Juan Manuel González Serna, chairman of Grupo Siro, at ESADE: ‘Our strategy is to grow our client’s business’
‘Our strategy is to grow our client’s business. It is a unique model in Spain that makes us more competitive and efficient’, said, Juan Manuel González Serna, chairman of Grupo Siro, speaking at the most recent session of the ESADE-Deloitte ‘Family Businesses of the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities’ lecture series. He was explaining the secret of his company’s success, 90% of whose products are sold by Mercadona under the Hacendado brand. ‘Every day’, he continued, ‘more than two and a half million people judge us on its shelves, when they bring our product home and decide whether or not they will continue to be our customers the next time they go shopping.’
Rigorous standards for products are a constant for the Grupo Siro chairman: ‘Mercadona chooses us because we make better, cheaper products, not to skimp on quality, but to cut costs. We seek maximum efficiency.’ As a result, ‘today Grupo Siro produces between 30% and 40% of the breakfast cereals and biscuits eaten in Spain’ and ‘is the largest consumer of wheat flour purchased in the country’. ‘80% of our purchases are flour’, he specified.
A healthful, sustainable agri-food chain
Always in search of greater efficiency, Grupo Siro has created a sustainable agri-food chain, growing its own wheat, especially in the region of Castilla-León, and promoting the development of local communities. ‘We work with precision agriculture. We use drones and tools connected to our expense systems to improve performance and, most importantly, to convey all the knowledge we extract from that to the farmers.’ ‘We thus achieve a more satisfied society and more efficient products’, he added.
This challenge is compounded by that of sustainability. ‘Another major challenge for our company is waste recovery and the circular economy. To this end, we work with the company Tuero, which reuses all the surplus and makes many of our plants 100% sustainable’, González Serna added.
Grupo Siro’s social commitment also extends to the area of promoting employment amongst people with disabilities, an activity it has been carrying out for many years and for which it was recognised last December by the United Nations, which named it, together with ILUNION, the ‘Best Company for Workers with Disabilities’. ‘It is one of our hallmarks’, the group’s chairman said. ‘Some 16% of our employees are people with disabilities.’
Succession with values
The ‘destiny’ to which González Serna referred several times during his talk is the succession of the current family business. He and his wife, Lucía Urbán López, who co-founded the group, plan to transfer ownership of the company to the Grupo Siro Foundation. ‘Our business model has to endure, go beyond us, transcend. We took this decision to ensure that what happened when we took over the company from my grandparents does not happen again.’ ‘Failures teach you how to do things better; you learn a lot less from success than from mistakes’, González Serna explained, acknowledging that the only successful precedent for this model is Mapfre, which ‘has a brilliant management model with admirable corporate governance’.
The event also featured remarks by Fernando Ruiz, chairman of Deloitte, Pedro Navarro, deputy executive chairman of the ESADE Foundation, and Alberto Gimeno, an associate professor at ESADE.
