Eloi Planes, the swimming pool entrepreneur who prefers poems to powerpoints

Barcelona"Distracted, I am seduced by the leaves / of the trees in the forest of life / and the stars smile at me / disguised as love. / I feel the notes of memories / spinning the old songs, / and they draw a thousand laughs for me. / I like to distract myself in the nights of desires, / sitting on the bench / I like to distract myself in the nights of desires / dreaming that everything is possible / and serenely / devour life."

Eloi Planes could have started his lecture before an audience of Esade alumni with a 40-slide PowerPoint presentation. He had it prepared and already felt the pressure of the familiar faces in the front row, eager for what the president of Fluidra, the listed Catalan company and world leader in the swimming pool sector, had to say. But, after consulting with the audience, the businessman took an unexpected turn: he began his gloss of the family business by reading a poem in Catalan written by himself. What we have reproduced at the beginning of this chronicle.

"I think that the history of Fluidra is like this, sitting on a bench looking at the universe with desire and passion." Planes was born the same year as the company, in 1969. His father, Joan Planes, was transferred just a few weeks ago, founded the company with three other partners who were dedicated to the construction of swimming pools and tennis courts. They found the key when they began to manufacture products themselves that until then they had bought from Americans, such as water pumps. "Being four families [in the shareholding] has always been an advantage. This forces you to apply certain gymnastics and evolve as a different system of government has been needed," explained Planes.

The businessman, who sees Fluidra as a Netflix series with seasons of all kinds, has recalled some of the episodes that have left the biggest mark on him over the years. For example, when his father asked him what he would do at a key moment when they had to choose between selling the business to an American group or taking the complicated shortcut of going public. At the outset, he confessed, he told him that he "had no idea." Those negotiations for the sale were a "great learning experience" about the importance of making a conscious decision and understanding when, as a family, they were wearing the hat of owners or managers.

Fluidra ended up going public and it did so at the worst time, before the markets collapsed during the Great Recession. "It was a company that was used to growing and then sales started to fall. Until then we were like Guardiola's Barça. We would shoot from the centre of the pitch with our backs turned and the ball would go into the top corner. Afterwards that was very hard, but it made us much stronger," Planes explained. The crisis was also the moment when the businessman started writing poetry again, a hobby he had discovered at the age of 18: "Those of us who weren't very attractive had to do this to get girls."

A definitive fusion

Fluidra has risen again, slowly preparing for its big move. "The stars have aligned," Planes told his audience. The merger with the American giant Zodiac It was a complicated operation –"It was like mixing hydrogen and oxygen"–, which turned out better than anyone involved expected. In fact, he recalled the little piece of paper he had with him at that stage and on which he wrote the five things that worried him most about this integration: "During the first 18 months I opened it and assured myself that everything was going well."

Fluidra is now an undisputed leader in the industry, and wants to be even more so through sustainability and digitalization, with new models of connected pools. "It is a structurally very healthy sector, because the global pool fleet is growing at 4 percent or 5 percent," said Planes. The businessman who writes poems and absent-mindedly dreams of "impossibles" does not look for overly complicated metaphors to define a management style shared with his father: "Being normal, something that seems like it should be everyday, but it is not so much."