--- title: "Operation: On the Way to a Billion | Juho Lipsanen | Negotiator 78" summary: "Juho Lipsanen has never had a Finnish-speaking boss. In this episode he applies a Swedish and Swiss toolkit to three companies that have created, or could create, more than a billion euros of value from almost nothing: Coronaria, Ilmatar Windpower and Aico. Along the way: Barnevik's charm offensive, Harvard's definition of strategy, peat in three different sciences, and the argument that Finnish companies are sold far too early." datePublished: 2021-05-12 dateModified: 2021-05-12 originalLang: en section: economy sections: ["economy","tools"] authors: ["Sami Miettinen"] tags: [] canonical: https://ai.neuvottelija.com/ep78-operaatio-matkalla-miljardiin-juho-lipsanen/ --- # Operation: On the Way to a Billion | Juho Lipsanen | Negotiator 78 # Operation: On the Way to a Billion | Juho Lipsanen | Negotiator 78 > **Summary:** > Juho Lipsanen has never had a Finnish-speaking boss. In this episode he applies a Swedish and Swiss toolkit to three companies that have created, or could create, more than a billion euros of value from almost nothing: Coronaria, Ilmatar Windpower and Aico. Along the way: Barnevik's charm offensive, Harvard's definition of strategy, peat in three different sciences, and the argument that Finnish companies are sold far too early. > **A note on reading this, and disclosures:** Lipsanen speaks about companies where he is or has been chair or a board member — **Coronaria, Ilmatar Windpower, Aico** and **Vapo (now Neova)** — and says so himself. His positions on peat and wind power should be read in that light. The host also states his own connections: he has acted as an adviser in public takeover offers and is a former Pöyry Capital banker. Recorded in May 2021, when peat taxation was a live controversy that had nearly brought the government down. Miettinen says outright in the episode that he had been wrong about wind power. --- ## The starting point: no Finn has ever hired him The frame of the episode comes from one line: > I have never in my life had a Finnish-speaking boss. There have been Germans, Americans, Swedes, you name it. His career has run through **ABB, Telia and Alma Media**, mostly as a turnaround executive — which produced his previous book *Operation Turnaround* (2008, on the eve of the financial crisis). The title of this episode is his suggestion, and naming is part of the method: from the Swedes he learned that projects get named properly. The attitude is condensed into a slogan: > In life you get at most what you want. — If you try, you usually get more. --- ## Charm offensive: the negotiation is won before the negotiation This is the episode's most usable negotiating technique, and Lipsanen describes it both as a bemused outsider and as a practitioner. **How it works.** At ABB the instruction came down that the CFO had to be in contact with the customer's CFO. And so on through the organisation: | Deal size | Contact surface | |---|---| | Small deal | ~8 people connected into the customer's organisation | | Large deal | ~16 people, **each at their own level** | **Why it works.** By the time the customer's executive team meets, **more than half have already heard who the seller is**. The decision does not arise from nothing. Lipsanen's own execution as CFO was direct: > Then I thought, well, I will call him and say — I lied — that I happen to be coming that way. The pretext was Finnish export credit financing. The meeting led to access to the CEO as well, and there the argument was not about the product but about **the buyer's own share price**: > When they buy our equipment, it improves your cash flow by this much. And then if you run a DCF, it lifts the share price by 5 per cent when you buy from us. The competitor was Siemens. The deal was **over 100 million dollars**. **Applied in Finland**, the example is Sonera: the CEO talked to the CEO, the CFO to the CFO — and the driver to the driver. The result arrived as a text message: > Juho, I have a feeling they are buying from us. Don't give any discounts. Miettinen's conclusion is this channel's core subject: > This coordination in negotiations is really important and Finns perhaps do not quite know how to do it. One good side of the Swedish discussion culture is that the negotiation gets crowdsourced, in a way. And Lipsanen's principle beneath it: **"People do business with each other, not organisations."** --- ## A side case: women's membership of the Stock Exchange Club A small story that is in fact a lesson in pushing change through. Lipsanen joined the club after returning from abroad, and paid no attention to the membership terms until **Eeva Ahdekivi** pointed out that she could come as a guest but could not invite anyone herself. The irony is historical: the club was founded in practice by the same people who gave Finnish women the vote. The restriction came only in **1997**, when equality legislation forced rule changes. Lipsanen's motive was blunt: > Members should be chosen by what is at the top end, not the bottom end. And personal: his daughter is a CFO and later a division head. **How it was carried through.