The start of a new chapter.
The merger in 1998.
1998 is perhaps the most important year in the company's history. It was the year that the previously separate Crailsheim and Göppingen sites were merged in a major joint effort and the entire company was restructured. Until then, the locations within the company family had maintained a kind of fraternal rivalry, which had been normal at LEONHARD WEISS for decades. But let's start at the beginning.
The history of the Crailsheim site begins with the founder of the company, Leonhard Weiß himself. At the end of the 1920s, when he was looking for new business areas outside of Göppingen, his attention was drawn to the Hohenlohe region, where a new marshalling yard was being built – the "turnstile to the East". During this work, Leonhard Weiß established a foothold in Crailsheim and decided to set up a branch there to develop the markets in northeast Württemberg and Bavaria.
Leonhard Weiß did not live to see his plans come to fruition. After his death, his son-in-law Werner Schmidt senior and his widow Ottilie Weiß took charge of setting up the new company. When his son Walter Weiss returned from the war in 1945, the companys succession was complicated. The long-term solution was to divide the family lines between the two locations: Werner Schmidt senior looked after the Crailsheim site and Walter Weiss the Göppingen site.
When the next generation, Werner Schmidt-Weiss and Ulrich Weiss, joined the company in the mid-1960s, this division became more pronounced. A rivalry developed between the locations and the cousins, but it was always friendly and fair and ultimately spurred everyone on to improve.
There were two young civil engineers whose grandfather had founded the company. Because we were independent, there was a certain amount of competition, and that was a good thing! As a result, both branches have become stronger and stronger.
Occasionally, however, a customer would receive two quotations from LEONHARD WEISS – one from Crailsheim and one from Göppingen. In the end, however, it was not only such paradoxical situations but also several developments that led to the decision that it was time to end the division. On the one hand, the concentration process in the construction industry is accelerating and combined resources are needed to be successful in the future. On the other hand, the jointly developed mission statement is bringing the branches closer together. Finally, Ulrich Weiss and Werner Schmidt-Weiss wanted to find a good arrangement for the future of their family business.
The decision is turned into a concrete plan. And this plan provides for a complete restructuring: Duplicate business areas were merged into divisions and, for the first time in the companys history, three managing directors were appointed who were not shareholders. Dieter Straub is responsible for Engineering and Turnkey Construction, Volker Krauss for Road and Network Construction and Wilhelm Wüst for Central Services. Werner Schmidt-Weiss is appointed Chairman of the Board of Management, and Ulrich Weiss is appointed Deputy Chairman and Managing Director of Track Construction.
Understandably, the shareholders were more emotional about some issues. Sometimes the three of us nonexecutive directors had to leave and wait for them to agree on how to proceed behind closed doors. But we resolved it well, and today we can consider ourselves fortunate to have chosen this path. Because from then on it was all uphill.
What remains after the merger is the will to improve: with combined resources, motivation and experience, the family-owned company is tackling ever larger projects. Since 1998, turnover has doubled every ten years, rising steadily from around 300 million in 1998 to over 2 billion today: LW now employs more than 7,500 people (2024). The common mission statement and the strong identification with LEONHARD WEISS keep everyone together – even in the difficult times of transition.
When the merger came about, a giant stone fell from my heart. We were organised differently and we were also different people. We in Hohenlohe were a very rural area. In Göppingen, on the other hand, there was large-scale industry as a catchment area for Stuttgart. The fact that we came together to form a company was the highlight for me.