From 5,000 to 20,000 people: what Nimlas has to get right next

Human Capital’s breakfast seminar at Tändstickspalatset in Stockholm was full on Tuesday morning. Milena Sohlén introduced the speaker, Christoffer Järkeborn, CEO of Nimlas Group, and told us he was the first speaker they’ve had with no PowerPoint. He called the talk “No Bullshit Leadership” and spent most of the hour taking questions.

The numbers

When Christoffer joined Nimlas about four and a half years ago, it turned over 1.5 billion SEK and had 750 employees. Last year it was about 10 billion SEK and more than 5,000 plumbers, electricians and ventilation technicians, across roughly 150 companies and around 100 acquisitions.

The next goal is what he calls 444: four new countries, 40 billion SEK in revenue and 4 billion in profit, within five years. That is around 20,000 employees.

Six things the best companies have in common

Nimlas’s majority owner told him he wanted to build the best company in the world. So Christoffer read everything he could find about the best companies, booked lunches with the leaders he admired most, and looked for the pattern. He found six things:

1. Clear direction. Everyone should know where the company is going, even if they don’t agree. He travels to all 150 companies and says the question is always the same: where are we going?
2. A strong culture that isn’t for everyone. There is no universal culture. Decide what yours is, and hold to it.
3. Few metrics. Profitability, growth and a handful more. Everyone knows them, and they don’t change every quarter.
4. Simplicity. “Our job as leaders is to simplify, simplify, simplify.” Anyone can write 500 pages.
5. The right person in the right position at the right time. The hardest part, he said, is telling good people who got you here that the next stage needs something else.
6. Lower cost. The surprise of his research. The best companies of the last hundred years had lower costs than their competitors, and to get there you need better leadership, because you get more out of every person.

How it shows up at Nimlas

• Get out of the office. There is no real head office. He travels Monday to Thursday every week, because you can’t gather a group over email or Teams.
• Every decision within a week. Investment committee, project committee, everything. “I thought you had to choose between being very good and being fast.”
• Integration in three months. When Nimlas buys a company, it switches every business system and puts in every process within the first three months.
• Train your own leaders. Nimlas Academy trains managing directors, project leaders and lead technicians. The idea is that you can start as an apprentice and end up as CEO, and about 80 percent of recruitment is internal.
• One HR person per thousand employees. That only works because the managers take on a lot of the responsibility themselves.
• If you get tired, you get fired. Tired managers are destructive, he said, because everything a leader does and doesn’t do is leadership. If you show up tired, that’s the culture you’re showing everyone: that it’s okay to come to work tired. He was clear it wouldn’t work everywhere, but at Nimlas being a manager is a privilege, not a given.

The question I left with

One line stuck with me more than the rest. Travelling between the companies, he said, he found that people want much more information than you expect.

Now put that next to the plan. To get from 5,000 to 20,000 people in five years, Nimlas has to bring in about 15,000 new people. Many of them arrive through acquisitions that have three months to learn the Nimlas way of working. New managers have to learn their role fast, with one HR person per thousand colleagues to ask.

All of those people will have questions in their first weeks. Where is this process, who approves that, how do we price a job here. Today those questions go to the person sitting next to them, or to the manager on the road from Monday to Thursday. Every one of them is a small interruption for someone who is busy building.

That’s the problem we work on at Opmore: helping new people find answers without stopping the colleague next to them.

If you’re scaling a team and have thought about how new people learn the ropes, I’d love to hear how you do it.