Xovis CEO Talks 100 Days and Beyond

21/06/2024

Blog

2 min

Xovis CEO Rupert Paris recently took some time to reflect on his start in the company, staying young, his personal leadership style, and plans for an eventual recharge. Edited highlights and a video recording of the interview follow.

You recently passed the 100-day milestone at Xovis. What are your thoughts about your role in leading the company?

My first hundred days with Xovis have been an amazing and crazy ride at the same time. What I like the most and appreciate extremely is the drive, the dedication from the company's perspective and the people's perspective. And what drives me is I'm learning a lot here.

How does it feel to be an Austrian leading a Swiss company?

This is, for me, a question about my life and the way I live as a person and as a father of three.

I studied law in Vienna but also studied law for one and a half years in Berlin. And then my first job brought me to Italy, with an Italian company, and then to Germany and from Germany back to Italy to headquarters and from there to Switzerland, and this also gave me a lot of interesting experiences with people, with culture, with languages. And I appreciate that because it keeps me young, it keeps me vivid.

Bern was, funny enough, in 2007, my first stop in Switzerland, for a renewable energy company. Since then, I have been in Switzerland with a small departure in the sensor business in real estate in Germany, in Hamburg, for the past four years.

And when I was asked to take the lead at Xovis, I looked at the industry and I had no doubts or discussions about moving back to Switzerland because I love Switzerland very much. Life here is great. I like the culture, the people, and the attitude.

And yeah, here I am, enjoying this challenge, enjoying the team, and foreseeing a bright future for Xovis.

What is your view on the transformation that is happening at Xovis?

What does it take to be a global company? Is it enough to ship your sensors worldwide, deploy them, or install them? For me, I would say no. For me, that's not enough. That doesn't describe a global company. A global company has a global mindset, global in the sense of product, application, service, customer, and culture.

I see all the potential, and I see we have the drive. We have the product. We have everything ready to do it. And that's one of my tasks in the coming years: to build, with the team, a true global company.

You've already spent a lot of time attending aviation and retail trade fairs with customers and partners. What are the other learning opportunities that keep you motivated?

My learning opportunities in Xovis are manyfold. First of all, it starts with the product. If you do not understand the product, there cannot be any meaningful contribution. And I've been fortunate enough to be welcomed by our production team to learn the ins and outs of our sensor portfolio.

We are a hardware company, but we are also a software company, and defining where is the common ground and how to put these things together is also very, very interesting. And the challenge is the amount of sensors we do because I was more used to mass market, I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of pieces per year or millions of pieces per year. So this is different. Also, the value generated in and represented by the sensor is much higher compared to other sensors.

The value we have to create with the data that our sensors deliver has to be extremely high. And that was one of the main reasons for me to join, is everybody in this world is talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence. I thought, hmmm, that's interesting. That's a company that is actually doing it. I want to go there and talk to the people and try to understand how they think, how they work and how they do their jobs. And this is, for me, the most interesting part, besides the challenge of taking Xovis as a company, identifying the opportunities, and helping the company and the team to grow, to develop, and to go to the next level.

You have also spent a lot of time meeting individually with employees. What's the motivation behind that?

Talking to everybody is a key principle of mine. Doing business is people business. And I'm a strong believer in personal relationships. I'm a strong believer in trust, which you can only establish and build if you know the person and understand why the person is here. What motivates the person? What drives them? What are the challenges?

This, for me, is a basic principle of good management.

It's been some busy months for you. What do you do to recharge?

Well, asking me about my private life and what I do to recharge my batteries or how I can re-energize is currently difficult to answer.

I used to be in the mountains and snowboarding or ski touring or going to Greece, where I am lucky to have some olive trees. But now, having three kids, age one, three and six, this takes all my free time.

I think what we all need time to, relax, to wind down. So my plan is to take the family, turn off my phone and laptop for two or three weeks and think about something totally different. I have no clue if that's possible, but I promise I going to try.