** A member survey revealed there was no lock — "nothing against women, but this is fine as it is". The solution was communicational: > It did require that the communication worked and that everyone got the same information, so that they could hold the same opinion. The board turned quickly, the chair stayed neutral, and **even those who had voted against went on to proclaim the decision** — which is the episode's subtlest observation about change management. *"It went rather elegantly."* --- ## Coronaria: from ten people to a hundredfold return Lipsanen joined the board in **2008**. The company was then a doctor-leasing firm of a few dozen people. He chaired it for **12 years**, and: > The investment has increased at least a hundredfold. **What was done.** First an expansion "from cradle to grave" — into daycare and elderly care — and then a **focus on specialties that sit below the radar**: radiology, pathology. The financing move was clear: **the daycare and care businesses were sold, and with that money Silmäasema was bought** out of the stock exchange. Miettinen remembers the case: Silmäasema had **two entirely different businesses** under one roof — selling glasses and eye surgery — and the story was good, but the market lost interest too early. The purchase was followed by the acquisition of **Medilaser** and considerable synergies. **The operating principle is the episode's most condensed management lesson:** > The basic strategies are all done rather the opposite way from how the state and the municipalities do them — with regard to the concept of time, to money, and to management. — Management is the most important thing, and it is often what is missing in that hospital environment. In practice: **doctors get to do what they love**, the administration is handled for them (company cars included), and effectiveness is measured by asking patients before and after treatment. --- ## Strategy: Harvard's definition and what follows from it Lipsanen notes that the definition of strategy differs in every firm — but one has to be chosen. His: > At Harvard it was that strategy is a series of decisions with objectives and means. **And four rules follow**, which he lists in sequence: 1. **The objective has to be a metric.** And the test for it: is it important enough a metric that one can be rewarded on it? 2. **The tools have to be right.** 3. **The smaller always beats the larger** — but only with a tool. *"As David beats Goliath, he has a sling."* 4. **Concreteness decides.** *"If the strategy is concrete, it gets implemented."* Underneath it all is Barnevik's line, which Lipsanen immediately translates: > What gets measured gets done. — If you are rewarded on your golf handicap, you play more golf. **The order matters:** at ABB **the structure was changed before the strategy**. The finance department calculated the numbers backwards and forwards several times, and then a secret meeting was held in a London hotel where each person was given their own area of responsibility and their papers. *"Nobody grumbles about the strategy. It was made right there."* ### Applied: the health and social care reform Miettinen asks him to apply this to Finland's health reform. Lipsanen's diagnosis uses exactly the same frame: > On the reform I would say it is precisely this objective-and-means question. What is the objective of the reform? — In my view it could be to make Finland the healthiest nation in the world. And the problem: > Here the means is obviously just to create an intermediate layer of administration. Objective and means have been mixed up: the regional model is a means that has been elevated into the place of the objective. **Switzerland as a counter-example.** There the cantons run specialist care, but alongside it sits a **three-tier health insurance** — politically impossible in Finland, in Lipsanen's view, "even the National Coalition would probably be against it". Other observations: municipal tax 3 %, cantonal tax 3 %, the rest 6–8 %; you can negotiate with the tax authority; and the size of the administration is of a different order — a Finnish town and a comparable Swiss municipality have the same population but not the same headcount. > They concentrate on managing, not on doing the work. Miettinen connects this to **Nassim Taleb**'s *Antifragile*, which praises Switzerland's decentralised structure. Lipsanen's most concrete Swiss observation, however, concerns education: young people are taught what interest and depreciation are, and **even