From electrician's assistant to the success of a company with more than 70 employees: the challenge of starting a business

Jorge Sanvitale is 56 years old and entered the electricity business almost by chance when he was 16. He was studying night secondary school at a technical school when an acquaintance recommended him as electrician's helper.

Ten years later, he opened his first business in a room in his parents' house. In March, he will celebrate three decades at the helm of Mehcco, a company with 70 permanent employees, more than 100 contractors and expansion projections in Latin America.

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The culture of work and learning from “trial and error”: the keys to its beginnings

The surname Sanvitale is not of a business tradition. His dad < /b>He was the head of Mechanics in the Maintenance area of ​​a textile industry. When the factory went bankrupt, with the compensation he opened a store in a store opposite the house. By the time Jorge was born his father was already a storekeeper .

Her mother, who had studied dressmaking, worked in clothing factories until they opened the store and also abandoned the textile business to dedicate herself to the family business.

“I was not born into a business family. I've learned what we've done up to now because I saw it from the rest, studying, reading and hitting the wall. The culture of work comes from the family, I learned the rest by trial and error”, Jorge Sanvitale told TN when he recalled his first steps in the electricity business.

Step by step, how is the challenge of starting a business in Argentina

When he started in his parents' room, Jorge never thought about the dimension his business would take. In his early days as an electrician's helper he knew little of practical matters. He was barely 16 years old and had taken some theoretical subjects, but had never brought that knowledge to the real world. “I didn't know how to put what I was learning into practice,” she admitted.

Two years later the Compulsory Military Service arrived and by the time he returned to his parents' house he was studying at the Faculty of Engineering and was dedicated to assembling light fixtures in a factory and electrical and machine maintenance. It was when a friend tempted him to enter the electrical installation business.

The first work was for a laundry room. From that moment on, the business grew "by word of mouth", but the partnership did not last long and that was when he decided to continue his journey on his own. “That's where Mehcco was born, I gave him his first and last name in 1992; He turns 30 in March”, he recalled, proud of the time that has elapsed.

The company offered electrical installation service from a room in his parents' house. The phone was shared between the company and the family, who alternated tasks to help him and keep the store running.

A year later, in 1993, he got married and, along with moving home, he took the company to the room that years later would be for his son. She needed two more years until she was able to rent a garage of no more than 30 square meters, which was “Mehcco's first real building”, as she likes to remember. There he had his office, the warehouse, the parking lot for the truck, and all his dreams. “Having your own space was a serious thing,” she recounted, almost wistfully.

“Any entrepreneur has ups and downs”

For Sanvitale, starting a business in Argentina “has always been an up and down”. Financial problems outside the company hit him at the start of his company.

“When the banks began to merge, the one I worked with kept our checking account and returned it three years later. We spent almost a year living on my wife's salary, and with the money that came in from the jobs we did, we had to pay the suppliers to start again, ”she explained.

“Any entrepreneur has ups and downs”, he summarizes.

The road began to clear up and in 1997 he was able to buy Mehcco's first physical space, a 200-square-meter shed and almost 60 square meters of office space, in the Buenos Aires town of San Martín. “ We were in paradise ,” he described.

And with the turn of the decade and century came good news. He opened up to a field that until then was unknown to him. The world of retailing gave him the opportunity to do electrical installations in several supermarket branches and large commercial stores.

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Today, this is one of the fundamental legs of the company. They do the work that an electrician can do, but on a larger scale and with great specialization: corporate office buildings, industries, retailing (supermarkets, department stores) and health (clinics, sanatoriums and laboratories).

From one room to several diversified floors

In 2005 he bought the shed next to the first one he had and instead of adding another 300 square meters he decided to rent it. But when in 2010 he entered the field of assembling electrical panels, the municipality considered that it was a manufacturing activity and told him that it was not allowed to do so there. It was when he moved it to an industrial zone within the same party, to a space of almost 700 square meters.

“In that store we opened a new part of the business, which is the assembly of electrical panels and until then we bought them from a factory,” he recalled.

In 2015 the place began to outgrow them and added another 200-square-meter store, after qualifying for a loan, and in 2021 bought a warehouse adjoining, which will allow it to be expanded to another 2,500 or 3,000 square meters.

In the 200-square-meter property that he previously rented, he set up a new company name, Qelectric, for the distribution of electrical materials.

“Every five years we had great movements, but in the meantime it went up and down”, that is, for Sanvitale, undertaking in Argentina.

Today, they are dedicated to the distribution of electrical materials, large-scale electrical installations, assembly of electrical panels; engineering contributions for wind farms and installation of chargers for electric cars in office buildings and concessionaires.

“At first I worked alone, with an assistant, and I gradually recruited people. Today we are 70 people in the plant and with contractors we are close to 150 to 200 people”, stated Sanvitale.

The big bet on alternative energy sources

If Sanvitale has learned anything in these three decades at the helm of Mehcco, it is adapting. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, he was unemployed for almost six months, without working ”, which he said “was terrible ”, but instead of regretting it, he decided to look forward.

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Alternative energy is a great commitment of the company. As part of the service it provides, it works with renewable energy for buildings, supermarkets, offices, banks and, of course, it has solar panels on all your plants.

But you know that while interest is growing, it's still expensive to install. "The amortization is between five and seven years and sometimes clients need faster amortization," explained the businessman, adding that another of the stumbling blocks is that "the implementation was not the same in all provinces."

“In Santa Fe, if you install a panel, you ask the energy company for a bidirectional meter so that if you generate and return it to the network, they will discount it and that is a practically instantaneous process. On the other hand, in Buenos Aires we have the panels that are generating energy on a weekend that we are not here and that energy goes to the network, but we do not see it deducted from what we produce”, he explained.

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In this regard, he said that although some time ago it had been “enough stimulated”, now “it is very difficult to manage so that they give the bidirectional meter”. “Renewable energies should be part of the country's energy policy; stimulate, encourage to make it easier”, he considered.

The dream of making the company transcend the family business

Many parents dream that their children will take over the family business when they are no longer in charge, but for Jorge the idea is that Mehcco transcend beyond.

Her son is 24 and her daughter is 17. Neither of them follow in their father's footsteps. The eldest does some work in the technical office, but his future lies in music, as a music producer. The minor is dedicated to dancing and photography and helps him with some of the publicity, but he knows that “his path lies elsewhere”. Her life partner is her partner and, although she does not work in the company, “she is the support of her whole life”.

For the businessman “the offspring will come from the internal staff”, but that must be seen “in the future”. His idea is for Mehcco to transcend the family name, like many of today's large companies, which at some point were a family SME.

“The idea is that it transcends the family and that it can move forward independently of Jorge. We didn't get here to end when I'm not there or I don't feel like working anymore. We are at a point of no return. Taking a step back would be throwing overboard everything we have built in 30 years. It would be regressing,” he said.

The owner of the company sees some options for continuity in some employees who have been with him for more than 20 years.

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In the immediate future, the goal is to gain a foothold in Latin America in less than a year. The next challenge is to take the first steps in Chile, through a local client with subsidiaries on both sides of the mountain range. “We are just starting towards the end of the year, the beginning of next year, and then we will see how we continue in the rest of the countries”, he says with his eyes set on the future.