Failure makes you stronger or fucks you up.” Félix Revuelta, 77, a self-made businessman in a Catalonia he longs for – that dynamism, alas – is not a half-hearted man, and where he arrived in 1966 from Logronyo to be a civil guard, like his father.
Your first service? Transfer to Mallorca a person convicted of murder in a small cabin on the Barcelona-Palma ferry. “The whole night without closing my eyes, hours and hours in maximum tension, with the machine guns”. Or the road trip to Madrid of the arrested Juan Vila Reyes, businessman and president of Espanyol, in the midst of the Matesa scandal.
From the transit of the Civil Guard to founding Kiluva and the Naturhouse Group in 1986 and 1992, respectively, there is the book El fracaso es el principio del éxito (publisher Deusto), reflections and talks collected by the journalist Pedro Luis Gómez.
Anglicisms, few. There are many traces of underdeveloped Spain, which sharpened so many wits and where the culture of effort was not an option but an obligation. From his childhood in Logronyo, Revuelta arrives in Barcelona with an image that has never left him: the queue in front of the Economic Kitchen, pure beneficence.
Years later – things of life –, Revuelta would forge his business in dietetics. From post-war thinness to the concept of feeling good, which he arrived at by accident. He combined the Civil Guard with the Faculty of Economics, under the tutelage of a lieutenant colonel whose pedagogy was simple: suspended subject, twelve-hour guard at a Model guardhouse.
– Military education is fundamental – he explains on the phone – which is why I advocate the reintroduction of military service, not as long as before. It gives pride, it gives unity, it teaches solidarity.
A book by Lee Iacocca, the man who revolutionized the automobile industry in the US, set him on the entrepreneurial path. He leaves the Civil Guard and joins a public company, Térmiques del Besòs, and by chance of life he receives a proposal from Dr. Antonio Puigvert: to take over Dietisa, a loss-making family business. Accept, with a 30% stake. And it makes it profitable, to the point that it was acquired by a French multinational.
Earnings of millions. The Bahamas? He founds his own dietetics firm. From dieting as a symptom of poor health, to dieting as a symptom of the opposite.
– How did you make that click?
– In the United States, the most advanced country at the time, they already had diets and vitamins. They always came with pill boxes. Do you know why? The person who gets sick does not get paid.
With his wife Luysa, dead, and his two children (Vanesa and Kylian, hence the name Kiluva), he will end up creating Naturhouse in 1992, two years after the liberalization of dietetics, a company listed on the stock market and has 400 stores and 1,600 franchises.
He has tried not to be a “neuter” father-businessman. “Children cannot be forced to do anything. I was hungry, my children weren’t. I only speak French and that way; she six languages ??and he, five. You have to leave them even if you see that they will screw it up”.
Revuelta regrets the poor culture of effort. “Bonusism harms, failure frightens. We are cultivating laziness”.
– Does he still maintain the sudden infatuation with Catalonia that he had in 1966 (he founded Societat Civil Catalana)?
– My relationship remains the same, that of love. I have been there for 55 years, I met my wife here and my children were born, I love Catalonia with all my heart. go back there? Some things have to happen. That there is legal security and that there are no such extremist politicians who harm it. Because they hurt her, huh?
