CEO Zbyněk Frolík founded Linet in 1990, only a few months after the fall of the communist government in his home country, The Czech Republic. A decade before that, he’d fallen in love with being a business owner and entrepreneur after founding and running a flower shop in the 80s. With experience in health care yet no formal business education, Zbyněk decided to fill a gap in the market and founded Linet, which supplies hospital beds to the industry.
Zbyněk has built his business on the back of hard work and learning from his mistakes, growing it from a small start-up to a global player in the market, with more than 1,200 employees and branches across Europe and
North America.
Zbyněk spoke to The CEO Magazine about building the company, his plans for expansion, and the future of the healthcare industry.
The CEO Magazine: Can you give an overview of your professional background, including your current role with Linet?
Zbyněk: Originally, I studied cybernetics at Czech Technical University, then in the 70s I was part of a team responsible for operating a mainframe computer in the Academy of Sciences in Czech Republic.
I was introduced to health care in the late 80s, while Czechoslovakia was still ruled by communist regime. I worked as director of the technical department in the university hospital in Prague—the biggest hospital in our country—and was responsible for a large project of building a unique system for automated transfers of hospital beds between individual wards. This project brought me an opportunity to gain know-how about hospital bed construction.