Carmelo Giuliana: Entrepreneurship in Spain with Hola Patatas

At the age of 15, Carmelo Giuliana was already working in weddings, and as soon as he left school he became independent.

More than twenty years of entrepreneurship and management later, his dream of opening a chip shop abroad came true and took him to Spain: Hola Patatas was born.  
It is not Canada that he talks about in the interview but Spain, closer to Belgium where he still keeps the establishment "Les 2 Haines" in La Louvière.

Carmelo created and managed establishments, built up teams, learned to work with very different personalities until the day he finally brought Belgian fries to life abroad.
Today it is in Spain, in Quesada, that he continues this story with Hola Patatas.

But "behind the fries", his story is above all a way of entrepreneurship, of managing people, of working as a family too (The interview with his wife Rosa will follow soon). 

Carmelo talks about his employees as people before talking about staff, he explains why we don't manage everyone in the same way, why the context matters and why, in the HORECA business, the state of mind of the person who works also ends up reaching the customer. This is a management experience built up year after year in contact with his teams.

This episode does not tell us that diplomas are useless, that would be much too simple, it rather reminds us that there is not only one way to learn, undertake, lead teams and finally carry out a project that we have been carrying out for a long time.

And when Michel Godart asks Carmelo what the teenager he was would think of the man he has become, a few words are enough.
The rest deserves to be heard.

Podcast produced by The Podcast Factory Org asbl-vzw.
Episode recorded at transforma bxl, in Brussels, coworking, a place of innovation and experimentation with 3 ecological labels.

Episode available with full transcript and translations (subtitles on YouTube @thepodcastfactoryorg).
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