Let's go back to ten years ago. What did Day 1 look like at MND Energie?

We started offering energy first among the group's employees to test the new system on them. Then Day 1 approached and we still didn't know if we had everything set up right. So in the end, we thought we would launch it and see. Today, I guess you would call it a very agile approach. From the beginning we tried to make everything as easy as possible for our customers, so we were a little bit worried if our contracts were too easy, we were worried if we had left something out. But at the same time, there was a great joy and drive that we brought to it in a really very small team.

So it was a bit punk...?

I wouldn't call it that. We had a clear plan, all backed up by research and data. So it wasn't punk in that respect. But the beginning was hard. We weren't the cheapest, we relied on openness and fairness. At the same time, we didn't have an executive sales force for the first year and a half, and then we started with call centers. From the beginning, we believed in the power of the brand. But it takes time to get into the minds of people. In fact, we initially thought our offering was so great that customer numbers would grow faster. We believed we had a great brand that customers would find. But the energy industry showed us that energy was definitely not bought here to begin with, but rather sold, and people were used to that. So customers certainly didn't flock to us in the beginning. But gradually, with the changes in the market, we are getting to a situation where 60 percent of our customers are coming to us this year based on our communication. Either by calling our call centre or coming to us via the web.

Ten years ago, it was a different situation for customers. People didn't care that much about the energy supplier, they just had one. That changed with the energy crisis, didn't it?

To a large extent, yes. People had a supplier, and if he didn't do anything wrong to them, they didn't worry about it any more.

And for many, the idea of changing supplier was quite a complicated process...

To this day we still get the view that changing supplier means having to dig up their gas or electricity connection. But it's moved on enormously in that time, there's been a generational change. Today, the vast majority of the population has no problem making a change of supplier online, and we want to take advantage of that. We know this area, we have built MND sales on online solutions from the beginning, and we are therefore strengthening our competence in the digital area even further.

How has the competition changed?

Since the beginning, our main competitors have been and remain the largest companies, the so-called dominants in the industry, i.e. Innogy, ČEZ, E.ON, Pražská Plynárenská and Pražská Energetika. They have changed mainly because they used to be "molochs" with broadly set services and higher prices - there was room for us as a market challenger. Today, these suppliers not only provide a wide range of services, but they also operate a very aggressive pricing policy, and due to the complexity of the energy market, the prices of these large suppliers are often better than the small ones.We are lucky that we are definitely not small, and thanks to our strong background in our Trading, we can offer good prices in addition to our quality service and service in the long term. But starting from scratch now would probably be a lot harder than in 2014.

How has the communication of the competition changed?

It has definitely gotten stronger and better. At the beginning of our operations, the competitors' communication was, let's say, very "one-sided". Today we can see that they are getting stronger in terms of the quality of their communication and their communication teams.

The second area is the expansion of competition. Today we are competing not only with suppliers, but also with comparison service providers, for example. These so-called comparison providers now have very intensive campaigns that often go as far as to downgrade suppliers to providers of "just" a homogeneous service, where the key to their comparison is a simplified comparison by price. The comparison providers are comfortable with this, they would like people to switch between suppliers as often as possible and they will collect fat commissions again. They live by shifting customers from one supplier to another, essentially suppressing the suppliers' brand at the expense of their own.

So their goal is not customer satisfaction, but a customer who switches suppliers as often as possible. Because they don't get commissions from a satisfied customer.

I thought that the market was rather cleansed.

That is only partly true. The "Eldorado", when the market was dominated by door-to-door selling and catching customers on unreadable contract terms and tying them up with penalties, is hopefully behind us. But there are still many suppliers on the market. In this respect, the complexity and complexity of the new energy industry cannot be expected to cope with such a large number of suppliers in the long term. As I have already mentioned, the smallest ones will not, in my opinion, be able to compete with the larger ones in the long term.

What has been the most difficult period for you? What did we take from it as a company?