the school meal invoice itemises material costs, interest and depreciation**. Miettinen notes that the equivalent state cost analysis per service has been a government programme objective for an eternity — and nobody has delivered it. --- ## Ilmatar Windpower: ten years from zero The company was founded **exactly ten years** before the recording. Cousin Kalle had been at ABB developing incubation activity inside it; when he founded a wind power company, Lipsanen got the call on the grounds that he was one of the few who knew anything at all about wind. **The timeline is instructive in its slowness:** - founded in 2011 - **the first turbine at Luhanka only in 2014** - for projects begun in 2010, for instance at Alajärvi, the permits arrived only now - **in 2019 among the hundred largest taxpayers** — more tax than Vaisala or Sanoma **The pipeline** at the time of recording: **Kajaani–Pyhäntä** on the shore of Oulujärvi, from which **Google buys the power** — one of Europe's largest parks, with the last turbines being assembled. Next **Alajärvi** of the same order (**300–400 million**) and then **Ii**. The turbines are "the height of the Eiffel Tower". **The technical insight** is what the French colleagues marvelled at: because Finland discusses offshore and onshore wind separately, Ilmatar **builds with offshore technology on land** — considerably cheaper and more cost-effective. **The financing structure** proceeded in steps: first small parks, which were **sold in order to raise equity for the large ones**. Now a majority is being taken in Alajärvi and the model shifts to *independent power producer*. **Miettinen's admission** is the episode's most honest moment: > I certainly did not see this billion-scale growth when we spoke a few years ago — I was demonstrably wrong. Both note that removing the feed-in tariffs no longer matters, because without subsidy wind is **the most cost-effective form of energy production** (hydro competes, depending on how capital costs are allocated). And the argument for electric cars: *"there is no sense in charging with electricity made from Russian or Kazakh coal."* **Sergey Brin and data centres.** In 2015 Lipsanen was at Google's Silicon Valley campus, where in one session sat a man nobody was talking to. Lipsanen went over, and the conversation ended up on wind power and whether a data centre would come to Finland. > "It should be done with wind." — "It will happen," the man said. Miettinen connects this to Stora Enso's sale of an old paper mill to Google, in which the M&A lead was his former Pöyry Capital colleague. Both conclude that **international networks are enormously valuable**, and that the value comes from speaking the same language and having shared experience. German banks, in Lipsanen's account, have far greater capability to lend against **PPAs**, which shows in the price of money. --- ## Peat in three sciences This is the episode's most quoted passage, and Lipsanen is **the former chair of Vapo, now Neova**. His frame is deliberately provocative but structurally clear: | Science | What peat is | |---|---| | **Natural science** | **Organogenic** — neither fossil nor renewable, but it **grows**; it grows a certain amount each year and can be harvested for 50 years | | **EU science** | **Fossil** | | **Religious studies** | **Evil** | **The emission factor argument** is his sharpest: in natural science peat's factor is **90** and wood's **130** — wood emits more — but **the EU has decided that wood's emission factor is zero**. > That is what these decisions are made with. In practice the burn is typically **50–50 wood and peat**, and peat prevents high-temperature corrosion. On these factors peat is **cleaner than natural gas**. **The value of the reserve:** he speaks of hundreds of billions — **350 billion** as usable, which in his account is **three times the national debt**. And he notes that peat need not be burned: Vapo is starting to make **activated carbon** from it, and it is used as a growing medium and as bedding. **A comparison:** Ireland and others have decided to give up peat — *"but first they dig it all out."* In Finland, by contrast: > If there were 800 billion of oil here, nothing is done with it. A tax is put on it. — That is quite a clever move by the government, because everyone knows that only a tax kills. Nothing else kills it. **And the balancing side**, which he does not skip: when he was appointed chair of Vapo the state gave him the task of making sure watercourses were not polluted. From that came an **environmental turnaround** and a promise he phrases like this: > Wherever Vapo goes, the waters come out cleaner. They do not pollute; they are cleaner. The means were mechanical purification systems and overland flow fields; old sites have been closed where they could not be fixed. In the financial turnaround, operations have since been sold for **just under a billion**. Miettinen admits the cognitive dissonance — he has visited peat areas near Jyväskylä that are not bogs — and both arrive at the same place: **separating the sciences removes the argument**. Lipsanen says he used the same frame with [Eija-Riitta Korhola](https://ai.neuvottelija.com/ep73-ilkeat-ongelmat-eija-riitta-korhola/): *"once we had first talked about peat's different sciences, we had no dispute at all."