Ballaré: a pact between business leaders and entrepreneurs to help the country grow

‘It is true that we are facing a complex geopolitical situation, but Italia has been experiencing moderate growth, in the region of 0.x per cent, for a long time now; the latest Istat forecasts indicate GDP growth of around 0.6% for 2025 and 0.8% for 2026, driven mainly by domestic demand. Our country is also too exposed to the international situation, particularly on the energy front.” Marco Ballaré, president of Manageritalia, who took the helm of the service sector managers a couple of years ago, wants to address an audience far wider than the 47,000 members he represents at the assembly taking place today and tomorrow in Milan. His target audience is shareholders and institutions: ‘We need a pact between entrepreneurs, managers and institutions to break out of the zero-point-something growth we find ourselves in,’ he says.

The number of managers in the service sector is rising; every year, the Manageritalia association grows by between 3% and 4%, but, as Ballarè points out, ‘that’s not enough – we need to grow more. The issue is not that the Italian business landscape consists mainly of SMEs, but that only 30% of our SMEs have a manager who is not the entrepreneur, a figure far below the 80% seen in countries such as France, Germany and Spain. If we do not professionalise our businesses, we will fail to seize opportunities for growth. We have good ideas but we do not know how to put them into action: we must focus much more on the managerial skills that enable high value-added businesses to grow.”

This also means making choices based on clear guidelines: ‘not merely redistributing what is already available, but encouraging investment, monitoring it, and ensuring that it is capable of driving forward the growth of companies’ ability to create added value. So we need to support investment in high value-added services such as ICT, consultancy and advanced logistics; encourage integration between industry and services throughout the supply chain; and strengthen exports and the internationalisation of services, which are still underutilised today,’ continues Ballaré, who does not deny that ‘this may also come at a cost and mean losing companies that struggle to grow. In the long run, however, it will mean generating jobs and growth. To achieve this, it is not enough merely to focus on management; this must be supported by tax incentives, but also by improving access to credit, for example’. After all, the alternative is even worse, namely ‘ending up with the same companies time and again: the major Italian firms have remained the same for many years now. There are few new ones that are growing, and we continue to have a country made up of SMEs that struggle to expand their scale. It is unacceptable that growth should be such a struggle.”

Looking at the economy as a whole, Ballaré points out that ‘the market-oriented service sector accounts for just under 60% of our country’s GDP, so when we consider the choices we need to make, we must focus on enhancing its value and fostering the growth of SMEs’. Especially because the risk is not so remote that ‘foreign funds and companies will acquire Italian firms, professionalise their management and help them grow. Fashion is the easiest example when we think of a sector where successful brands, including those in services and retail, have grown and ended up in the orbit of foreign companies that have helped them expand. There are sectors where we have companies that are unable to operate on a global scale, and others where this is possible. We need to make choices and decide which sectors are the driving forces for the country: certainly among these is the entire service sector, which includes the advanced service sector, from consultancy to payments to IT.”

Among the practical measures mentioned by the president of Manageritalia are structural tax incentives for the recruitment of qualified managers in SMEs, linked to targets for growth, exports, innovation and generational succession, vouchers for managerial skills, which businesses can use for digital and organisational transformation projects and market development, and flexible contracts and tools that facilitate the recruitment of managers – even on a temporary basis – into smaller companies. In this sense, the current Tertiary Sector Executive Contract also fits the bill in various respects. In the background, there are several major issues. One is generational transition, another is the brain drain, and then there is the demographic winter, which makes it even harder to accept such a vast pool of inactive young people and women as that found in Italia.