The Billion-Dollar Workaround

When available American die-casting machines failed to meet Bühler's requirements, the Swiss milling company built its own, producing its first machine in 1927.

That internal workaround grew into a business whose technology now touches roughly half the world's new cars, inside a fifth-generation family enterprise generating CHF 3 billion a year.

Most executives treat a vendor's failure to deliver as a procurement problem to route around quietly, then forget once a workaround appears.

This instinct treats capability as a cost absorbed rather than an asset that compounds, discarding the very friction that could seed an entirely new line of business decades later.

Building legacy through forced self-reliance requires treating an internal fix as a candidate business rather than a rounding error, deliberately asking whether today's stopgap could serve tomorrow's customers.

In 1927, a family-owned Swiss miller could not buy the machine it needed, so it built one instead, and that decision now reaches half the world's new cars.

Case Study: How Bühler Forged a Second Business From a Blocked Purchase

Adolf Bühler was 38 years old in 1860 when he founded a cast-iron foundry beside the Uze river in what would become Uzwil, eastern Switzerland. The foundry began with two employees and a first-year output of 23 tons of iron castings, most destined for the region's textile and embroidery mills rather than food companies.

Nothing about the founding hinted at a future in flour, chocolate, or automobiles: Bühler cast rolls for other people's machines, a modest subcontractor in a country already dense with metalworkers.

Growth came gradually and mechanically. Bühler began building its own roller mills in the 1870s, delivered its first complete flour mill around 1890, and by 1900 employed 717 factory workers and 72 office staff. By 1920, its workforce had grown to 1,400.

The company also opened offices in Paris, Milan, and Naples before the century's turn, selling milling machinery into a global market it had never set out to serve when Adolf Bühler was still casting rolls for embroidery looms.

The defining moment arrived not from ambition but from a purchasing failure. Die-casting technology had emerged in the United States around 1920, but available machines failed to meet Bühler's requirements. In 1927, the company produced its first die-casting machine in Uzwil instead.

What began as a workaround for an internal problem became an entirely new business.

Bühler kept developing the capability. What started as machinery built for its own needs evolved into a dedicated operation supplying die-casting systems to customers around the world.

Today, nearly a century of accumulated expertise sits behind a business serving industries far removed from the flour mills that originally created the need.

The workaround eventually reached extraordinary scale. Bühler's die-casting technology now produces powertrain components for roughly half of all new cars worldwide, while its machines also manufacture large structural castings for the automotive industry.

What started as a machine Bühler couldn't buy now competes for orders in an industry its founder never served.

The parent company has scaled alongside it. In 2024, Bühler Group reported CHF 3.0 billion in turnover and CHF 189 million in net profit, while its equity ratio rose for a sixth consecutive year to 52.8%. The company employed roughly 12,350 people across more than 140 countries.

Milling Solutions alone added more than 30,000 tonnes of daily wheat-milling capacity over three years, while Advanced Materials now sits alongside the Grains & Food business that grew from Adolf Bühler's original roller casting.

None of this compounding happened under outside shareholders demanding quarterly proof of a decades-long engineering bet.

Jeannine, Maya, and Karin Bühler hold the company in its fifth generation, continuing an ownership structure that allowed capabilities to develop over timelines far longer than a typical investment cycle.

A capability built to solve one generation's problem survived long enough to become another generation's growth engine.

The paradox is that the division built to unblock an internal bottleneck now serves an industry the founder never entered.

For leaders who treat every stalled purchase as an inconvenience to solve and forget, Bühler's die-casting business poses an uncomfortable question: how many of today's internal workarounds are quietly becoming tomorrow's second business because no one stopped to ask whether the fix itself was worth selling?

From Buying the Fix to Growing the Capability

1. Recast a Vendor's Refusal Into an R&D Roadmap

Conventional procurement treats a supplier's failure to deliver as a problem to route around, not a strategic signal.

Amazon faced internal infrastructure strain in the early 2000s that pushed engineers to build their own compute and storage systems rather than rely on inadequate off-the-shelf capacity, work that became Amazon Web Services.

By 2024, AWS generated $39.8 billion in operating income, more than the $25 billion produced by the North America retail business that originally needed the fix. The stopgap outgrew the problem it was built to solve.

2. Encode Founding Trust as a Balance-Sheet Asset

Most partnerships treat trust as sentiment, referenced in a mission statement but absent from any ledger. GS Caltex has operated as a 50-50 joint venture between Chevron and Korea's GS family since 1967, a relationship its fourth-generation CEO Saehong Hur describes as a marriage sustained through good years and difficult ones.

The trust itself became the switching cost: a partner supplying a quarter of Korea's fuel market through roughly 2,500 service stations has no comparable alternative to rebuild that inheritance from scratch.

3. Recover, Revive, Renew: Treat Old Craft as Feedstock

Most companies file institutional memory away as nostalgia once a product line matures, rather than reopening it as raw material for the next one. Family business researchers describe a recover-revive-renew sequence for exactly this kind of reuse.

Nintendo followed it by accident, redirecting the distribution network and manufacturing precision developed by a Kyoto playing-card maker founded in 1889 into toys during the 1960s, then video games in the 1970s. The capability outlived the product it was originally built to serve.

4. Let the Failed Project Fund the Unplanned One

Most research pipelines discard an experiment the moment it misses its original brief.

In 1968, 3M chemist Spencer Silver was tasked with inventing a stronger adhesive and instead produced a reusable, low-tack one with no obvious use, shelved for years until colleague Art Fry adapted it into a bookmark, then a note.

The adhesive that failed its brief became Post-it Notes. What looks like waste inside one project brief is often inventory for a project nobody has proposed yet.

From strategy to legacy

There is a particular humility required to admit that a solution built for oneself might be worth more than the problem it solved.

Organizations mastering that humility stop discarding internal fixes the moment the immediate shortage disappears. What internal workaround has already outgrown the inconvenience that created it?

The most durable businesses are not always the ones a founder set out to build, but the ones assembled quietly from internal fixes nobody thought to sell, until the fix outgrew the company that needed it first.

- Legacy Beyond Profits