Interview with Francisco Perez, Managing Director of Grupo Flexicel

For those colleagues who don’t know Flexicel yet, can you tell us a bit more about the company?

Currently, FLEXICEL can be considered as the largest converter of technical foams, mainly in the form of thermal and acoustic insulation, in Spain and Portugal. During 30 years, the company has acquired an essential know-how for the development of our activity, which has made the company to what it is today. Our presence in many segments and applications has allowed us to acquire enormous experience in all transformation processes to offer tailor-made solutions to our customers.

What do you like best about the company?

There are two clear characteristics of Flexicel:
First, I love the essence of Family Business. In many cases, you get to know people's personal lives and easily extend relationships not only with the workers themselves, but also with their closest family.
Next, I am also excited about the possibility of combining different processes so that new solutions can be offered to customers. I love that, with the incorporation of new machinery, we can solve those problems that caused a headache in the past.

What is your leadership style?

I like to be very close to and empathize with all the people in my team. I’ve always tried to set a good example. Lately I’m enjoying the possibility to empower people in my organization and I’ve learnt to wind down the fear of making mistakes. Instead, I’m trying to look out of the box. I like change and “out of the box” ideas. Finally, I find it important that people assume their responsibility at each level of the organization.

Flexicel was founded 30 years ago. Are you celebrating this anniversary? How?

Yes, we are going to celebrate it next December 16th during the famous Company Dinner for Christmas. As we all know, we have not been able to celebrate it in the past 2 years. On the same day, the plants of Spain and Portugal will be celebrating the event each in their own location and in some way, we will join both events. We will take the opportunity for an awards ceremony for employees who have been with us these last 25 years, and a small tribute to Isidro Gomez, a key pillar in the company who retired last September. After dinner, we will enjoy some small events that I do not want to reveal yet …

Within the IPCOM group, we launched a project to reduce our carbon footprint. To what extent is sustainability on Flexicel’s agenda? What actions did you already take in this area?

Without any doubt, sustainability is already part of many of the decisions that we have been taking at Grupo Flexicel at a strategic level.

An important project in this area will be the certification in 2023 of both production plants with ISO 14001. We have been working towards this to demonstrate our clear commitment and progress in the field of sustainability.

We are very happy with our 100KW Photovoltaic Plant start up at the end of 2021 on one of our roofs. A similar one is planned for 2023, as well as investments in machinery that do not only provide greater productivity but also the improvement in energy efficiency is remarkable (for example new Hot melt).

In a previous edition of the newsletter, we could read about the cooperation between ATIS and Flexicel. How do you experience this? Are there any recent projects you’ve done together?

At the time we joined the IPCOM Group in March 2020, we had the clear mission to enhance synergies and collaborations with other companies in the group. Raymond Van Loon - from ATIS - got the same feeling and thus, it was easy straightforward to start this collaboration with an enormous potential.
Important actions so far: this year we’ve had the first supplies of prototypes for one of the most important customers of ATIS. We participated jointly in the most important fair of the railway sector, INNOTRANS in Dublin. And we began to receive requests for proposals for important projects; the development of some is a real challenge but fitting within the objectives of this collaboration.

If you could change 1 day with a celebrity, who would you like to be? And why?

This is the hardest question…I would feel more comfortable answering whom I would spend a day with. In that case I would answer Angel Leon, a prestigious Spanish Chef with three Michelin stars and a lover of the sea. With no doubt, food is one of the pleasures of life that I enjoy a lot. Especially seafood. So when I see this guy cooking his recipes, looking at his research, ... I would love to be close to him at times of culinary discoveries.