The most difficult period was definitely the energy crisis when we couldn't sell. In 2021, we were forced to dampen sales or even shut down completely when taking on new customers due to the huge volatility in the markets. My personal takeaway was also that nothing is mostly black and white and that when you have clear values set, you overcome even things that are very difficult. In the end, it was confirmed - and we took this as a lesson - that just like in life, luck favours the prepared in business. When the market opened up, we had well-prepared processes. From the beginning, we built our business on digital tools. Then, when the energy crisis subsided, we had a huge head start in this respect, because our customer intake after the market opening was working online, while our competitors were adopting pseudo-solutions in a hurry. As a result, we were able to win a huge number of new customers. But to set the record straight, it is of course one thing to acquire customers and another to process all the contracts and documents. I'm sure our colleagues from our call centre could tell you in detail about how challenging the work was. I send them all a big THANK YOU! They did a great job and we jumped to 200,000 customers.

Has MND Energie's approach to customers changed in any way? Have we adjusted our values in any way?

Years ago, we said we wanted to compete in a time of energy change by being as simple, clear, fair and as much as possible using information technology. We try to reflect these key factors in our strategies all the time. What makes our thinking more difficult, however, is that from our position as an unknown challenger in a market with no customers, we are now one of the largest suppliers. We are therefore considering some of our actions in the knowledge of the much greater impact on our financial performance and that of the Group as a whole. However, I personally believe that we are managing that shift to a large supplier well and that we continue to maintain our core principles and values of how we approach our customers and the market. Sure, sometimes it hasn't been and sometimes it still isn't easy.

From the beginning, we have relied on the miners and the legacy of our own mining that our company has. That's an advantage no one else can copy. Is it a concept that will continue to work?

From the beginning, with the concept of Gas First Hand, we wanted to refer to supplying directly, i.e. on simple, fair and therefore advantageous terms. This is how we have always differentiated ourselves from the competition. Now we are in the process of creating a concept for how to move forward with the role of the upstream producer. We don't want to focus too much on him, so that it's not just about the miner but about the company's values, but again we don't want to weaken his role too much. Not to "creep" into people's homes in the commercials, not to be brash, but to act more as a mentor, to differentiate himself from the competition. It's not easy to balance. We want to evoke positive emotions with our advertising. For example, in our current TV spot we say, "You can rely on home supplies." And then we show a common "pantry" at mom's or grandma's house, and that's what we believe evokes exactly those positive emotions, homeliness, tradition, heritage. But at the same time, that's where our company's strengths lie in the energy market - inventory, storage, reliability. Going forward, I see better data handling and customer segmentation as a big challenge.

What exactly does that mean?

Previously, you had a profiled target customer, to whom you then tailored marketing campaigns. Today, that doesn't work that way across the board anymore, you need to have a lot more data and information and create different groups. We have two projects in the pipeline in this area and we want to launch them next year. It's more complicated, but it will be more effective. You can't go to the market today with a ploughshare and say you're going to hit everybody somehow. You have to target the exact needs of potential customers and offer them what is profitable for them.

What do you anticipate for the next decade?

Certainly full of change, with the constant dynamics of the ratios becoming more the norm than ever before. But somehow we will surely learn to just "live with it". At the same time, I expect that our values of humanity, transparency and fairness will continue to play a major role with our customers, and thus in the marketplace, and that we will continue to grow stronger as a company as a result.

We have a huge advantage over other players in the market. We not only have clear values, but also the backing of the strong background and roots of the entire MND Group, which is simply unique.

Finally - if you could give any advice to your former marketing self, what would it be?

I guess before advice, I would start by saying to myself: "Jenda, this is going to be great and it's going to be worth it!" Prior to joining MND, I worked in FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), was part of four global coffee and tea sales teams across Europe and was also Sara Lee's marketing director for the local market. When I joined MND, I wasn't at all sure if energy was the area for me. I did a market analysis and it seemed like a sea of sameness - everyone was just throwing their prices around, door-to-door sales people were operating and people were bitching about it. At the interview I met Honza Sterba, now Allwyn's marketing director, and I immediately recognised that he was an excellent marketing expert and a very inspirational person with whom I would have the scope to change the whole market. That convinced me, you don't get a chance like that just like that.

We then put a tremendous amount of work and effort into building our MND Energy with him and the entire team, and seeing how we were able to ultimately move the market towards transparency and better customer positioning makes me so happy, and I thank all of my MND and KKCG colleagues who are still fulfilling this "mission" with us today!

Interview conducted by Martin Beneš