Hero exists
15 years!
What have we got in this
period already experienced a lot.
Dear reader,
Milestones often make you look back. That you relive the route, which preceded the milestone, again in a bird's eye view. It works exactly the same for me, especially in this case. Lots of positive and somewhat less positive memories then come to me as I look back at 15 years of Hero. I like to take you along with me in that and, above all, choose which version you read; the ‘glass half full version’, or the ‘glass half empty version’. Read them!
Jeroen de Vries
The glass is
half-full
half-full
Hero is 15 years old and Wow! what a lot we have been through in this period. I started Hero on my own, then alongside my other business. I already knew the industry well and there was a lot of demand in the market, but I founded Hero mainly because I liked it.
And so this is still, after all these years, my number one drive; because I like it.
I often use the metaphor with the foot trip to Rome. But why make a foot trip to Rome would you think? Not necessarily to arrive in Rome, because then I can really recommend taking the plane, train or car... But you do it mainly to enjoy the whole trip, to experience things, to be surprised and to see how far you get. And so, 15 years later, we are still not in Rome, but many adventures, peaks and surprises further.
The glass is
half-empty
half-empty
Hero is 15 years old, and Wow! what hard work it has been and is. What a journey of trial and error, beautiful moments but also definitely deep valleys.
A dream of setting up a (permanent) growth company sounds fantastic, but what a challenge it is. It often feels like constantly falling forward. And by running fast enough, you make sure that you end up not really falling. But even before you are stable on your feet again, you fall forward again and have to run again.
In a growth company, you have no choice when to work hard, the company determines this for you. In the past 15 years, I have had to take every opportunity that came my way, at the good and the bad times. And so I have also had to disappoint people and especially my family at times, with cancelled holidays, a postponed wedding and even the make-up honeymoon being postponed for a year.
Lots of adventures, peaks and surprises
Lots of adventures, peaks and surprises
Growth
Growth
The glass is half full
The glass is half full
Growth is cool! It creates opportunities and challenges for everything and everyone. Growth keeps everything moving, not growing feels like stagnant water. Growth gives you a sense of achievement, but also challenges you. It causes you to be continuously pulled out of your comfort zone and move on again.
Hero has grown by over 30% a year for the past 15 years. The total revenue we had 3 years ago is this year's revenue growth. How cool! And it is not just in terms of turnover that Hero has grown over the past few years, the number of employees has also increased significantly, and the more souls, the more joy!
Growth also makes one proud; after all, it is a feeling of winning, time and again. Especially if you win market share or perhaps manage to create whole new markets.
The glass is half-empty
Over 30%
grown per year
Over 30%
grown per year
The glass is half-empty
Ouch! I'm growing! All great things come with growing pains. That makes being an entrepreneur in a growth company extra challenging and tough, and for that, you have to actually keep enjoying yourself to keep it up.
Almost all profits made are immediately reinvested back into Hero to grow even harder, make more margin and invest more again.
Growth and opportunities can never be timed. You sometimes grow harder and faster than you expect and can actually handle. Then you all fall behind. And while you work very hard and put in long hours, you also have to recruit new people to cope with the growth.
The formula
The formula
The formula
We never shied away from challenges
We never shied away from challenges
The glass is half full
15 years ago, our knowledge and experience was significantly less than today. We had to discover and learn practically everything ourselves. With a clear growth objective in mind, we have always invested fully in this. We seized all opportunities with both hands and never shied away from challenges. It has always taken us further and it has ensured that researching and trying things out is now in our DNA.
Because of this unbridled commitment, we now have several successful sales channels and services. It always remains possible for us to provide interim staff of the highest quality and we always manage to recruit our own employees, train them and help them develop their specific talents. Of course, none of this is without setbacks, but by getting up after falling, we have learned and achieved a lot.
The glass is half full
The glass is half-empty
If only we knew 15 years ago what we know now. The quest for knowledge has brought us much adventure but also certainly setbacks. Some wrong turns have cost us a lot of time, money and energy. This too has caused much delay in growth.
An example is our extensive search for the right sales manager. After months of searching and talking to 60 different candidates, we thought we had found the right one! But then you find out after two months that it's not the right one after all... but the contract still runs for another 10 months. And the budget for yet another recruitment had also run out by now. This blunder delayed our growth by about 1.5 years ...
Another example is that we hired many new colleagues after a period of strong growth. But shortly after this, growth stagnated and we then had to take the foot off the accelerator again. This kind of situation really still happens sometimes with us, but in the early years of Hero it happened much more often than it does now.
If only we could have used all that learning money to find the right formula for everything differently. It could have saved us a lot of stress and grey hairs.
