Petr Vymer is a man of many professions and in his forty-six years he draws on his own experience, which he gradually gained in several fields at home and abroad. He currently holds position of the Managing Director and sole partner of the logistics and sales company Karnool, based in the Zdiby industrial zone on the outskirts of Prague, and in addition to the company’s management, he is engaged in several other interesting activities.

How does one become such a universal “player” as you are?

Frankly, I probably would not call myself an all-purpose person, but rather a team player. Interesting and capable people have always been my biggest inspiration. Combined with the desire to discover and learn new things, learned experience is probably what makes my professional career so diverse…

Gradually, in addition to the Czech Republic, you also gained experience in the North and Central America, both in the environment of private companies and multinational corporations…

As a young man full of life ideals, of course, I was attracted to distant and exotic regions, so I accepted an offer to work in tourism in Costa Rica. It was a huge experience. In the peak season, we all worked there not eight or twelve, but twenty hours a day. And once you finish one job, you immediately have to move on to another job and just do what is needed. In one person, you are actually a craftsman, manager, guide, lifeguard and helper for dealing with emergencies… In Costa Rica, I gradually became director of a hotel on the Pacific coast, I got married for the first time and my son was born there. But then fate took me to the United States, where I worked in construction. The first impulse was my effort to better secure my family, but working in that field in the conditions of the market in the United States turned into absolutely fascinating experience for me and an outstanding life experience. Methods of organizing work, how one work assignment follows another, focus on fulfillment of the set tasks and sense of individual responsibility or professional integrity are in the United States completely different from those I knew in the South America. And unfortunately, with today’s optics also from those in the Czech Republic…

Today you run your own company providing a comprehensive logistics service…

The path to my own company was not easy. After returning from abroad, I had no idea how much the market had changed in the Czech Republic so far, after all, 6 years are a significant period of time. However, I knew what I enjoyed and where I could probably make the best use of my experience. Therefore, I joined an established Czech private company for a few years first. The company’s management has given me the necessary space and confidence to be able to find ways to make our customer service better, more comprehensive and intuitive than those offered by our competitors. Perhaps because I was able to use everything I had learned abroad, I greatly enjoyed this job. Later, I accepted an offer from a multinational company providing professional transport and logistics services to its customers around the world as Director of Transport Services. Too soon, however, the company I worked for became the target of an acquisition of another multinational company, which instead bet on purely bureaucratic management of individual processes and reduced the space for creativity of its employees to an absolute minimum. It was an impulse for me to start looking for my own path. This is how the logistics company Karnool was founded, in which I started again from the very beginning: new clients, new work, new employees, new challenges…

What sets Karnool apart from other companies on the market?

Karnool is essentially pure essence of what I have learned in my professional career in the world and here in the Czech Republic; The basic philosophy that I applied when building my own company consists of three basic pillars: The first is my belief that in competition with giant multinational corporations, a company of our type must offer the customer an individualized service. At the same time, the services you provide must have a unique added value. Lastly, you need to make sure that the company has a sufficiently broad portfolio of services at all times and, in the event of shocks such as the current coronavirus crisis, that it is sufficiently eroded and able to withstand them as best it can.

How does your philosophy manifest itself in real practice?

I believe that these principles are clearly defined in the real functioning of my company: We try to establish partnerships with clients, rather than just pure supplier-customer relations. We help them come up with new strategies and design suitable processes for them, which we then implement together. When we offer logistics of medical and IT technology, part of our comprehensive service is their installation, commissioning and basic user training. As we are today the central warehouse of goods of one of the largest Czech producers of paints and varnishes, we have also taken on the role of a company store and mixing center for customers from Prague and the Central Bohemia region. And because I have a number of friends trading with various commodities overseas, we are the exclusive importer of a wide range of whirlpools, which we sell under our own brand Karnool. This also helps us significantly to overcome difficult periods, because when one field is doing worse, there is always a good chance that another field will be affected less or not at all.

Working in the environment of your own company obviously fulfills your expectations. But a person of your type certainly needs some extracurricular activities that would charge him.

You’re right. For me, the strongest source of energy is my wife and seven-year-old daughter. We live in the countryside just outside Prague, where we have a farm with livestock. And this is the second thing that gratifies me. I also really like riding a motorcycle, which I recently voluntarily replaced with a nostalgic car from the eighties from the youngtimer category, in which there is room for the whole family. When there is a little extra time, we are very happy to travel in it together, so we are actually looking forward to this summer when we plan to discover interesting places in the Czech Republic…