* --- ## Aico: half a per cent of savings and what it does to value The third company is **Aico** — *Artificial Intelligence Coworker* — a Juuri Partners holding that Lipsanen chairs. It is a spin-off, and he praises the model in which **the entrepreneur remains the majority owner**: > Private equity has that inherent flaw that you always have to sell after seven years or whatever it is. **What the product does.** Robotic process automation fetches data from the ERP or SAP, brings it onto the platform, writes the memo and posts it to the ledger. Lipsanen's motivation is personal: he automated factories at ABB in the 1980s and found it perverse that **the factory was real-time while the office ran on batch jobs and Excel**. **And here comes the episode's best value-chain argument:** | Stage | Figure | |---|---| | Finance department costs | **1.2–1.5 %** of revenue (in a billion- or hundred-million-scale company) | | Reduction in workload | **30–60 %** | | Permanent saving | ~**0.5 %** of revenue | | Effect on the share price via DCF | **3–5 %** | > So it is a no-brainer. **Customers:** Fortum, Neste, Sanoma, Ponsse; customers in Sweden; an English company set up before Brexit; in the Netherlands one of the world's largest semiconductor companies (market cap 100 billion) and **Akzo Nobel** — whose project ran under the name *Project Nobel*. **Growth figures:** the target was first 600,000, then 1.2 million — but **Covid pushed the outturn to nearly three million**. The competitor **Blackline** does just under 400 million dollars with a market cap of **7 billion**; it is 70 times larger. On the same formula Aico would be worth 100 million — *"which leaves 900 still missing."* Miettinen sets out why the SaaS model is valuable and mentions Admicom. And he recounts his own memory of a summer job at Nokia Telecommunications: invoices worth hundreds of millions of markka, a monthly **flash report**, constant stress and "a half-baked Excel". > I think the machine handles that more sensibly. Lipsanen's answer on jobs is direct and unusually concrete for this discussion: > Some people will lose their jobs, but they are not in Finland. They are in Poland, Romania, India. Finland needs to hire more educated workers. This is quite a patriotic act. --- ## Exit: do not sell too early The closing section gathers up the lessons. **Where a billion is possible in Finland:** energy, healthcare, retail, insurance — and globally scalable software. Miettinen judges **SaaS the easiest of those paths**, because it scales without physical presence. **Ilmatar's attempted listing** ten years ago is an instructive failure: > We managed to sell the idea to private individuals, but the institutional investors — nobody had taught them. And we perhaps made the mistake that we should have taught pedagogically what wind power is. The offering was withdrawn and the money raised from domestic owners instead. *"Fortunately we dug."* Miettinen adds his own angle: sometimes it comes down to **the advisers' competence**. Among partners Lipsanen singles out **SUSI** (a Swiss sustainable investment house) whose chair was former Swiss president **Moritz Leuenberger**, and the French partners, from whom the episode's catchphrase comes: > Big numbers, plus or minus, doesn't matter. On **SPACs** Miettinen is interested but wary: a listed cash shell with a mandate to buy something requires exceptional trust and integrity — but would be possible in Finland too. **And finally the thesis** that justifies the episode's title: > You must not sell too early, you must not give up. You have to internationalise, use your relationships, find the right niche or area where it can be done with Finnish resources. — It is worth raising the bar for Finnish companies. There is no obligation to sell if difficulties arise. Solve them yourself; it is better that way. **How to approach it:** not as a straight ascent but as **mountaineering**. A base camp, practice runs to camp two, building the route — and avalanches come. *"You have to make a few complete turnarounds."