How Michal Irzek grew coffee brand Aromaniac to 180m crowns

Czech entrepreneur Michal Iržek spent nearly twenty years building his coffee business Aromaniac, growing the company's turnover to 180 million crowns at the peak of the pandemic. But when he sat down to put together the financial statements, he found an unpleasant surprise: the firm was eight million crowns in the red, and he hadn't even noticed it happening.

“Not having financial statements is foolish, but not having them with a turnover of 180 million is suicide,” the entrepreneur candidly admits — a lesson that cost him dearly. According to him, a drop in revenue is easy to spot, but noticing that something inside the company is going wrong is far harder.

The trouble began in 2020, when Iržek decided to step back from running the processes the company had spent years building and hand the reins to experienced hired managers. “I thought I'd bring in experienced managers who'd run things their own way, better than my system could. That's exactly what broke everything,” he admits. The entrepreneur had always felt that working with and managing people was his weakest point, which is why he wanted to hand that function to others.

Still, as he himself stresses, the responsibility for the failures was his own: the wrong people in the wrong positions, a mismatch between people and roles, and realizing far too late that the system wasn't working. After three years of losses, the 38-year-old businessman managed to bring the company back into modest profit by rethinking his approach to management and returning to the model of a small, tightly run firm.

Iržek's path in business began back in high school, selling goods through online shops — he would launch one project, sell it, buy the next, improve it, and sell it again. The coffee online shop that later became Aromaniac was already his fourth business — he was just 21 at the time and paid less than half a million crowns for it, only to later discover that the previous owner had cheated him with falsified accounting.

That experience gave him extra motivation to dig in even harder and earn back the money he'd invested. Today, having come through the crisis and rethought its management approach, Aromaniac is betting on efficiency and the use of artificial intelligence in the traditional business of roasting and selling coffee.