An interview with Francesco Argirò of Bliss in Italy, by Steve Jordan.
The moving industry has always been full of interesting characters and, although some of the older generation may think those days have passed, I can assure them that they have not. Still today this industry breeds people of vision and charisma who inspire those around them. One of those is Francesco Argirò from Bliss Corporation in Italy. In this interview Francesco offers his thoughts on building a business of the future that can keep fresh and still serve its customers in a rapidly changing world.
According to Francesco, one of the keys to modern entrepreneurship is resilience. "You have to adapt to change very quickly," he explained. "In this extremely difficult environment there are so many variable factors that threaten business," citing as examples the pandemic, war and inflation and all that they have entailed. "It is very difficult to adapt and stand out in our business. Resilience is critical for a business trying to survive and succeed in the medium and long term. Resilience is the ability to never be overwhelmed by a problem, but to learn from it and become stronger."
I suggested to Francesco that resilience is all very well, but none of us can predict the future. How do we protect ourselves from a threat that we don't see coming? "We have to do our best to ask ourselves the right questions and try to mitigate the risks as much as possible," he said. "I often ask myself: what happens if...? You certainly cannot predict the future, but with the right approach you can avoid many problems and gain a significant advantage over your competitors."
Another key factor for Francesco is to keep himself informed. "Read, read and read some more. Learn about as many actual issues and modern industry trends, such as risk management, cybersecurity, environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility, energy saving, geopolitics and DE&I. Many of the future challenges will be related to these core areas." But you can't plan for everything. How do you focus on what really matters? " The key, in my opinion, is to focus on well-defined areas related to the company, both at strategic level and data analysis and monitoring, and for which we can do something concrete. Often, most of the things we worry about don't happen and we can't control them anyway, or worse, they just come from gut feelings.”
Digitisation and efficiency
One area that Francesco does focus on is the efficiency of his office. He says he has made it paperless. Certainly reducing paper helps protect the environment, every little bit helps, however the move to paperless was necessary because digitisation saves time and money, makes the system more scalable and more easily replicable, allows access to information from anywhere, reduces costs and optimizes processes.
He also recognises that the growing demand for digitisation has an impact on a company's supply chain ...
Photo: Francesco Argirò.