Podcast „Alles neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum“

Every third car on German roads drives with a Kroschke plate. Elfriede and Martin Kroschke pressed the first license plates in the 1950s and sold them out of a VW Beetle. Today, Christoph Kroschke Holding is based in Ahrensburg near Hamburg, operates 400 branches across the country, employs 1900 people and generated sales of around 100 million euros in 2023. The family business has long since become an all-round provider of car-related services: Kroschke prints and stores vehicle registration documents, stores duplicate keys for car rental companies, operates registration offices - and still embosses license plates. The brothers Philipp and Felix Kroschke are the third generation to run the company. They have to transform the core business. How processes relating to registration and license plates can be digitalized is the major challenge now facing the company, which the Kroschkes also call the "Paypal of registration".

"The next ten years will be crucial for the existence of the company" says Felix Kroschke in the podcast. He describes the pain of the slow digitalization of the registration system in Germany as follows: "If I have a complex and nerve-wracking physical process and try to map it digitally, then it becomes a nerve-wracking digital process." Felix Kroschke wants to become less important in the family business over the next few years. In the interview, he also talks about erratic political decisions, the challenges of cultural change in companies and license plates as a national asset - in the podcast "Alles Neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum” with Tobias Rappers, Managing Director of Maschinenraum, and Capital editor Katja Michel.

How can the origin and future of Mittelstand companies be courageously united? What are the challenges facing family businesses and what experiences do they gather in digital transformation? These questions are answered by “Alles neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum“, the interview podcast for German Mittelstand*. Once a month, Tobias Rappers, Managing Director of Maschinenraum, and Nils Kreimeier, Senior Editor of the business magazine Capital, talk to thought leaders and makers from the heart of the German economy and focus on the personalities and their motivation. *The podcast is in German.

For more episodes of “Alles neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum“ please click here!