Carlota Pi Amorós is a young mother with three children who recently co-founded Holaluz (pronounced “Oh-la-LOOSE”), a Spanish electric company that provides “100% green” electricity (that’s its motto), and stands out for having dared to challenge the giant companies of the power sector with competitive pricing and transparency in its business practices.
As executive president of a company that already has 186 employees and is growing at a rate of 50 clients per day, Pi Amorós also has a family waiting for her when she gets home. When it comes to how she juggles it all, she says she doesn’t have any magical recipes, but that she simply takes a very practical approach. In a recent presentation at the IESE business school’s Barcelona (Spain) campus, at the Business Women Conference, Pi Amorós shared her tricks and guiding principles before an audience of the 500 executives and businesswomen.
Carlota’s 10 tips:
1. Work in a company with values, and take care of those values. Pi Amorós values are:
– Always believe that your goals are attainable.
– Grow as a team.
– People come first.
– Enjoy your work.
And she added, “If it weren’t for my mother, perhaps these values wouldn’t be present in my company.”
2. Make your company 100 percent flexible. Pi Amorós believes that “flexibility is a tool that will serve us in the face of competition.”
3. Help each person to be responsible. “It’s essential to work with people who know how to use their freedom,” said Pi Amorós.
4. Communicate. “Every two weeks, we send around an internal newsletter. This way, nobody has to find out about things from outside sources.”
5. Get the family involved. “We organize summer camps for the children of our employees.”
6. Aim high. “We want to be the best company in the world. That’s why our company is 100% green, and pays attention to people.”
7. Don’t waste people’s time. “When we’re in meetings, you can leave the meeting if it isn’t helping you and you have other work to do.”
8. Never eat alone. Carlota takes advantage of lunch time to get to know the people in her company, and to have conversations with them.
9. Take advantage of opportunities. “The same applies to when you’re in the elevator: you have to take advantage of the chance to get to know the people who’re there with you. It doesn’t cost you anything time-wise.”
10. Don’t neglect your family. “I leave work in the afternoon at a reasonable time, and then go pick up my kids at school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. For the other days, I make arrangements with their grandmother.”
It’s thanks to this person-centered, flexible, practical, and family-oriented approach that Pi Amorós is able to successfully combine being a mother with being a successful businesswoman. It’s a work model that would be a boon both for society, which would benefit from companies paying more attention to their social and ecological responsibilities, and for business executives and employees, who, with a more balanced approach to work and family, would be happier and more productive.
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