Petri Kontiola tries life after the rink with wamo
Antoni: Before we get to the campaign, what does life actually look like now?
Petri: Different. Good different. Golf takes up more of my week than I expected, which apparently happens to everyone. I still get on the ice sometimes but it's different when there's no game on Friday. You go because you feel like it, not because you have to.
Three small businesses, one recently retired hockey player
Antoni: So we put you behind a coffee machine. How did that go?
Petri: Not well. In hockey someone gives you the puck and you know where the net is. Behind a coffee machine there are twelve buttons and someone wants oat milk at a very specific temperature. I have a lot more respect for people who do that every morning.
Antoni: Was there a moment in any of the three where you thought, actually, I could do this?
Petri: Maybe the first five minutes each time. Then something went wrong.
What struck me though, and I kept thinking about this afterwards, is how much skill is sitting behind what looks simple from the outside. A café, a plumbing job, an office. Those people are solving problems all day. I mostly created new ones.
Ten jobs before lunch
Antoni: That's not a bad description of running a small business actually.
Petri: That's what I kept coming back to. In hockey you have a whole team around you. Coach, physio, equipment manager. A small business owner is doing ten jobs themselves before lunch and there's nobody to hand any of it to. Customers, suppliers, invoices, staff. It's a lot.
Antoni: Which is more or less why we made the campaign.
Small businesses are the backbone of Finland but financial services still make life unnecessarily complicated for them. Our view is simple, the entrepreneur should be running their business, not wrestling with their banking. Account, cards, POS, international payments, all in one place, working quietly in the background.
Petri: Which suits me perfectly. If I'm working in your business, you need something reliable running quietly behind me.
Antoni: We might actually put that on a poster.
Petri: "Petri might not work. wamo will."
Antoni: That's the poster.
Equipment either works or it doesn't
Antoni: More seriously, you spent your whole career in an environment where equipment either works or it doesn't. Does the wamo idea land for you?
Petri: Completely. You don't want to be on the ice wondering if your skates were sharpened. You want to be thinking about the game. I imagine it's the same for someone running a restaurant. You didn't open a restaurant because you enjoy payment systems. That part just needs to work and stay out of the way.
Antoni: That's exactly what Laske wamon varaan means to us. The financial side of your business should be something you can stop thinking about.
Someone is going to hire you, by the way. Finnish business owners can apply at palkkaapetri.fi and you'll spend a working day at the winner's company. How are you feeling about that?
Petri: Worse than before we filmed, honestly. But I'll show up. Ideally they run a hockey shop.
Antoni: No promises.
Petri: Then one request. Make sure they're already using wamo. At least one of us should know what's going on.
wamo builds business accounts, cards, POS and international payments into one place for Finland's entrepreneurs, so running the business stays the hard part, not the banking.
