Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2011, as an opinion piece written before the outcome of the Nueva Rumasa case. The group’s companies later went into insolvency proceedings, and the family was investigated for fraud over promissory notes sold to investors.
These will be my last words on Nueva Rumasa, a few days or months before we learn the final outcome, and without knowing yet whether José María Ruiz-Mateos will be charged with anything, convicted or cleared of responsibility.
First of all, let me say that criticising from the stands is easy; the hard part is being good on the field. Once again, I warn all those people who don’t hesitate to call José María Ruiz-Mateos a fraudster, a scoundrel and worse that one day they may find themselves in a similar situation, provided they ever step onto the field, because from the stands life is very simple.
Nueva Rumasa set off down the road of entrepreneurship, a road many people don’t dare to take out of fear, lack of knowledge, lack of funding, lack of ambition, or whatever it may be… But JM Ruiz-Mateos lost that fear, had the know-how and sought financing in difficult times.
While Spanish companies were laying people off to save on staff costs, he hired, built new factories, tried to grow and succeeded.
Then came a situation that any business owner… I repeat, any business owner… can face. In fact, thousands of companies have gone through it during this crisis, sending thousands of people into unemployment.
The Nueva Rumasa case can teach us an invaluable lesson about the business world: while your company is riding high, everyone will praise you, bless you and, crude as it may sound, kiss your backside. They’ll knock on your door asking for work, they’ll call you “Don” (the Spanish honorific), banks will ring wanting to manage your finances, you’ll feel surrounded by people and “friends” will crawl out of the woodwork. Everyone will support you.
See also: Business ideas to beat the crisis
As soon as things start to wobble and falter, a large share of those people will be glad, others will abandon you and the rest of society will criticise you. But most importantly, NO ONE, however hard you look, will ever thank you for the years you gave them work, for choosing their products over their competitors’, or for keeping them on when it would have been easier to let them go, a very common way to cut costs.
At that point, when things turn ugly, you discover that you’re alone and that your only support is probably your family, because everyone else was there for the good times but didn’t take two seconds to abandon and criticise you in the bad ones.
I imagine many of these “professional critics” think they would have done better, but the reality is that they haven’t yet done anything in the business world, apart from working for someone else’s company (the stands).
I’m not going to say whether financing through outside capital was the right or the wrong choice. I understand that if you want to grow, you have to take on debt, and if one door refuses you, you have to look for it elsewhere. Only someone who has tried to build an empire of that kind can know. I admit that I’m not capable of doing it today, and maybe that’s why I don’t criticise.
If tomorrow JM Ruiz-Mateos loses his entire business and goes bankrupt, everyone will remember him as a washed-up swindler, but few people will remember that he was a businessman who created jobs and that thousands of families have put food on the table thanks to his trials and triumphs.
So before you fire off a cheap criticism, I’m going to ask you something… Hire 10,000 people and create 100 companies. When you come out of that entrepreneurial battle victorious, I invite you to tell us how you did it.
In the meantime, you can join the national lynching that is being carried out against this family.
I know this article is less commercial than the ones about the Nueva Rumasa disaster, but my principles won’t let me criticise someone who stepped onto the field and lost, because the next one to lose could be me or any other business owner. One thing is clear: the only one who won’t lose is the one who doesn’t play for fear of something similar happening to them.
PS: “It’s easy to hold out your hand to collect a paycheck. The hard part is generating the resources to pay those paychecks.”
Further reading
Featured image: Art y Letras Hispanas, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
