Juan Pimentel

When Juan Pimentel took over AVI-SPL’s Germany business, his first priority was not growth but delivery. The roughly €50 million operation had around 150 employees, and he focused on making project performance more predictable before pushing the commercial side.

Over the following year, on-time delivery rose from 70% to 89%, escalations fell by 80% and revenue increased by approximately 16%. Pimentel also restructured parts of the organisation, introduced new governance and processes and helped integrate Germany into AVI-SPL’s pan-European operating model. He says the achievement he values most is that performance now depends less on individual heroics and more on repeatable capability.

Leading that turnaround came with an additional challenge. Colombian-born Pimentel was managing change in Germany, in a language and business culture that were not his own. He says credibility had to be earned through competence, consistency, German-language communication and command of the numbers.

His broader argument for AV follows the same logic. Pimentel wants the industry to operate more like an industrialised service business, with standardised delivery, clearer measurement and structured progression rather than reinventing processes project by project.

His first paid job, cleaning offices in London, still influences that thinking. It taught him that the people closest to the work often understand its problems best – even when nobody asks them.