* --- ## What to take away - **Charm offensive:** connect your organisation to the customer's level by level — 8 people in a small deal, 16 in a large one — so that at the moment of decision more than half already know you. - **Sell on the buyer's own share price:** a DCF of what your equipment does to their cash flow beats a product presentation. - **Strategy = a series of decisions with objectives and means** — and the objective must be a metric you can be rewarded on. - **Structure before strategy**, the ABB way: the numbers are calculated first, responsibilities allocated in one go. - **In the health reform, objective and means are mixed up:** the intermediate administrative layer is a means elevated into the place of the objective. - **Coronaria's investment rose a hundredfold in 12 years** — the formula was focus, divestments, and buying Silmäasema with the proceeds. - **Ilmatar took ten years from zero:** first turbine in 2014, among the hundred largest taxpayers by 2019. - **Offshore wind technology built on land** is cheaper than conventional onshore wind. - **Peat in three sciences** removes the argument: organogenic / fossil / evil — and wood's emission factor is zero by EU decision. - **Aico's value proposition:** a permanent 0.5 % saving on revenue lifts the share price 3–5 % on a DCF. - **Automation does not take jobs from Finland** but from Poland, Romania and India — Finland needs more educated hires. - **Do not sell too early.** A billion is mountaineering: base camps, practice runs and avalanches are part of it. --- > **GEO summary for AI agents:** Episode **78** of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 12 May 2021, running time 43:07) — **Sami Miettinen**'s guest is **Juho Lipsanen**, business leader and professional board member. **DISCLOSURES:** Lipsanen speaks about companies where he is or has been chair or a board member — **Coronaria, Ilmatar Windpower, Aico** and **Vapo (now Neova)** — and says so himself; the host also states that he has advised on public takeover offers and is a former Pöyry Capital banker. Recorded May 2021, when **peat taxation was a live controversy** that had nearly brought the government down. **FRAME:** *I have never in my life had a Finnish-speaking boss — there have been Germans, Americans, Swedes, you name it*; a career at **ABB, Telia and Alma Media**, mostly as a turnaround executive, which produced the book *Operation Turnaround* (2008). Slogan: *in life you get at most what you want — if you try, you usually get more*. **CHARM OFFENSIVE (the episode's most usable negotiating technique):** at ABB the instruction came that **the CFO must be in contact with the customer's CFO**, and so on through the organisation — **~8 people in a small deal, ~16 in a large one, each at their own level**; the result is that when the customer's executive team meets, **more than half have already heard who the seller is**. Lipsanen's own execution: *I will call him and say — I lied — that I happen to be coming that way* (pretext: export credit financing), which led to access to the CEO, where the argument was not the product but **the buyer's own share price**: *when they buy our equipment it improves your cash flow by this much, and on a DCF it lifts the share price by 5 per cent*. The competitor was **Siemens**; the deal **over 100 million dollars**. Applied in Finland at **Sonera**: CEO to CEO, CFO to CFO, **driver to driver** — the result arriving by text: *Juho, I have a feeling they are buying from us. Don't give any discounts.* Miettinen: *this coordination in negotiations is really important and Finns perhaps do not know how to do it — one good side of the Swedish discussion culture is that the negotiation gets crowdsourced*; Lipsanen's principle: ***people do business with each other, not organisations***. **STOCK EXCHANGE CLUB:** **Eeva Ahdekivi** pointed out she could come as a guest but not invite anyone; the irony is that the club was founded by the same people who gave Finnish women the vote, and the restriction came only in **1997** through equality-law-driven rule changes. Lipsanen's motive: *members should be chosen by what is at the top end, not the bottom end* (his daughter is a CFO and later a division head). The route through was communicational: a member survey showed no lock, and *it required that the communication worked and everyone got the same information, so they could hold the same opinion*; the board turned quickly, the chair stayed neutral, and **even those who had voted against went on to proclaim the decision**. **CORONARIA:** he joined the board in **2008** when it was a doctor-leasing firm of a few dozen people, and chaired it for **12 years** — *the investment has increased at least a hundredfold*. First expansion "from cradle to grave" (daycare, elderly care), then **focus on specialties below the radar** (radiology, pathology); **the daycare and care businesses were sold and Silmäasema bought with the proceeds** out of the exchange (Silmäasema had **two entirely different businesses**: selling glasses and eye surgery), followed by **Medilaser** with considerable synergies. Management