project was the planning and building of our new headquarter. However, this project belonged to an customer satisfaction. One of the challenges that comes with continuous growth is successfully taking the leap from a smaller family-centric company structure to a corporate structure with different management levels and responsibilities. This is a challenge that every bigger family-run business faces at one point in time: you can‘t do everything yourself. You have to delegate the decision-making and responsibility for the sustainability of the company. even bigger undertaking, which is the Kastas long term growth strategy, that we implemented in the last decade. 10 O+P Fluidtechnik 3/2020
Let’s make industry work better Bircan Atılgan During this time, we made many investments in R&D, into our production capacities, into logistics, into IT, into organization and in the end into the new plant. All of that contributed to our goal of transforming Kastas Sealing Technologies from a medium-sized company producing seals to a big and efficient company with innovative R&D, a strong global brand and excellent customer service. We invested in every corner of the organization to become what we are today: a successful global player who supplies business-leading OEMs! I really enjoyed being a part of that process. What story defines the Kastas spirit the best? The company is like a big family. We try to do our best for our employees so that they feel comfortable and appreciated. And vice versa, our employees are happy to work here and feel that they are a part of this family as this short story proves: When we moved from the old plant to the new facilities we did not want that this had an impact on our daily business. We did not send out any warnings to customers. We wanted to make the last shipments from the old plant on Friday afternoon and be back in business on Monday morning in the new location. Thanks to our employees we managed to be successful. On the weekend, everybody came together and helped moving. The office workers moved their stuff themselves and did not wait for the hauling company. On Sunday afternoon everything was ready, we had a huge party at the new plant, and on Monday, production continued as if nothing had happened. I am very proud and thankful for having such great employees. www.kastas.com Pneumatik Filtration Hydraulikleitungen Verbindungstechnik Ihre ERIKS-Standorte beraten Sie gern. www.eriks.de/standorte pm-hydraulik@eriks.de www.eriks.de | shop.eriks.de
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