Woman on the go

It's not easy to get Andrea B. Roch on the phone. But in 2015, the Business4you founder emphasizes, she wants to be a little more inside the agency instead of outside with the customers. Personal cultivation of customer relationships is her passion. When it comes to administration, finances and HR, on the other hand, Roch relies on her co-owner Patricia Bianco. The two have had a clear division of roles since business4you was founded in 2003. Roch is the face, Bianco has her back. Bianco is the structured one, she takes care of the administrative processes. Networking is the playing field of Roch, the extroverted strategist. Marketing and sales are in the Biel native's blood, and her memories of her first steps go back a long way. As a 12-year-old, for example, she bought a mountain of cassettes in Bangkok for 3 francs apiece and sold them on to her Swiss classmates for 8 francs. One can well imagine that at 12, one would have wanted the cassettes Andrea B. Roch sells in the schoolyard. She has a winning assertiveness, a confident friendliness. The cassette import was supported by Roch's father, who advanced the start-up capital. In return, he demanded a 50 percent share of the profits, which he wisely set aside for the guarantee. Because the quality of some cassettes was so poor that the buyers demanded their money back. She learned to understand these relationships through play and made mistakes through play, Roch says. Her parents' trust was always there, she says. After school, Roch completed an apprenticeship at a travel agency in Bern. Early on, at the age of 21, she was able to take over responsibility for the business travel department by a lucky coincidence. This contributed significantly to her decision to study business administration as a second course of education. Roch joined the Swatch Group Travel Team in Biel, her home town, and at the same time began training as a business economist at the HWV. Then she was poached by Swisscom. Patricia Bianco, her current business partner, brought her into the team at the telecom provider. Roch comes from an SME family. Her father ran a medium-sized logistics company at Zurich Airport. He often talked about it at home, which influenced her. The fact that she became an entrepreneur herself, however, is due to a fortunate and unfortunate coincidence. At 28, Roch was unexpectedly let go by Swisscom. Originally, she was to have transferred the telecom giant's service technology into a franchising system. This had to do with marketing, a direction in which Roch wanted to develop. After three months, however, the project was halted and the freshly graduated business economist was pulled away into an internal reorganization project. "We had to crisscross Switzerland and release employees. We confirmed every prejudice against unsympathetic consultants. We made budget cuts indiscriminately. I missed being able to inspire people." At the time, Roch says, she had already recorded the idea of business4you. But she didn't know she'd have much time to flesh it out soon after.

Termination as an opportunity

Ultimately, the rationalization did not stop at Roch's own team. She belonged to the part that was no longer needed. Roch, used to things always going uphill since her apprenticeship, found herself with a bruised ego. "You don't immediately realize in those moments that they hold the greatest opportunities. Being laid off forced me to take stock of where I was and ask myself where I wanted to go." It took Roch about a month to do that. "I think quickly in terms of solutions."

Not a lone fighter

Patricia Bianco was released at the same time. In the summer of 2003, during their vacation together in Calabria at the home of Bianco's parents, Roch let her in on the plans for their own agency: Bianco was to be part of it. The girlfriend slept on it and promised her support the next day at breakfast. She wasn't at all surprised that Roch wanted to start her own company, Bianco says. "But I wouldn't have taken this step alone," Roch admits. She is not a lone fighter. Above all, administrative skills are not her strong point. But she has boundless energy. She is "always on the go," is how her apprentices describe the Business4you boss: "She is often out of the office, but when she is there, you notice it immediately. "Even as an apprentice and in school, I was like that," Roch says with a laugh: "I could never sit still. I always had a little more energy than the others. Sometimes so much that I run straight into a wall - and only see afterwards that there was a door next to it."

Web services from Vietnam

Business4you has grown continuously. The agency currently has 54 employees. From the very beginning, Roch and Bianco aimed for the necessary size to be able to offer everything from a single source. "We are clearly positioned as an SME agency, and an SME does not want to have several contact persons for the area of marketing communication. " For Roch, the only option for this was usually an in-house solution. For example, the company's own Communication Center came into being because it was noticed that the original marketing idea often did not reach the customer's sales team in a consistent manner, explains the Business4you owner. With the Communication Center under the roof of the agency office, she ensures the necessary proximity to the marketing team. Since the end of 2014, business4you has also been operating another Swiss location in Zurich. "We have a relatively large number of customers in Zurich. And you can't build trust with people if you always have a screen or a phone in between. The road was an obstacle in that regard." 2015 is now the year of deliberate stabilization for the agency. Challenge enough for Roch? "Yes. I have to learn to be the boss of a company of this size. I'm not at that point yet. On the one hand, I have to let go. On the other hand, I have to ensure our most important value - delighting customers - internally." In Asia - the region of the world to which she has "lost her heart" - Roch now sources web services rather than cassettes. Five years ago, the Biel native set up a second online marketing team with 10 employees in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is regularly on site. "The cultural exchange is good for us. It pulsates differently than here." So it's a relationship that has stuck. Swisscom hasn't completely disappeared from Roch's life either. It is now one of Business4you's customers. After our conversation, Roch has a meeting at her former employer, she mentions in passing. Business4you, she says, was the only agency that could offer customer printing, communication center and web store development under one roof and thus meet the requirements. This should be a nice confirmation for Andrea B. Roch that she is on the right track with the strategic orientation of business4you.

Simone Isliker