In this interview, OEGE Managing Director Özcan Gölyeri provides insights into the lessons he has learned from 23 years as an entrepreneur.

What three tips would you give to other founders?

1. Maintain continuity: Always stay on the ball and don’t give up. There are always people who want to scare you about the possible risks. Believe in yourself and don’t let yourself be unsettled, because there will always be someone who doesn’t like your idea.
2. Seeking allies: In the beginning, I needed a 5000 DM overdraft and went from bank to bank. None of the banks wanted to take the risk because we were still so new on the market. Here our insurance agency Meister helped me out and put in a good word with the Sparkasse. As a result, the Sparkasse Dortmund took the risk and both companies are still on our side today. I will remain forever connected to the contact persons I have there.
3. Handing over responsibility: In the beginning, it was really hard for me to hand over responsibility. I thought that the more tasks I handed over, the more would go down the drain. But then I learned to trust and hand over areas of responsibility to the employees and realized that things were still going well.

What was your biggest challenge?

In 2004, our largest supplier adjusted its prices, which then amounted to an existential crisis for us and I was forced to lay off employees. I put this off for a very long time, so that we almost went bankrupt. Only when the step was taken did things start to look up again. Since then, we’ve tried to position ourselves very broadly in terms of our suppliers.

Then, more than ten years later, we had an even bigger crisis. Because we first started as a retail company and Amazon was our main channel, a certain dependency had also formed here. When this channel was closed, things didn’t look good at first. Actually, I would have had to lay off employees, but since we all had a lot of time on our hands for the time being, we were able to build up wholesale and also set our new focus here. In retrospect, it was the best thing that could have happened, because the wholesale business quickly got off to a good start and I didn’t have to lay off any employees.

What differentiates OEGE from other competitors?

We are very family-oriented and employees can develop freely. Someone who wants to develop has many opportunities to try out different things.

Where do you see OEGE in five years?

I’ve never made plans for the future, and so far that hasn’t proved to be a negative thing. We are always very fast and agile as a company when we perceive changes, and it is perhaps also an advantage that we don’t have a prefabricated plan that we then stubbornly stick to. Things change so quickly in some cases and I don’t want to limit myself with long-term plans.