Two generations, one name

In 1989 I decided to import solar panels into Malta, when there was no market for them.

Very difficult and challenging. But this had become the modus operandi of our business models. We create business to do business.

My resilience, and perhaps stubbornness to do something different, and perhaps the gift of having a vision, made me believe I was doing the right thing. I had no support. I was totally alone. I had left my secure job to fulfil this dream.

And I must admit that in the very first months, if not years, I had failed miserably.

My tenacity and long working hours finally started giving small results. In my case failing was not an option. It had to work, full stop.

Business without risks is no business.

My son takes over as Group CEO this week. I am writing here over the next weeks because I think the beginning is worth telling properly, including the part where it did not work.

Business without risks is no business.

I have said this for a long time and I mean it plainly, not as encouragement. A business that has removed its risks has usually removed its reasons to exist as well.

What I look for, and have always looked for, is a proposition that benefits the customer's needs and the company at the same time, from a market leading position. Innovation, and taking the balanced risks to explore and venture into what we do best.

The word I would stress there is balanced. I left a secure job in 1989 and I failed for the first years. I do not romanticise that period. It was hard and it very nearly did not work.

Risk is not the same as gambling. One is a calculation you can stand behind when it goes against you. The other is a story you tell afterwards.

Knowledge with ambition is key.

People ask what tools I use to know whether a business is healthy.

There are several I rely on that give clear indicators of the position of our customers, and equally of our partners and employees, without whom we could never have made it this far.

But the basic ones I have used since I started are four, and none of them are systems.

Observing. Listening carefully. Being fair. Being present.

I am anything but a passive person. I have very clear ambitions to grow and to become better, relentlessly. So this is not a gentle approach and I would not want it read that way. I am constantly trying to read the room and look for what needs to be attended to and addressed.

But I have never found a report that tells you what the room tells you.

Knowledge with ambition is key.

I put those two words together deliberately, because on their own each one disappoints you.

Knowledge without ambition produces people who can tell you precisely why something will not work. I have employed them. They are often correct and the business goes nowhere.

Ambition without knowledge produces energy pointed at the wrong thing, which is more expensive than doing nothing at all.

What I have always wanted around me is someone who understands the trade properly and is still not satisfied with where it is.

They are rare, and in my experience you do not find them by reading qualifications. You find them by watching what someone does when a problem appears that is not theirs.

Putting your name in the business means there are no filters.

The Bajada name has always carried a sense of responsibility and duty for me. My passion and love for what I did made this seem easy. But trust me, it was never easy.

When the name on the door is your own, you cannot hide behind a brand when something goes wrong. There is no distance between you and the decision. You have to commit, and everyone around you can see whether you have.

For decades I focused my energy on building businesses which are meaningful and have a purpose. My first plan was not to make money. It was how I would impact other people's lives with what I am doing.

The money followed, and I am aware how convenient that sounds coming from someone it worked out for. But I would say it either way.

Apart from a few failures, which are important in order to grow, our businesses are healthy. I do not take that for granted.

What I want now is simple, and it is not about me.

I would love to see this passion for innovation and solutions carried on within our group in the next generation.

That is the whole answer. I have been asked several times over these weeks what I want the name to stand for in ten years, and every version of my answer comes back to that sentence.

Bajada can now provide a very diverse structure, with various operations and trades to build on. That did not exist in 1989. I had one product and no market.

So the next generation does not have my problem. They have a different one, which is how to keep the appetite for doing something difficult when there is already something comfortable to protect.

I cannot solve that one for them. I can say clearly that it is the thing I would be watching.

My father did not just import. He is the reason we manufacture.

I want to correct that, because the tidy version of this story has me in it and it should not.

In 1989 he imported solar panels into a country that had no market for them. Importing was how you created one. There was nothing local to build on and no demand to serve.

In 2005 he started manufacturing. Solar water heaters first. That was fifteen years in, when the business was finally comfortable and nobody was asking him to change anything. I was nine years old and doing the filing at the time. It was his call, and of the two it was the harder one.

