Reykjavík Grapevine - 06.12.2013, Qupperneq 6

6The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 18 — 2013
Business | Women
“If we found a suitable
man, with the right
skills, we would hire
him. But I think that
would take a very con-
fident and self-assured
man. There is a dy-
namic here with these
women.”
The very centre of the Marz Seafood headquar-
ters in Stykkishólmur is pillared by a tall shelf,
stacked with books by female writers, Annie Lei-
bowitz’s photography collection “Women” and a
big tablet of female body paintings titled “The Nude.”
It is a bright and totally open space save
for one private office, and even that door
is left open. It belongs to Erla Björg
Guðrúnardóttir, who started Marz Sea-
food in 2003. Over the last ten years it
has become the only entirely female-run
seafood exporting company in Iceland
and one of the most successful in an
industry dominated four to one by men.
My girls
Forty-one-year-old Erla calls the five
females she runs Marz with ‘her girls’
and she speaks of them with the same
level of affection and adoration as she
does of her three daughters, who are
also ‘her girls.’ This could be because
there is no distinction between the
employees of Marz and her family—
they are one-in-the-same. “I take care
of my girls,” Erla says. “I treat them
with respect. I want them to marry
me when they come to work.”
They share a catered lunch every-
day where they talk about everything
from a daughter’s singing career to
business strengths to an upcoming
trip to Burma. They take a break for
fresh juice midday; they go out for
drinks on weekends and take a group
trip together once a year. They’ve run
a marathon, climbed a mountain and
completed a triathlon together. They
are a dynamic group of women from
different backgrounds and of ages
that differ by up to twenty years.
“I think I have a mixture of very
tough women; they are not typical
women,” Erla says.
Fast growth
Tough and atypical were part of Erla’s
upbringing in a fairly poor and un-
peaceful family in Reykjavík’s Breiðholt
district, from which she was driven
to be independent. When she was 15,
she moved away from home with her
boyfriend and had a daughter shortly
after. They were together for five years
and Erla lived an accelerated adoles-
cence. “When I look at my daughter
today, 15 going on 16, and I think of
her leaving home and moving in with
a boyfriend and cooking and pretend-
ing to be 40—I wouldn’t want that for
her, but I think it largely explains how
I am today.”
When she was 24-years-old, she
met her husband Sigurður Ágústsson,
who grew up in Stykkishólmur and ran
a salted-fish-production factory there.
They moved to his hometown and, in
her disinterest in the handful of cleri-
cal and administrative positions at
banks and shops in the town of 1,100
people, she enrolled in a business ad-
ministration programme at Reykjavík
University. She completed her educa-
tion in two-and-a-half years, most of
the time remotely from Stykkishól-
mur, with occasional stretches of up
to three-weeks in Reykjavík study-
ing and taking exams while her hus-
band watched their then one-year-old
daughter.
At university, a teacher asked the
120 people in one of her business
classes which of them wanted to run
their own company. The male-female
divide in the room was about 40:60
and nearly all of the men raised their
hands. Only Erla and a few other wom-
en raised theirs.
“I had always wanted my own
company, that was nothing new. So I
founded this and gave it a name that
had an international ring to it—Marz
Seafood,” Erla explains.
No small fish
Fish, a passion and resource-driven way
of life in Stykkishólmur, became her pas-
sion too. She got started with 1,000,000
ISK ($8,238.86 USD) of her savings and
began buying and selling cheaper sea-
food products that the big companies
didn’t want to deal with. She needed to
gain the trust of producers, who started
by selling her one pallet of fish at a time.
It wasn’t until several years had passed
that Marz began buying fish from Sig-
urður’s production factory.
In 2004, the company’s second year,
Erla hired the first ‘girl’ to help her
manage all of the accounts. By this time
she was selling to different traders, su-
permarkets and industrial companies
in Europe—most places but the UK.
“Icelanders sell most of their fish to the
UK,” Erla says. “So when we were start-
ing, nobody wanted a new player in that
market, and I had to find other markets
that people didn’t want to put so much
effort into.”
She began selling to Italy and
France and ran the operation out of a
25-square-metre loft above Sigurður’s
factory. She took on more employees,
all women, and expanded to a second
office in Denmark, staffed by two girls
year round. In 2010, she moved into the
new space in central Stykkishólmur, a
400-square-metre converted post office.
She hired a man once but it was a brief
engagement. Beyond that, all of her em-
ployees were, and are, women.
It’s business and it’s personal
“I think when you reach a point of three
or four [women], it’s very hard for a man
to come into the group. I mean, if we
found a suitable man, with the right
skills, we would hire him. But I think
that would take a very confident and
self-assured man. There is a dynamic
here with these women,” Erla says.
