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Danish-Polish Eryk built a unique niche as a technical service provider and IT specialist with tasks worldwide – now they are hunting for the latest talent.
First, you drive to the small town of Kollemorten, which is approximately right in the middle of Jutland.
Then you drive out of the small town again, take a narrow country road, make a sharp right turn onto a gravel road – and then you arrive at something that looks like a well-maintained country estate, surrounded by soft, green hills.
Only a stone in the driveway with a company logo showing the name “Eryk” and the silhouette of a small dog reveals that the property is actually the headquarters of an extraordinary Danish company. And nothing reveals that Eryk is actually a rather large business with a three-digit million turnover and activities in many distant parts of the world.
That was the first surprise.
The next surprise comes out on the steps and says a friendly hello. It is Maj Winther Møller, 35 years old and newly appointed CEO of Eryk.
She does not look like a typical CEO of a large technical service company. One thing is that the industry is extremely male-dominated at all levels, so female top leaders are rare in themselves. But female top leaders at 35 years old who wear a nose ring are rare, admits Maj Winther Møller. “I am known throughout the industry as ‘the one with the nose ring who is younger than most others.’ And who is not an engineer!”
Eryk is a family business, created 20 years ago by her father Jens Christian and his Polish wife Lucja Kalkstein. Maj Winther Møller has been active in the group since 2014, first as a trainee, later as a sales and marketing responsible management member.
So when she formally moves up as CEO of the entire group from July 1, it is with a great knowledge of all parts of the company – and also a great internal knowledge of herself: “I have talked my way into an industry that in some areas is still very rustic. But it has not been a hindrance, because people remember me. I stand out from the crowd a bit, and I can easily join in a macho jargon if necessary.”
Eryk’s specialty and unique niche require a little explanation and some history: When you say that Eryk is Danish, you might as well add that the slightly more correct term is “Danish-Polish-Nigerian.” The majority of the total 300 employees are from Poland, and in second place come employees from Nigeria.
The group’s largest office is located in Szczecin in Poland, where 50 have their daily function. The rest are spread around the world, often in temporary workplaces where Eryk has a large task – a current example is Novo Nordisk’s factory in Kalundborg.
The explanation goes back to the last millennium when Jens-Christian Møller, who is an engineer and MBA from Aalborg University, was director of what is today called KK Wind Solutions, a pioneer company in electrical panels for wind turbines and today owned by A.P. Møller Holding.
Even back then, it was difficult to find Danish technicians and electricians who were particularly interested in jobs with many travel days around the world to fix technical problems in connection with the installation of wind turbines. This was the starting point for Lucja and Jens-Christian, who were colleagues at KK, to choose to start their own company and base it on Polish labor.
“Back then, it was mostly about what a Polish electrician cost in salary, and whether he drank or stole,” remembers Jens-Christian Møller. But with a gigantic unemployment rate in Poland of 25 percent, the Poles as a nation were extremely willing to travel far and frequently to secure a favorable income for themselves and their families. Prejudices about Polish labor were quickly put to shame – and Eryk built up many long-term customer relationships. The specialty is that Eryk’s engineers and technicians take on the installation, assembly, or repair of large, complex technical systems on-site, where these systems are located.
An example of the tasks could be a number of defective wind turbines, which are located on a dock somewhere in the world. It is cheaper and easier to have them repaired on-site before they are transported out to sea and hoisted up to 170 meters height. Another example could be large corporations that need to have a number of production systems installed and put into operation at several different addresses – the industry can be anything from pharma to concrete production, but the common denominator is Eryk, who takes responsibility for getting the machines to run as they should.
MAJ WINTHER MØLLER
She herself has a whole series of educations, including in business studies and “performance design” from RUC. She has just completed an education as a diploma leader with top marks.
Father’s new heart project How does she feel about taking over the management of a company where the founder, who is also her own father, is still active?
“That was also asked by the examiner at my exam in June. And yes, I am the director’s daughter, and that will probably always be the case. And yes, my father is in many ways a strong patriarch, and we know that there are examples where two generations start to rival too much. But it is different here because we are not competitors. My father is my mentor, and we have a strong interest in the company continuing to be strong,” says Maj Winther Møller.
That she is not extremely worried about being able to wrest power from the patriarch is also for a very concrete reason: Jens-Christian Møller has found a new heart project to spend his time and a whole lot of travel days on. Just as he had to cultivate opportunities in Poland’s labor market 20 years ago, he now has to figure out where in the world one can find qualified and willing-to-travel technicians.
Today, the arrow points to Nigeria.
The explanation is simple: Today, the workforce is shrinking throughout Europe – including in Poland, where over 100,000 Poles leave the labor market every year. “There are simply not enough hands to handle all the tasks; we all know that we lack care assistants, nurses, and doctors. We as a company have precisely the same problem with the people we need: electrical technicians and IT people. In Poland, unemployment, due to fantastic growth and an increasing average age, has gone from 30 percent to 0 in the last 25 years,” says Eryk’s founder.
In Nigeria, he has found something similar to what got him started in Poland more than 20 years ago:
A young and well-educated workforce in the gigantic country with 220 million inhabitants – including many skilled electricians who speak good English and are highly motivated to travel far away for better incomes and better conditions than they can achieve in their home country, where corruption is high, traffic is dangerous – and unemployment over 40 percent. “In reality, there are almost no Danish companies besides Maersk and Novo – and then Eryk – that have a permanent base in Nigeria today. We have an IT remote service center that can serve customers globally – and at the same time, we have a collaboration with both the EU and Nigeria’s Ministry of Education to get some of the best students from technical schools to Europe and further educate them,” says Jens-Christian Møller.
So with her father on regular trips to West Africa, the new director can have room to set her line for leadership – she has written her diploma thesis on new leadership forms and self-managing international teams.
“It actually surprises me that there are not more female leaders in our industry because we have great potential, both as leaders and as salespeople. Many colleagues in this industry have a tendency to talk a lot about what the company can do. But value-based sales are about listening to customers’ wishes. I will probably never be the one standing out on the global sites leading people. But I am fine with being a front figure in larger gatherings and am not afraid to stand out a bit,” says Maj Winther-Møller.