Water treatment followed, and then desalination. So today we design, we manufacture, we install and we operate. On the water side that includes building and programming the control logic ourselves.

The reason is narrow and practical. If an imported system fails on a Friday afternoon, the supplier is in another country and the lead time is measured in weeks. If we built it, we are on the island, and there is nobody else for the customer to call.

His phrase for this was "we create business to do business". He meant doing the harder thing before the market asks for it.

He did that twice. Importing in 1989. Manufacturing in 2005.

The third one is mine, and it is export.

My father and I have completely different language for the same discipline, and it took me years to notice.

He talks about observing, listening carefully, being fair and being present. It sounds old fashioned. I have watched people underestimate it in a meeting.

I talk about reading the energy in a room. Whether someone explains their work to me with pride or waits for me to leave. Whether the quiet team is quiet because it is calm or because something is wrong.

Same instinct. Different vocabulary, thirty years apart.

What we both mean is that the health of a business shows up in people before it shows up in figures, and that by the time it reaches the figures you are late.

The generational difference is not the insight. It is what we each do next. He would go and address it himself, because in 1989 there was nobody else to send. I have to build a business where somebody closer to the problem than me has already noticed it and dealt with it before I walk in.

The instinct that built this company is the one I now have to let go of.

My father ran it by holding everything. One person in absolute control, everything on his fingertips, every decision through him.

For years I read that as a management style and copied it. It is not a style. It was the actual condition of 1989. He was alone because there was nobody else. Holding everything was not a preference, it was the job.

I copied the posture without the circumstances, and it became a ceiling.

Three years ago coming to work felt lonely. It was me against about a hundred people I was trying to convince. You spend the day repeating yourself and never reach the goal, because you are standing in front of it. When one person is accountable for everything, nobody is accountable for anything.

So I put leadership at every level and made people accountable for a destination rather than a task.

My father built this company by carrying it alone. My job is to make sure nobody ever has to again.

He agrees with that, which is the only reason I can say it publicly.

My father failed for years at the start. I failed four times at hiring. The difference between those two failures is the whole story of this handover.

His was existential. He had left a secure job, he was alone, and by his own account he failed miserably in the first months if not years. There was no organisation to absorb it. If it did not work, there was nothing.

Mine was structural, and it was survivable precisely because he had already built something underneath me. I kept trying to hire a successor for operations and it kept not working, because I had designed a role that only functioned if you were already me.

He could not delegate because there was nobody there. I could not delegate because I had not built the levels for anyone to stand on.

His constraint was circumstance. Mine was design.

That is the honest version of what the second generation inherits. Not an easier job. A different failure to fix, with a safety net he never had.

My father asked one thing of the next generation. That we keep the appetite for innovation, and do not settle into protecting what already exists.

That is the actual handover. Not a title, not a signature on a certificate. A request. So here is my answer to it.

In ten years I want Bajada to mean something beyond one industry, one island and one generation. Not a name people recognise because it is big, but because of how we got there. That we built things properly, treated people properly, and did not lose our character chasing scale.

What has to change is us. We have to grow up as an organisation without growing cold. Real structure, real governance, leaders at every level who do not need me or my father in the room to make the right call. That means letting go of some of the instincts that got us here, starting with the instinct to hold everything close and do it all ourselves.

I want the third generation to look at that name and feel what I feel today looking at what my father built with his hands. Not obligation. Pride. And I want them to feel there is still more to build, not that it is already finished.

He carried it alone so that nobody after him would have to.

That is what I am accountable for now.

My father did the difficult thing twice. I only have to do it once, and I have his working out in front of me.

In 1989 he imported a product into a country that had no use for it yet, and by his own account failed miserably for the first years doing it. In 2005, with the business finally comfortable, he started manufacturing instead of enjoying it.

Nobody asked him to do either. That is the pattern, and it is the only thing in this business I would call inherited. Not the company. The habit of moving before the market makes you.

My version is export, and it is less romantic than his. There is no secure job to walk away from and no empty market to invent. There is a factory that already works, customers who already pay, and a very reasonable argument for leaving all of it exactly as it is.

