The structural engineering firm celebrates an important birthday by enhancing its greatest asset: people
At first glance, SteelMedia may appear to be an ordinary multifunctional studio whose activities revolve 360 degrees around the world of steel, a pool of expertise and functionality where customers can find answers to all kinds of needs. Structural engineering, metal carpentry, steel services and signage structures: SteelMedia has succeeded in giving the sector a new shape through innovative and reliable solutions that help develop projects of the highest quality. But in addition to the ability to manage a project from feasibility study to commissioning, to guarantee efficient and proven operating standards, and to offer services with certainty of time and cost, SteelMedia has also been able to propose a unique business model for the engineering sector.
“It is not so much the product as the way in which it is conceived and realised that characterises us,” explains Salvatore Bariatti, Managing Director and Sole Shareholder of SteelMedia. “Behind every one of our successes there is a long process of enhancing human resources through the creation of a stimulating and dynamic working environment that meets the needs of employees and helps them to shape their professional and private lives in the name of well-being. Personally, during my long career as an entrepreneur, whenever I have started a new venture with a new company, I have never put the product at the centre of the development plan. It is rather the people, with their talents, their ideas, their approach, who really make the difference. I am not an engineer, I have no technical skills, I have always held roles, even important ones, in the commercial sphere, and that is why I feel the need to invest in fresh, genuine professionalism that knows how to move towards the new frontiers of innovation. In short, SteelMedia exists only thanks to the young collaborators I have brought together over the years. With the crisis of 2008, after at least two decades of fat cows for the engineering sector, we needed to start again from a new concept of enterprise, from the creation of a work-system that would make a clean break with the past and overturn the obsolete market models that had guided us up to that time. Here, in this new phase of reforming the relationship between the individual and his or her profession, the employee is no longer seen as a cost, but as a resource to be protected, trained, and enhanced. This is SteelMedia: an ecosystem where human value finds its highest expression”.
A young and reliable team, a dynamic business model that does not have fixed hours and does not oblige employees to stay in the office, access to the best technological tools for working remotely, and an internal welfare system, attentive to the well-being of employees and their families, and capable of self-financing: SteelMedia offers a business archetype that seems to go hand in hand with entrepreneurial success. “In ten years we have gone from half a million to EUR 5 million in annual turnover while maintaining the same number of employees, which corresponds to one tenth of the workforce of our first competitor,” says SteelMedia’s CEO. “We register zero outstanding debts and enjoy a very solid bank rating. Of course, our growth has always been accompanied by a proportional increase in salaries. I have always had it clear in my mind how important it is to create a happy environment, attentive to the needs of everyone: employees, suppliers and customers. If I had not understood and invested in this concept, I would feel I had failed as a man”.
‘Let my people go surfing’, wrote US mountaineer and entrepreneur Yvon Chouinard, ‘let our people go free‘. If you believe in the people you surround yourself with so much that you rely on them, you must provide for their protection and well-being, always. “When they asked the great Henry Ford to what he owed his enormous success, he replied that he spent half his life looking for the right people and the other half thanking them,” Bariatti continues. “As far as I am concerned, I have always tried to invest in projects that I knew could outlive me, that were deeply devoted to the search for the immense human value stored in new generations of talent. I, the CEO, play a marginal role, basically managing the finances and little more. It is only thanks to my guys that SteelMedia has become what it is today: a hub of free invective, a crossroads of cutting-edge ideas and skills that, through new companies born out of SteelMedia, explore the world of communications and business consulting, software houses, video making, social media, web writing (Saved srl), and even construction (Edilizia Etica srl). We can deploy the most advanced technologies, but without the contribution of human feeling we cannot innovate for real. Our professional success is first and foremost a human success, and in fact, to celebrate our first ten years together, next month we are all going to Morocco, in Marrakech, for a regenerating break at the company’s expense”.
A shake-up that goes beyond the boundaries of the engineering sector to impact the entire industry. “We must safeguard the human wealth that we are losing, we must network around the new generations,” concludes SteelMedia’s CEO. “In this company we have stripped ourselves of all alibis and started again from the simplicity of a happy environment. We veteran entrepreneurs have had our day, now it is time to step aside and let the kids play.”
To find out more about SteelMedia, visit the website https://steelmedia.it/en/
