Born and raised in the Amersfoort area, I always had a passion for numbers. From early school years this has always been my strength in school. To follow my passion, I have pursued the education in the Finance direction. I have a bachelor’s degree from Hogeschool Utrecht. After I graduated, I moved to Groningen where I completed my master`s in Finance, Accounting and Investments at University of Groningen.
My professional career
After completing my degree, I started my finance professional career as Finance Analyst at Refac BV and a short period at the Ministry of Defense. Afterwards I joined Fort Dodge Animal Health. In total I spent about 12 years with Fort Dodge Animal Health, in different positions. I started as Financial Analyst and moved through different roles up to CFO at the Germany & Benelux organization, which was at that time the largest local organization outside the USA.
Being a part of a multinational and working in a multicultural organization, was very exciting. As part of various roles and opportunities, I developed different skills needed at different stages in my career: how to manage a team, leadership, influencing and communication.
Moving to the IT industry
After the company was acquired by Pfizer, it was time for a new challenge. I started as Head of Finance at Traveltainment Gmbh, the market leader in software solutions in the travel industry in Germany. So in total I spent almost 10 years working in Germany. This is the same software you might have been using while booking a hotel room via www.expedia.com. A complete different industry, fast paced as IT is, provided more opportunity to use the skills acquired in a different business environment and industry. I joined the company right after it was acquired by Amadeus ITG. As till then it was a privately held company, all processes and procedures as part of a multinational needed to be implemented.
E-commerce start-up
I always had a desire towards entrepreneurship and a dream of starting my own business. I thought the opportunity given by broadening even further my knowledge and going out of my comfort zone, was a challenge. After reviewing and revising several ideas and plans, I decided to start an e-commerce business.
In the same time, my passion has always been Finance. Therefore, I decided to start combine an e-commerce, that was very new and challenging with my own expertise field of finance. This has been a road full of new experiences and new challenges, all opportunities to learn and grow. I have started focusing on setting up my e-commerce business that is currently as automated as possible, and then over time I have moved my focus on sharing my Finance expertise in different projects and interim assignments.
As I have no background in IT or Webdesign, I am proud to say that I managed to fully automate our online business. With that process I also learned a lot on this area, for example SEO, SEA, XML-interfaces, and Google Analytics.
Why Freelancing?
I like challenges. A new situation brings the best in me. Quickly understanding the situation or issue and look for a solution or what needs to be done. Execute it and see the results. That is what is driving me, and is in my opinion what is the characteristic of a successful freelancer.
As my e-commerce business is running almost flawless now, I am now focusing on Finance Freelancing that is and will always remain my passion. I really enjoy sharing my expertise with companies and organizations and support achieve their targets, needs or solving a long-time painful problem.
I can use my passion for Finance, broad experience to work together with companies and see them succeed. This is very fulfilling.
And with my experience of launching a e-commerce business from scratch, and by myself, I bring additional experience on startups, and ecommerce, which not many finance people will have.
I truly am a Freelancer with a strong entrepreneurship.
My personal life
For role as CFO at Fort Dodge, I relocated to the South of the Netherlands, just at the border with Germany and Belgium. This is my current location for the last 10 years where I live happily together with my wife.
In my free time, I like spending time with my family. Exploring the beautiful surroundings of the beautiful Limburg that has a lot of beautiful places for hiking.
I am passioned about soccer, which I also used to play myself for over 25 years. I also like traveling, exploring new and different cultures, learn more about the locals. Some of my favorite places visited are The Chinees Wall, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, but also swimming with wild manta rays in the Maldives are a life enriching experience.