Setbacks and an overdraft running dry

Jørgen Læssøe rarely gets angry, but on that day around the turn of the millennium, he had had enough. The overdraft fell short because Novo Nordisk hadn't paid a large invoice that got stuck in paperwork somewhere. Something had to be done, so Jørgen Læssøe put on his red scarf and drove out to Novo Nordisk, where he explained the situation to the receptionist:

"I want my money, and I'm going to sit here and wait until I get it."

When the surprised receptionist finally realized that Jørgen Læssøe was serious, she started making calls around the organization. Finally, they managed to mobilize a director with the authority to write a check for the amount due, and Jørgen Læssøe was able to drive home again with the money he needed to keep the company afloat. 

“Twenty-five years later, there are still people at Novo who talk about that time when the man with the red scarf sat waiting in the reception area for most of a day to get his money. They had never experienced anything like that before,” says Kenn Hansen. 

With the back against the wall

For the past 25 years, JLI has been a profitable business, with the exception of one year, and has built up a healthy equity base, but before 2000, the company regularly found itself with its back against the wall.

As a project-based company, JLI has had to manage natural fluctuations in revenue, and at times the overdraft balance has been dangerously low. 

"At one point, we were in a situation where we couldn't pay our monthly salaries. So some of us agreed to defer our salary payments for a month in the expectation that a payment would come in. Jørgen put his neck on the line and said it would come. He had to pay the mortgage on his house himself, so he couldn't wait for his salary, and we accepted that. We managed to turn it around every time, but we were running on fumes," says Henrik Birk. 

A failed Korean adventure

When you live to take on difficult tasks that have not been solved before, you face a natural risk of failure. JLI has lost money on several tasks, but not to the extent of the Korean adventure with Samsung around 2014. 

"We were given a task by Samsung to inspect mobile phones, and it was really exciting. No one in Korea could solve it, but we thought we could. However, it turned out to be a complete disaster. They kept changing course constantly. They were continually redesigning the mobile phones, and they had to. But when you need to develop something to inspect a product that you don't know what it will look like, you have to guess a lot and make changes all the time. There was one year when we spent DKK 250,000 solely on plane tickets to Korea. And when they changed course once again, I had to say stop, and we withdrew from the project. The six million Danish kroner we had was pretty much gone. We had spent it all on that adventure. But we had learned from it, and we slowly worked our way back up again," says Jørgen Læssøe.