Ondřej Prucha: from “I’ll pick up German” to a 15 bn crown developer

In just three years, the development company Svoboda & Prucha has delivered fourteen residential projects worth a combined 15 billion crowns. One of its co-founders, Ondřej Prucha, told the Forbes conference in Karlovy Vary how a civil engineer who barely spoke German grew into a developer aiming to compete with the market leaders in Prague and Brno.

Prucha, 37, began his career with a job ad: a German firm was looking for a builder who spoke German. “I’m a builder, I can communicate, and German? I’ll pick it up,” he recalls. He drove to the interview in an old Škoda Fabia, only to find that the other candidates and the managing director were speaking German among themselves and he understood almost nothing. So he stepped out of his comfort zone: in broken German he announced that he was the only foreigner there and asked them to speak more slowly. The managing director walked in and said, “Welcome to the company, you won the competition.”

A school of entrepreneurship in someone else’s company

He first worked as a secretary for half a year, then spent six years building a retail and store network in Czechia. According to Prucha, it was more like entrepreneurship “with an investor behind you”: he found and implemented solutions himself and had to convince the owner of every new step. Once everything was running smoothly, he lost interest, as the business had turned into corporate routine. When he left, management told him he had behaved as if the firm belonged to him. Prucha stresses, though, that he was simply following the director’s instruction to treat the business as if he were working for himself.

From JRD to his own company

In 2019, Prucha joined the development group JRD, then headed by chief executive Martin Svoboda, who had brought it into the ten largest players on the market. Over three years Prucha led projects from land purchase to handing over flats to clients, managed teams and budgets and successfully negotiated with authorities, including on changes to zoning plans. Then he received a notice of dismissal, with the same familiar remark that he had treated the projects as his own.

Both Prucha and Svoboda left JRD and together founded their own firm, soon joined by their former colleague Pavel Fridrýšek. They managed to buy out some projects from the previous developer and continue them, which shortened the time needed to get the company going; several buildings are already nearing completion.

Plans: a big company with a small team

Today Svoboda & Prucha employs 25 people, and what began as a small start-up has grown into a full structure with acquisition, finance, sales and project management departments. The goal is to build a large company able to compete with developers in Prague and Brno. The founders want to do it on a “lean firm” principle: a large volume of work with a small, efficient team in which people treat the business as their own.

By the Around Prague newsroom