The story of Secoplan Building Systems, told by Csaba Kakucs

I wake up every morning at 4:30. No alarm. No drama. My body knows this is the hour when the day begins for a man who runs projects for BMW, Mercedes, Ferrari, and a few other European giants.

I lift weights. I feel my muscles working exactly as they should. This is the energy that keeps me on building sites for 12 to 14 hours, through cold halls, among cables as thick as my forearm. After a few minutes I hear Hajnal, my wife, coming after me. She says nothing, she just walks in and starts lifting weights.

It is one of my favourite moments of the day. The sound of her breathing next to me, two rhythms pulling together. That is what strength in a couple looks like: not many words, but shared discipline.

After the workout, I do a few lessons on Duolingo. I speak English well, but I love the quiet of those ten minutes. A mental reset before the daily chaos.

When I finish, we have coffee together. This morning routine helps us start the day with a small victory: an important, hard task already crossed off the priority list. We have three little girls, each with her own personality. I watch them at the dinner table in the evening and I know for certain: this world is about to be reshaped by them.

Secoplan was not a success story from the start. First of all, it was a choice.

My father had an electrical company. Everyone thought I would stay there. But I was "the son who leaves." Some did not understand why. It was simple: I did not want to be "my father's boy." I wanted to be Csaba, the one who charts his own course.

I started at the bottom. Very much at the bottom. And when the company reached a turnover of 200,000 euros, my ambition was already bigger than the capital. I knew two things: I did not want to be a local "jobbing" firm, and, if I was going to do something, it would be at an international level and with impeccable execution.

That is how Secoplan Building Systems began. It was me and two other guys: one I had shared a school desk with, not at all prepared, the other already seasoned by life, eager to try something new. In Barni and Dani I felt the same ambition, the same immense will to prove to everyone that we could be the best. And that was the foundation from which we started to build.

Hajnal was beside me, of course. She started as a secretary. She answered calls, drew up offers, organized the paperwork. And at the end of the day I would realize that, in fact, she was the one keeping the company standing. For years she worked from behind the curtain, but she was always present.

One day, at a workshop, she was taking notes with surgical precision. She was not learning out of curiosity. She was building her future. That is how she came to work with family business advisors, month after month, with her coffee beside her and her laptop in front of her.

Then something happened: she began to be better than me in the areas where I had no patience. Finance. Marketing. Sales. Clarity.

I was out in the field with Barni and Dani, who had in the meantime become real strategists and leaders. We fought on the building sites, trained "warriors," crossed borders, stole the trade from the biggest companies that served as our benchmark. And when I came home with ideas that were beyond me, Hajnal would take a deep breath and come up with the solution: how to turn them into reality. She developed structures, systems, processes.