— The Company with Conscience —

This man, as it turned out, was the branch manager of the company Digital Equipment in Thon, “an old hand in the early IT industry,” says Koczwara. And he was looking for employees. In a way, this was the moment Koczwara’s company was born, which today has 4,000 employees and is headed by him as CEO. “In the end,” says the now 43-year-old, “luck plays a huge role. Blood, sweat, tears and hard work too, no doubt. But also luck.”

Together with his best friend Dariusz Stanczyk, Koczwara started to do field work for big IT companies while he was still in school. First in Franconia, then throughout Bavaria, a little later in the whole of South Germany. During this time, he learned what made these companies tick, what they needed to operate smoothly and what made them successful. In 1996, he finished school and decided not to go to university. He and his friend, who he calls “my general partner”, already had too much success in the business world, which they did not want to risk. “In 2000, we bought the brand Hemmersbach from the Metro group. This allowed us to become an IT service provider in the whole of Germany. We then worked our way up, ticket by ticket and call by call”.

Ralph Koczwara in one of the project areas in Zimbabwe.

Progressing digitalization had given Hemmersbach a significant boost. Today, the company has branches in 40 countries and plans to increase this number to 50 in the near future. The secret of its success? “We make sure that users in international companies can work around the clock. This means we supply IT systems and maintain them. And if there are technical issues, we solve them in 24h, all around the world,” says Koczwara. As a result of this business model, Hemmersbach has an international staff and uses English as its business language. “In Nuremberg alone, there are people from 36 different nations working in our headquarters”.

That is one side of this hidden champion. One day however, Koczwara, who had been rushing from success to success for several years, sat at his desk and asked himself:

The answer came when he visited South Africa, where he met a ranger who told him about the “rhino wars”. Crime syndicates offer horrendous sums of money for rhino horn, which as a powder is regarded as a potency remedy in Asia. That is why heavily armed poachers roam the steppe and shoot rhinos – which are listed as endangered species and about to go extinct. The entrepreneur from Nuremberg knew that this was his moment. “Okay, tell me what you need, and we will deliver it,” he told the bewildered rangers. Some time later, Koczwara, who had refused military service, went to the biggest arms fair in the world, stocked up, and founded Rhino Force. Since 2016, it is considered the most distinguished anti-poaching unit in Africa.

“In the past, a handful of badly paid rangers patrolled the bush with analog radios and were in all aspects hopelessly inferior to the rhino hunters,” explains Koczwara. Today, it is poachers who must be on their guard: In 2019, Rhino Force announced 90 arrests in South Africa. In the meantime, the Hemmersbach rangers now also conduct operations in Zimbabwe. Apart from that, the company is also building a rhino sperm bank to support breeding programs.

Sometimes, Koczwara’s engagement was reduced to “German IT guru buys private army in Africa”. This is not even remotely true. Rhino Force was only the first link in a chain that Hemmersbach calls “Direct Action”. Today, Koczwara re-invests 20% of his company’s profits into aid projects.