That argument is the risk. Comfort ends companies like ours more often than competition does.

He says business without risks is no business. He said it with nothing behind him. I am saying it back to him with a group behind me, which makes it easier to say and harder to mean.

So measure me on it rather than agree with me about it. Ask me in three years what we sold, and where.

I was nine years old the first time I was given a job in this company.

It was filing. Alphabetical dividers, photocopies, the fax machine.

Today I take the Group CEO seat, so it is worth being clear about what is actually new. The title is new. The work is not. I took sales at eighteen, operations at twenty one, and the general manager's seat in 2019.

What changes is the scope of what I have to answer for, and how publicly I am willing to talk about it.

I have kept quiet for most of my career because building takes concentration. That is changing now, deliberately, and I am not doing it alone.

Over the next eight weeks my father is going to write here too. He started this in 1989. Some of what we think is the same. Some of it is not, and the parts where we differ are the useful parts.

There is one call I made that people who were there still talk about.

We had someone delivering real numbers. Hard to argue with on paper. But the way they got there was corrosive. People were afraid to speak up around them, and good people were quietly looking for the door.

When I said we were letting them go, a lot of people around me pushed back. The logic was obvious. Why remove someone who is performing, in a market where performance is hard to find.

What made me sure was not confidence about the numbers. Short term, it probably hurt us.

It was that I had seen what happens when you let one person's results excuse how they treat everyone else. You do not only lose that person's output. You lose the standard for everyone underneath them.

Once people believe results buy you a pass on behaviour, that belief travels faster than any number you were trying to protect.

I would make the same call again without hesitating. Some of the best people we have today stayed because of it, not despite it.

Over 100,000 solar panels.

That is roughly what 40 megawatts of installed capacity looks like when you count it one panel at a time, and it is what we have put on Maltese roofs and fields to date.

Around 20 megawatts of that is solar farms we built and continue to operate ourselves. That is deliberate. Operating your own assets is the fastest way to find out whether what you sell actually performs over years rather than over a warranty period.

I am putting the number here for one reason. When we tell an industrial operator that we understand what happens to equipment in year seven, that claim has to be backed by something.

It is not a boast. It is the evidence for the sentence that follows it.

My father could not have said anything like that when he started. He was selling a product nobody here had bought before. The whole point of a second generation is that we can be judged on a record rather than on a promise.

When I walk into a site, the first thing I read is not the numbers on the wall.

It is energy. How people speak to each other. Whether someone stops what they are doing to explain something to me with pride, or goes quiet and waits for me to leave.

I am looking for ownership. Is someone fixing a problem because they noticed it, or because they were told to? Is the newest person on that team being brought into the conversation, or handed a task and left outside it?

Those things tell me more about the health of a business than any report.

And when something needs my attention, it is usually quiet rather than loud. A team that has gone a bit too silent. A manager who has stopped pushing back on me in meetings. A site technically hitting its numbers where nobody looks like they want to be there.

That is when I need to spend more time in that room, not less.

We owned a company for years without really running it.

My father started Pro Energy in 2014. It was always part of the group, but it was managed by someone who had built a fortification around it. Sealed off. Reporting in, not really connected.

That is a more common situation than people admit, and it is comfortable for everybody involved right up until it is not.

When I involved myself properly, the changes were not clever. Open it up. Put accountability at more than one level. Give people a destination rather than a task list.

Today it is a team of fifteen, revenue has tripled, and there is a pipeline and a plan for the next few years rather than for the next quarter.

The lesson I took was not about that business. It was that a fortified team is almost always protecting something, and it is rarely the thing you would want protected.

I hire for two things, and neither of them is on the CV.

Hunger and accountability. Ambition that shows up as goal driven behaviour, and a willingness to own the outcome rather than the task.

For years I believed the opposite. I assumed that people with a certain age and a certain length of experience would take us to the next level. I hired that way repeatedly.

It was an illusion, and in my experience it often ran the other way. What I got was resistance to change, difficulty adopting new technology, and a strong preference for how things had been done before.

