Like all anniversaries at Franke, Günter Fischer's 25 years of service with the company were duly celebrated in 2004.
As part of a diversification strategy, Franke also focussed on expanding its sales network from the 1970s onwards. A task that Günter Fischer was responsible for with great success for more than four decades.
When the young business economist came to Franke for a job interview in 1979, he initially drove past the then still comparatively small company building three times. He was hired by the boss Egon Franke himself. He would strengthen the small sales team, which was still being established. Just three employees looked after the three national and three international offices in Switzerland, Spain and Sweden.
His first workstation consisted of a side table in the purchasing department, housed in Erich Franke's former home. Space was so tight that the former bathroom was converted into an office. A board was placed over the bathtub and the copier was placed on top. Günter Fischer's tasks included the strategic expansion of the sales network with additional national and international offices. In Günter Fischer's early days, there were good opportunities, especially in the precision mechanics division, where he was able to win numerous customers for positioning units for neutron spectrometers.
In 1990, Günter Fischer was granted power of attorney and became part of the management team. He experienced the introduction of PCs into everyday working life first hand, as well as the strong growth of the company. When he retired in 2021, the company had 32 offices worldwide and turnover had increased more than tenfold since he joined. He saw two main reasons for this success: Franke had remained flexible enough to react to special customer requests quickly, unbureaucratically and in a solution-orientated manner. "If there's an urgent matter, we can pick up the phone and sit down together within five minutes. As a medium-sized company, we are naturally much faster and more determined than the big players." And then there was the excellent working atmosphere. This included having a sympathetic ear for employees' concerns as well as the regular company and departmental parties and the pride of being part of a functioning, rock-solid company. For Günter Fischer, this close-knit working atmosphere was an important factor "that characterises a company in the long term". However, he himself was only able to celebrate his farewell in March 2021 with a small number of people due to the coronavirus pandemic. //