The glass is half-empty
Culture
Culture
Culture
The glass is half full
For the first 10 years of Hero, we labelled everything that felt right and worked out as ‘the Hero culture’ and ‘the Hero way’. Until we started describing culture and asking ourselves what exactly did it mean? This process eventually led to clear cultural values that we really made our own.
Meanwhile, we have published many books on corporate culture and organise monthly training sessions on it for our employees. We also organise an extensive and varied onboarding for all new employees in which culture is one of the main topics.
Apetrically, we are proud of the Hero culture. A key element is that we don't talk about each other, but to each other. Irritations are expressed in a professional, deliberate manner and certainly not taken home. But 100% honesty is also in our DNA and making mistakes is allowed! We do think it is important that this is reported immediately, so that we can work together towards a solution.
Culture is the character of our company. So we spend a lot of time, money and effort monitoring it. The result? A culture to be proud of!
The glass is half full
Utterly proud we are of the Hero culture
Utterly proud we are of the Hero culture
The glass is half-empty
Culture is different for everyone. For the first 10 years anyway, we had little idea of our culture. Almost everything that felt right we called our culture, but what exactly it was, everyone would answer differently.
And what a challenge it is to get and keep your culture right. And I have been wrong about that at times over the past 15 years.
So the shock was great when I received signals that there was a lot of negativity and that not everyone felt free enough to express their feelings. ‘’What? Hero is a wonderful company, everyone can walk into my office anytime, everything can be said, I'm having a great time and only nice people work there’’ were my first thoughts.
Until I did dig a little deeper.... It turned out that there was indeed dissatisfaction and negativity among some employees. And this was mostly discussed among themselves and not directly to management. As in this article, at Hero the glass can also be half full or half empty. And if you always keep focusing on the half-empty glass, you will automatically develop a negative culture.
After my eyes were opened and I got over my own shock and surprise, we worked hard with management to turn this around. With outside help, we got the culture back on track within 3-6 months.
The glass is half-empty
Ambition
Ambition
Ambition
Maximum growth also means maximum risk
Maximum growth also means maximum risk
The glass is half full
It started with ambition and this is still our biggest driver. When we achieved a turnover of 4 million a year after four years, we developed a plan to grow to 10 million a year.
The plan stood, although there was a lot to criticise here, but the plan could be executed. We had to invest a lot to achieve rapid growth but that didn't stop us. Incidentally, the goal of reaching 10 million within 2.5 years was not achieved but it was achieved within 4 years. So as far as I am concerned, equally successful!
The ambition to grow 10x bigger every 10 years travels with us all the years. So even in 10 years, this will still be true. To keep up this growth at this pace, we need to continuously develop our processes and operations. We do this together and this makes it a cool process. The choices we make are also aligned with our ambition; We put our money where our mouth is.
We are now seven years on since we first reached 10 million in sales. And we expect to reach 100 million turnover for the first time next year. And now everyone may again call us crazy, but in 10 years' time we want to be 10 times as big again. Wow... how cool would that be, I dare not even put that number on paper. But we keep dreaming, we keep dreaming big.
And in the meantime, we continue to enjoy the well-known foot trip to Rome
The glass is half full
The glass is half-empty
If there is 1 expensive hobby, it is ambition. Nice that ‘’put your money where your mouth is’’, but often that means, therefore, that costs come before benefits. And I can reveal, not all costs have always yielded benefits.
Growth is an end for us, while for almost everyone else it is a means and profit is the end. For Hero, profit seems precisely the means to then be able to grow again.
Ambition and maximum growth also mean maximum risk. So we spent a lot of money on new employees who ‘’just came to bring success’’ or on an external consultant who came to write a fantastic plan. And was that really necessary? Nah... if we hadn't had so much ambition, certainly not.
But is that high risk always desirable? After 15 years, of course, it is easy to talk, the risks are now a lot more manageable but perhaps the last 15 years could have been a little less at times.
But even with a half-empty glass, the conclusion is still that we can be apathetic of where we are, that sometimes (often) the loan money has been a waste of money. But that not paying tuition fees would never have got us as far as where we are today.
Even with sombre glasses on, the ride of the past 15 years has been a fantastic ride. And the moments when we struggled precisely make our pride all the greater now.
No pain no pleasure.
The glass is half-empty
Dear Hero colleagues, clients, candidates and associates. Thank you to everyone! What a fantastic time we have had together over the past 15 years. And the best part is, we are far from finished! The past 15 years were just the beginning. Without you, without us, there would be no Hero.
Hero that's us, Hero that's you!
Jeroen de Vries
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+31 (0) 85 222 1999
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For anyone who has no idea what Hero does, but would like to know, we have developed a special website where we explain our services in simple terms: Hero for Dummies