THE FOUNDER HANS STAEGER.

Entrepreneur, visionary, networker.

Great entrepreneurs are always well ahead of their time. This applies particularly to the founder of OCTANORM, Hans Staeger. He didn't just have a visionary instinct for devising ground-breaking products, he drove forward developments such as sustainability, globalization and networking long before these terms ever became an issue for most companies.

Hans Staeger's career didn't begin at an elite university, instead it emerged from the chaos of the Second World War. In 1944 when he was just 16 years old he was conscripted to serve in the mountain infantry. At an age when young men are normally preparing for their school-leaving examinations, he then found himself a prisoner of the Americans. After being released in 1946 he was sent on a march across Germany. It was on this march however that he got to know the woman to whom he remained married until his death, and with whom he had three sons. Like many of the key entrepreneurs who were to become the drivers of Germany's legendary "economic miracle", Hans Staeger was a self-made man. After a short stay in what was then Russianoccupied East Germany, he moved to Swabia where he began to build a new life as a carpenter. It was in this period that Hans, a Berliner by birth, became especially fond of the people of Swabia who are renowned for their hard work. Eleven years after the end of the war Staeger passed his final exam as a carpenter and immediately took over the operational management of a company called "Raumtechnik" in Untertürkheim. Two years later he became a partner in the company. Over the following years he worked with Manfred Malzacher on developing the RTS shelf construction system, which was included in the exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in New York a few years later. Meanwhile he had devoted himself completely to the trade fair sector, and in 1963 he became a founding member of the Fachverband Messeund Ausstellungsbau (FAMAB) – the German trade fair and exhibition federation. Then in 1969 he founded OCTANORM.
 

Although Staeger KG Raumtechnik had by then become one of the most important trade fair companies in Germany, he soon sold his shares in order to avoid any conflicts of interest and so that he could concentrate fully on OCTANORM. From the outset he was an entrepreneur who attached great importance to networking – and this soon spanned the globe. On pages 8 and 9 you can read about all his other achievements in the period from then until 1995 when he left the company. The fact that under his leadership OCTANORM grew into a company which now operates in over 80 countries around the world is probably due to several factors. Staeger's inventiveness is just as responsible for this as his special negotiation skills and his talent for building links with people – and successfully maintaining those links for decades. In his private life too he was passionate about technology, and he loved beautiful cars, and also high-class clocks – which he actually wrote a book about after leaving OCTANORM.

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