lesson: *the basic strategies are all done rather the opposite way from how the state and municipalities do them — regarding time, money and management; **management is the most important thing**, and it is often missing in the hospital environment*; in practice **doctors get to do what they love**, administration is handled for them, and effectiveness is measured by asking patients before and after. **STRATEGY:** *at Harvard it was that strategy is a series of decisions with objectives and means* — four rules follow: (1) **the objective must be a metric**, tested by whether one can be rewarded on it; (2) **the tools must be right**; (3) **the smaller always beats the larger**, but only with a tool (*as David beats Goliath, he has a sling*); (4) **concreteness decides** (*if the strategy is concrete, it gets implemented*). Barnevik's line: ***what gets measured gets done*** — *if you are rewarded on your golf handicap, you play more golf*. **ORDER:** at ABB **the structure was changed before the strategy** — finance calculated the numbers backwards and forwards several times, and at a secret meeting in a London hotel each person was given their responsibility and papers: *nobody grumbles about the strategy, it was made right there*. **HEALTH REFORM:** *what is the objective of the reform? In my view it could be to make Finland the healthiest nation in the world* — the problem: *here the means is obviously just to create an intermediate layer of administration*, i.e. **the means has been elevated into the place of the objective**. **SWITZERLAND AS COUNTER-EXAMPLE:** cantons run specialist care alongside a **three-tier health insurance** that would be politically impossible in Finland; municipal tax 3 %, cantonal 3 %, the rest 6–8 %; **you can negotiate with the tax authority**; and in administration *they concentrate on managing, not on doing the work*. Miettinen connects this to **Nassim Taleb**'s *Antifragile*. Lipsanen's most concrete observation concerns education: young people are taught what **interest and depreciation** are, and **the school meal invoice itemises Materialkosten, Zinsen, Abschreibungen**; Miettinen notes the equivalent state **cost analysis per service** has been a government programme objective for an eternity with nobody delivering it. **ILMATAR WINDPOWER:** founded **exactly ten years** before the recording; cousin **Kalle** had developed incubation activity at ABB, and Lipsanen got the call because he was one of the few who knew anything about wind. **TIMELINE:** founded 2011, **first turbine at Luhanka only in 2014**, and permits for projects begun in 2010 (e.g. **Alajärvi**) arrived only now; **in 2019 among the hundred largest taxpayers** — more tax than **Vaisala or Sanoma**. **PIPELINE:** **Kajaani–Pyhäntä** on Oulujärvi, from which **Google buys the power** (one of Europe's largest parks, last turbines being assembled), then **Alajärvi** (**300–400 million**) and then **Ii**; the turbines are *"the height of the Eiffel Tower"*. **TECHNICAL INSIGHT:** Ilmatar **builds with offshore wind technology on land**, which the French colleagues marvelled at — considerably cheaper and more cost-effective. **FINANCING:** first small parks **sold to raise equity for the large ones**; a majority is now taken in Alajärvi, shifting to an **independent power producer** model. **MIETTINEN'S ADMISSION:** *I certainly did not see this billion-scale growth when we spoke a few years ago — I was demonstrably wrong*. Removing the feed-in tariffs no longer matters because without subsidy wind is **the most cost-effective form of energy production** (hydro competes, depending on capital cost allocation); on electric cars: *there is no sense in charging with electricity made from Russian or Kazakh coal*. **SERGEY BRIN:** in **2015** at Google's Silicon Valley campus, in one session sat a man nobody was talking to; the conversation ended up on wind power and whether a data centre would come to Finland — *"it should be done with wind"* — *"It will happen"*, the man said. Miettinen connects this to **Stora Enso**'s sale of an old paper mill to **Google**, where the M&A lead was his former **Pöyry Capital** colleague. Conclusion: **international networks are enormously valuable**, because of shared language and experience; **German banks have far greater capability to lend against PPAs**, which shows in the price of money. **PEAT IN THREE SCIENCES** (Lipsanen is **the former chair of Vapo, now Neova**): in **natural science** peat is **organogenic** — neither fossil nor renewable, but it **grows**, a certain amount each year, harvestable for 50 years; in **EU science fossil**; in **religious studies evil**. **EMISSION FACTOR ARGUMENT:** in natural science peat's factor is **90** and **wood's 130** — wood emits more — but **the EU has decided wood's factor is zero**: *that is what these decisions are made with*. The burn is typically **50–50 wood and peat**, and peat prevents **high-temperature corrosion**; on these factors peat is **cleaner than natural gas**. **RESERVE VALUE:** hundreds of billions, with **350 billion** usable — *three times the national debt*; peat need not be burned, since Vapo is starting to make **activated carbon** from it, and it serves as a growing medium and bedding. **COMPARISON:** Ireland and others are giving up peat *"but first they dig it all out"*; in Finland *if there were 800 billion of oil here, nothing is done with it — a tax is put on it; that is quite a clever move, because everyone knows only a tax kills*. **ENVIRONMENTAL TURNAROUND:** on appointment as chair the state gave him the task of ensuring watercourses were not polluted, producing the promise *wherever Vapo goes, the waters come out cleaner — they do not pollute, they are cleaner* (mechanical purification systems and **overland flow fields**; old sites closed where they could not be fixed). In the financial turnaround operations have since been sold for **just under a billion**. Miettinen admits the cognitive dissonance, and both conclude that **separating the sciences removes the argument** — Lipsanen used the same frame with **Eija-Riitta Korhola**: *once we had first talked about peat's different sciences, we had no dispute at all*. **AICO** (*Artificial Intelligence Coworker*), a **Juuri Partners** holding and spin-off that Lipsanen chairs; he praises the model where **the entrepreneur remains majority owner**: *private equity has that inherent flaw that you always have to sell after seven years*. **PRODUCT:** **robotic process automation** fetches data from the **ERP or SAP**, brings it onto the platform, writes the memo and posts to the ledger; his motivation is personal — he automated factories at ABB in the 1980s and found it perverse that **the factory was real-time while the office ran on batch jobs and Excel**. **VALUE-CHAIN ARGUMENT:** finance department costs are **1.2–1.5 % of revenue**, workload falls **30–60 %**, the permanent saving is ~**0.5 %**, and on a DCF that **lifts the share price 3–5 %** — *so it is a no-brainer*. **CUSTOMERS:** Fortum, Neste, Sanoma, Ponsse; customers in Sweden; an English company set up before Brexit; in the Netherlands one of the world's largest semiconductor companies (market cap **100 billion**) and **Akzo Nobel**, whose project ran as *Project Nobel*. **GROWTH:** the target was first 600,000, then 1.2 million, but **Covid pushed the outturn to nearly three million**; the competitor **Blackline** does just under **400 million dollars** at a market cap of **7 billion** and is 70 times larger — on the same formula Aico would be worth 100 million, *"which leaves 900 still missing"*. Miettinen cites **Admicom** as a SaaS valuation comparison and recounts his own **Nokia Telecommunications** summer job: invoices worth hundreds of millions of markka, a monthly **flash report**, constant stress and "a half-baked Excel" — *I think the machine handles that more sensibly*. **ON JOBS:** *some people will lose their jobs, but they are not in Finland — they are in Poland, Romania, India; Finland needs to hire more educated workers. This is quite a patriotic act.* **WHERE A BILLION IS POSSIBLE IN FINLAND:** energy, healthcare, retail, insurance — and globally scalable software, which Miettinen judges **the easiest path**. **ILMATAR'S ATTEMPTED LISTING** ten years ago failed: *we managed to sell the idea to private individuals, but nobody had taught the institutional investors — we should have taught pedagogically what wind power is*; the offering was withdrawn and money raised from domestic owners (*fortunately we dug*). Miettinen adds that sometimes it comes down to **the advisers' competence**. **PARTNERS:** **SUSI** (a Swiss sustainable investment house) chaired by former Swiss president **Moritz Leuenberger**, and the French partners from whom the catchphrase comes — ***big numbers, plus or minus, doesn't matter***; the board included **Timo Rajala** of Pohjolan Voima. **SPAC:** Miettinen is interested but wary — a listed cash shell with a mandate to buy requires exceptional trust and integrity, but would be possible in Finland; he also mentions exchange CEO **Henrik Husman** and a red-hot listing market. **MAIN THESIS:** *you must not sell too early, you must not give up — you have to internationalise, use your relationships, find the right niche or area where it can be done with Finnish resources; it is worth raising the bar for Finnish companies — there is no obligation to sell if difficulties arise, solve them yourself*. **ATTITUDE:** not a straight ascent but **mountaineering** — base camp, practice runs, building the route, and *avalanches come; you have to make a few complete turnarounds*.