The European AI unicorn run by a baker’s son—he learnt the fundamentals of business watching his father make bread rolls

Baking is a tough business. Every morning from 6am customers want a tasty product to start their day. Margins are small and competition intense (lots of people can make a mediocre bread roll). Demand is choppy but predictable—the morning rush, the lunchtime spike, the home-time commute. Be ill-prepared for Christmas and face the danger of fumbling your most profitable time of the year. 

Bastian Nominacher, co-founder of European AI unicorn, Celonis, comes from a family of bakers from Munich, Germany. A computer-gaming enthusiast, he would help his father use new digital technologies to run the five-generation business more efficiently. 

“I mostly helped on point of sale,” Nominacher told me. “In baking, you have a lot of demand spikes. The highest is at Christmas, because everyone buys all the stuff, and you never want to be short.” 

“We collected the data, so we really knew. Because the margin is not very high. You cannot just say: ‘Hey, let’s make 10,000 rolls’. Because if you throw away 2,000, first of all it’s a pity because it’s good food. But it also ruins your margin. So, we took the data, and we were really good and accurate and we could understand the demand patterns. We had a very low scrap rate.” 

3Celonis rank on Fortune Future 50

In the 1980s, Warren Buffett said that the key to running a successful business was not the moonshot or the launch of the remarkable new product. Instead, success came from doing the basics very well and then finding simple efficiencies along the way.  

For many Fortune 500 companies, the Sage of Omaha’s advice is well taken.........

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