That is not a comment on age. I have people who have been doing this for decades and are the most adaptable in the building.

It is a comment on what I was actually screening for, which turned out to be reassurance rather than capability.

I would rather train hunger than negotiate with certainty.

Most industrial water systems in Malta are not broken. That is what makes them a problem.

Broken gets fixed. A system that quietly runs at reduced efficiency for a decade never generates the phone call, because nothing on the daily report looks wrong.

The systems I see were often specified for a building that has since changed. Occupancy went up, the plant did not. A process line was added. Water quality shifted. Nobody re-examined the assumptions because nothing failed.

There is no scheduled moment in most operators' calendars where somebody asks whether the water system still matches the building it sits in.

That absence is systemic, not negligent. The operators I meet are careful people. They are simply not prompted, by anyone, to ask.

If nobody has looked at yours in years, the honest first step is not a quotation. It is a survey.

I failed to hire a successor four times.

Over roughly three years I kept trying to find the person who could take operations off me, and it kept not working. For a long stretch it was patchwork. People who could hold part of it, nobody who could hold the whole.

The instinct in that situation is to decide the market is thin and go back to doing it yourself. I did that for longer than I should have.

What I eventually accepted was that the role could not be filled by anyone, because I had designed it to require me. Every decision path ran through my office by construction. I was asking candidates to step into a job that only worked if you were already me.

The fix was not a better candidate. It was breaking the role into levels that could actually be owned.

If you cannot hire your replacement, look at the job description before you blame the applicants.

We build water systems in Malta, and we are starting to sell them to people who have never been here.

Seawater reverse osmosis is the line. Not the whole catalogue, one product family, because export punishes companies that turn up with a brochure instead of a specialism.

Malta has no rivers. Almost everything we drink and most of what industry uses either comes out of the sea or comes off a roof. We have spent twenty years building for a country that has to manufacture its own water, which means we have been building for the hardest version of that problem as routine work rather than as a showcase project.

That is a narrow claim and I want to keep it narrow. We are not the largest manufacturer of anything. We are a manufacturer from a place where the thing we make is not optional.

I am not going to list markets here. I would rather name them once the first ones are signed than announce ambitions and hope nobody checks back.

What I will say is which part of this is mine. Importing was my father's decision. So was manufacturing. Getting it off the island is the one I answer for.

Honestly, most of what I do will not change with this title.

I have been running these operations for years. The calls I made last quarter are the calls I will make next quarter.

Two things do change.

The first is the scope of what I have to answer for. My name is now on the group's door rather than on one company's, and that includes businesses I did not build.

The second is that I have to be publicly visible in a way I have deliberately avoided. I kept quiet by choice, not by accident. Building takes concentration, and a public profile takes time you are not spending on the work.

I no longer think that trade-off holds. Industrial customers make long, expensive, slow decisions, and they make them on trust. If I want to be trusted, being invisible is not a neutral position.

My father let the work speak for decades and it was enough. He imported what nobody here had, then he made what nobody here made. Either way the customer was on the same island and could go and look at the result themselves.

I am now trying to sell what we build to people who have never set foot on it. You cannot let the work speak to someone who will never see it.

The energy debate in Malta is stuck on generation, and the money is sitting in consumption.

Almost all the attention goes to what we install. Panels, capacity, targets. Those matter and I sell them, so I am not arguing against them.

But an industrial site that adds capacity without examining what it is currently wasting is buying a bigger tank for a container that leaks.

Efficiency does not get the same attention for a simple reason. It has no ribbon-cutting moment. Nobody photographs a corrected specification.

I would like the next phase of this conversation to be less about how much we can generate and more about how much is quietly being thrown away inside buildings nobody has examined in years.

It is a less exciting argument. It is where I would put the money.

Malta is a small market. That is usually offered as an apology. I have started offering it as a qualification.

A country this size with no natural fresh water has to solve problems that larger countries can postpone. Water gets made rather than found. Land is scarce enough that a solar farm has to justify its footprint before anything else. Grid capacity is not a theoretical constraint here, it is a daily one. And everything sits close enough together that a bad specification shows up within months instead of disappearing into a regional average.