She’s never been at the receiving
end of off-the-cuff remarks about her
all female staff and she even had one
producer tell her he would stop working
with her if she hired men. “I think gen-
der is such an obsolete idea though,”
she says. “You can have very masculine
women, very feminine men.”
Erla identifies as a feminist because
she fundamentally believes in equal
rights. This is not a value that is held in
all of the countries where she does busi-
ness. Regardless, Marz has been able to
break into markets where conservative
gender roles are still valued. “What it
comes down to,” she explains, “is—do
you have the product they want? Do you
have the price they want? Then they get
over it. I could probably grow faster in
some of those countries if I had men, but
we’re still doing business with them.”
Erla does acknowledge two quali-
ties that stand out among an all-female
workforce: empathy and intuition.
When she talks with her producers,
it tends to be more personal. “We ask
them about their kids and their fami-
lies,” she says, “I’m not talking with
them about football; we connect on a
different level.”
She is also largely driven by a gut
instinct she sees as inherently female.
“I use my intuition a lot when I’m do-
ing business and I think that is a pro for
women, being able to use that gut feel-
ing. I know that’s not something you
can measure or prove, but I’ve learned
over the years to trust it,” she says.
Alternatively, she sees less risk-tak-
ing among an all-female company.
“Girls in general are more risk
averse than men and sometimes it can
be limiting,” Erla says. “I just don’t
jump into things. I want to be certain,
I want to be sure that what I’m doing is
the correct, right thing to do.”
Regardless of gender, “If you don’t
have the right people to back you up,
then your company is not going to
work,” she says.
Sign of a great leader
The power structure at Marz is fairly
linear. Beyond Erla’s role as the head
and face of the company, she works
closely with the other employees and
encourages them to think as indepen-
dent innovators.
“We have very lax power here. The
girls choose their own titles. If the lo-
gistics girl wants to be ‘manager of
logistics’ or ‘director of logistics’ it
doesn’t matter, really.”
Erla subscribes to the notion that
great leaders should surround them-
selves with people different and even
cleverer than themselves—in Erla’s case,
a variety of clever and diverse women. “I
don’t believe in a great hierarchy,” she
explains. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve
worked with me for nine years or six
months. It’s about whether or not you
can deliver what you say you’re going to
deliver, about how hard you work.”
After ten years, Erla has learned that
the most steadfast way to get a foothold
in this industry is with respect earned
through knowledge above all else.
“I think that me and the girls,” she
says, “when we sit down at a meeting,
as soon as we open our mouths, people
listen. That’s not about being male or
female. We know what we’re talking
about and we know what we’re doing.”
In Iceland’s Fish Industry,
The Women Are From Marz
One seafood company stands
out among the men
— Alex Baumhardt
Marz
Continues over
With the holiday season upon us, it’s
time for a little old fashioned Icelandic
hospitality. It seems that visitors from
the UK are the most susceptible to
our charms, with 53,000 British
tourists visiting Iceland in October
alone. Iceland has welcomed an
astounding 700,000 travellers from all
over the world since the beginning of
this year, so it stands to reason that we
know how to show folks a good time.
While some esteemed visitors get the
royal treatment, certain locals have
not been treated so well. Take, for
instance, the 39 employees of RÚV,
Iceland’s national broadcasting
service, who were laid off without
warning (21 others will soon
be let go). In a press release, Páll
Magnússon, the director of RÚV,
stated that these cuts were prompted
by the new state budget proposal.
However, these budget cuts will not
be confirmed for sure until the end of
December. The lay-offs sparked sev-
eral well-attended protests organised
by outraged citizens who—recalling
comments by several MPs that RÚV is
biased towards EU membership and
that the station receives “an abnormal
amount of money”—believe that they
were “politically fueled.”
Iceland also experienced a sad first in
its history this month when police shot
and killed a man who had opened
fire from his apartment in the Árbær
neighborhood in Reykjavík. Two
policemen were shot and wounded
by the man, who they tried to subdue
with tear gas before shooting him. The
man later died from his injuries. This
is the first time that a civilian has
been shot and killed by Icelandic
police.
Customers of Vodafone, one of the
country’s primary telecommunications
companies, experienced another
dubious “first” in Iceland’s history.
Following a website break-in perpe-
trated by a group of Turkish hackers,
the passwords, text messages, and
personal information of over 70,000
Vodafone customers—including MPs
and government ministers—were pub-
lished online. The attack was possible
because Vodafone had not encrypted
passwords and, in contravention of
Icelandic law, was also storing com-
munications data that was more than
six months old. With 300 MB of data
stolen, this attack is the largest
cyber attack that Iceland has ever
experienced.
It seems that many people aren’t inter-
ested in keeping the private, well, pri-
vate (or should we say their *privates*
private…). A recent survey conducted
NEWS IN BRIEF
NOVEMBER
by Larissa Kyzer
NEWS IN BRIEF
NEWS IN