From employee to employer , the other life of Angelo Rossetti

 Try. It is a verb that Angelo Rossetti knows very well: not only because he has been responsible for the " trials" department of Franco Tosi, the historic, but nowadays in a profound crisis, steel plant in Legnano; also because 15 years ago Rossetti did the "trial of trials": a jump in the dark to start his own business and beat the first signs of the recession, being successful to revive his department with other four partners ( Angelo Rossetti in the picture, taken from a frame of a video interview on Leganonews).

It is a story of success that took the name of the factory in crisis: also the company where Rossetti possesses a share is named Tosi, but that name is the acronym of Tecnici Organizzati al Servizio delle Imprese (Technicians Organized for Companies’ Services): " Laboratorio T.O.S.I. srl, indeed.

" I was responsible for the department where we used to test the materials, and the company began to go wrong: choices and strategies that,in my opinion were wrong, lead us to an wages guarantee fund, that I had the disgrace to suffer" he said to us on the phone," at that point we, other colleagues and I, decided to become businessmen of ourselves: now we’ve done it".

These were expert, skilled workers who lost their trust in the company in which they worked; but who had to continue their life: children, family. “Certainly we didn’t want a start-up, maybe at that time they didn’t even have this name. We looked for two things: a job and money,” says the businessman who came back a few days ago from a business trip in Singapore. “Today this company gives work to 12 people; 5 of whom are partners. The other 7 are workers, some of whom renounced a higher salary, and we are talking about € 150-200 more every month, to work here. But now they’re undertaking a dynamic reality in which you don’t have to clock in or clock out, in which you can freely surf the Internet, and that asks for flexibility and diligence.”

What do they do in these laboratories? “We do tests on materials,” Rossetti explains, “and our customers work mainly in the field of ‘oil and gas’. We avoid the Public Administration and the automotive sectors. The 95% of our customers is Italian, who in turn supply the basic needs which are mainly foreign. There is a lot of innovation and very few outstanding debts.” This is godsend , in a time like this where bad loans and customers who don’t pay are the rule.

The company’s turnover is between 2.5 and 3 million per year. It has also an infrastructure which has turned out to be winning: Malpensa. “We’re open to the Asian markets, like with the Malaysian Exxon Mobil, that chose us, together with another Italian company, as a qualified test laboratory. We have a customer in Singapore who sends the samples for the tests by airplane; they arrive with more punctuality that those sent from Vicenza.”

As for the future, Rossetti is optimistic ; he has an 18-years-old son to whom he will pass the baton, “I’m 58…certainly, if I was twenty less…”