A pioneer in many fields

Throughout his life, Dr Georg H Endress took the initiative and moved things forward. A hundred years later, the entrepreneur’s legacy is still visible and tangible – in the family-owned business he built up and far beyond.

Text: Martin Raab

Photography: Endress+Hauser

Georg H Endress was 29 years old when he founded the company in 1953.

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Even his early years were fast-moving: Georg Herbert Endress was born on 9 January 1924 in Freiburg, Germany, where his father ran a factory for industrial gases. He was educated in Zagreb, Croatia, where his father later worked. Georg H Endress attended secondary school in Basel. The family had moved there due to the troubled political situation in Europe instead of following his father to Paris.

Endress completed an apprenticeship as a mechanic and then worked for various companies. At the same time, he attended evening classes at technical college. But after five semesters, this came to an end: his father no longer supported him because, in his opinion, his son wanted to start a family too early. Georg H Endress had met Alice Vogt during his military service in Ticino. The couple married in 1946 and the first of eight children was born in 1947.

At that time, Georg H Endress was working for his father. He was selling British-made capacitive moisture meters to the textile industry around Basel. The young engineer had returned from a visit to the manufacturer of these instruments, Fielden Electronics, with a new type of level measuring device in his luggage and the plan to sell them in Germany from then on.

Safely through the turbulent early years

As a Swiss citizen, Endress needed a German partner for his project. The 29-year-old found his counterpart in Ludwig Hauser (58), manager of a small cooperative bank. On 1 February 1953, L Hauser KG was entered in the commercial register ‘for the sale of Fielden-Endres electronic devices’ (including the spelling mistake). The company was named after Hauser’s wife Luise, who was also the company’s first shareholder with a stake of 2,000 deutsche marks.

Development was rapid right from the start. The new owners of Fielden Electronics were uneasy about so much success: they did not want to become dependent on the German partner and terminated the contract. So in 1956, the young company started its first in-house production in rented premises. The work soon spread across several buildings – a mechanical workshop, electronics production, dispatch and offices – which the employees affectionately and mockingly referred to as the ‘United Hut Works’.

While Georg H Endress developed the business with a keen sense of the market and customers, Ludwig Hauser kept an eye on the finances. Many of the principles that Endress+Hauser still adheres to today were already taking shape at that time. Georg H Endress expanded his business step by step in order to reduce dependence on individual technologies, industries and regions. A strong focus on customers was also in the company’s DNA from the very beginning. The small start-up became an ever-larger player. This was possible because Georg H Endress knew how to inspire people for his projects who were better than he was in their fields.

Overcoming boundaries and broadening horizons

GHE, as he was known internally, always attached great importance to training and further education. He made Endress+Hauser a model company for this. He launched the trinational apprenticeship program in the Basel region, initiated the trinational engineering degree program and was committed to cross-border cooperation. He was active in the German business association WVIB and in the Upper Rhine regional association, and he also supported the BioValley initiative, a network in the field of life sciences.

When he handed over the management of the Group to his son Klaus in 1995, the company had 4,300 employees worldwide and a turnover of 680 million Swiss francs. Georg H Endress received many awards for his entrepreneurial achievements and his social commitment – including the German Federal Cross of Merit with Ribbon and an appointment as French Chevalier dans l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel and honorary senatorship of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

Georg H Endress died after a short illness on 14 December 2008, a few weeks before his 85th birthday. However, his legacy remains visible, his work alive in many ways: in the company, which is now a leader in process measurement technology, in his large family that now has more than 75 members, through the Georg H Endress Foundation, which is involved in education and research, and in the many people he influenced and who still remember him today.

MOMENTS

Fertile ground

Georg H Endress was not born an entrepreneur. After completing his training, the young engineer first worked for various companies, then for his father, who sold capacitive moisture sensors to the textile industry. The pay, as the family recalls, was poor. “When our fifth child was on the way, my wife asked me to do something – so I became an entrepreneur,” Georg H Endress later liked to say.

Two unlikely partners

The young Swiss engineer Georg H Endress (29 at the time of founding) and Ludwig Hauser (58), head of a small cooperative bank from Germany, were very different partners. Nevertheless, they complemented each other well. The farsightedness and forward thinking of the one were as important for success as the prudence and experience of the other. After the death of his partner and the withdrawal of the Hauser family, Endress therefore saw “no reason” to change the company name.

The young Swiss engineer found the perfect partner in Ludwig Hauser, who was twice his age when the company was founded.

Proven recipe

Georg H Endress liked to fire up the pizza oven in the garden of his house for guests – and he expanded his business, as he himself called it, according to the ‘dough roll-out method’: after sales gradually covered the whole of Germany, Endress+Hauser opened up foreign markets from 1960, including overseas from 1970; other measuring principles were first added to capacitive level measurement, and then further fields of activity in the second half of the 1970s.

Georg H Endress expanded his business according to the ‘dough roll-out method’.

Strong relationships

Georg H Endress knew that it is not the devices and technology that breed success, but the people and how they interact. This was especially true when dealing with customers: “First serve, then earn” was the motto he adopted, based on his experience. “Customers with whom we had made a mistake were later among our most loyal customers, because they saw that we wouldn’t let it go, but would make sure that things worked.”

The young company founder was not afraid to get his hands dirty when visiting customers.

Close ties

Even when things are not going well economically, no jobs are cut: this iron rule already applied to Georg H Endress. Only once, in the 1970s, did he have to deviate from it. The oil price crisis and the construction of a building had plunged Endress+Hauser into financial trouble. The company had to lay off 74 of its 710 employees. But the difficult times were quickly overcome – and most of them were able to return to their positions just one year later.

Georg H Endress in the 1950s with employees from production in Lörrach, Germany.

The value of education

“Nobody can take away what you have learned,” Georg H Endress knew. He himself had received excellent training as a mechanic (“If you have made a block of steel five centimeters smaller after a week of filing, you have learned a lot”). He gave his children the best possible education, and he made Endress+Hauser a model company: “The training we provide must be so excellent that every manager would send their children to us.”

Endress+Hauser opened up foreign markets from 1960, including overseas from 1970.

A family affair

Georg H Endress met his wife Alice during Swiss military service in Ticino. Her wish from the outset was to have a large family. She deliberately kept her distance from the company. And she demanded that nothing but good things should be said about the business at the family table. As a child, she had suffered from all the bad news during the global economic crisis after 1929. The principle proved its worth, Georg H Endress later said: “The children came of their own accord and wanted to join the business.”