That produces a particular kind of engineering. You do not get to over-specify your way out of a problem, because there is neither the space nor the budget for redundancy that nobody uses.

Given the choice, I would rather buy a system designed under those conditions than one designed where the constraints were optional.

That is the argument I am taking abroad, and it is not a patriotic one. It is that scarcity is a better design school than abundance, and this island has had us enrolled since the beginning.

Whether it lands is a separate question. Nobody outside Malta owes us a hearing.

For two years, I behaved as though covid was not happening.

I do not recommend that as a philosophy. I am describing what I actually did.

I had become general manager in 2019, so my first real stretch in the seat was that period. I went through three quarantines myself, set up screens at home, and locked into a routine. Awake at six, start, one break, close around seven, keep going. Minimal news, deliberately.

We tripled sales in that time.

I have thought a lot about why, and I do not think it was the discipline. Plenty of people were disciplined and still lost ground.

I think it was that everyone around me was pointed at one goal specific enough to actually work on, and the focus was total enough that two years went past in a blink.

A goal that concrete is the most underrated crisis tool there is. It does not remove the uncertainty. It gives people somewhere to put their hands.

I have personally signed off stainless steel tanks before they left for a customer.

Rolling, swaging, punching, TIG welding, foaming, then quality control. For a period, overseeing that production and certifying it was my job.

That line has been running since long before I was allowed near it. We have manufactured here since 2005.

I bring it up because of what it teaches you about warranties.

When you have watched a weld go wrong, you stop believing that a document protects a customer. What protects a customer is that the person who certified the unit is still reachable, still employed by the same company, and still has something to lose if it fails.

A warranty is a promise about who will be around later.

Most people compare the length of the warranty. The better question is who is standing behind it, and how far away they are standing.

We could have tried to export fifteen years ago. It would have been dishonest.

Manufacturing started here in 2005. For most of the years since, nearly everything we made went to a customer within about half an hour's drive. That sounds like a limitation. It is how you find out whether a product is any good, because you install it and then you live with the same customer for the next decade while it either performs or does not.

Export removes that. The customer is far away, the site conditions are somebody else's, and the only failures you hear about are the ones somebody bothered to report.

You do not put a product through that until it has already survived twenty years of people who can find your office.

I think that is the honest test for anyone in manufacturing here who is thinking about selling abroad. Not whether there is demand. Whether your product has been held accountable somewhere, for long enough, that you would still stand behind it at a distance.

We are only doing this now because we have that. Ten years ago I would have been selling potential.

The best thing I did as a leader was become less necessary.

That sentence would have made no sense to me a few years ago. I had absorbed a model where the person at the top knows everything, holds everything and decides everything. I was reasonably good at it, which is what made it hard to give up.

What I could not see was the arithmetic. One person's attention is fixed. Every decision routed through it makes the queue longer. At some point the organisation's speed is just your calendar.

Putting leadership at every level felt like losing control. It was the opposite. I gave up the illusion of control and got actual capacity back.

I still care about the same things. I still walk the sites. But the business no longer waits for me, and I no longer spend my week convincing people.

Growing people is how I grow. It took me too long to believe that was a real strategy rather than something you say.

The strongest argument against exporting is one we have been making to customers for years.

We tell them buying local is safer. If an imported system fails on a Friday afternoon, the supplier is in another country and the lead time is measured in weeks. If we built it, we are on the island, and there is nobody else to call.

Export makes us the foreign supplier in somebody else's version of that sentence.

I do not have a clever answer to that. I have a practical one, and it is the part of this I expect to be judged on.

If we sell a system into a market where we are not physically present, then somebody there is trained, paid and accountable for it, or we do not sell into that market. Not a distributor holding our logo and no obligation. Somebody who has to answer for it when it goes wrong.

That is slower than the alternative and it will cost us deals. I would rather lose those deals than build the exact thing we have spent twenty years telling people not to buy.