Hendrik Jan van Es

My Purpose

Let’s start with my purpose. Everybody has one and so does every organization. The only thing is that most people do not know their purpose and the same is true for organizations. It took me also decades to find mine. I always knew there was something I should know but did not know where to look. Now finding purpose is part of my purpose. For individuals and especially for companies because it is amazing how resilient and engaged they become when they implement it well.

But back to mine. My purpose is:

Serving people and organizations by finding their calling in life and help them see and realize the opportunities that come with it.

How I got there

The long road of getting there was (and still is) by being a serial entrepreneur. My talent, which is part of my purpose, is seeing opportunities. I use this talent for very long now, in an instrumental and rational way as you can see below.

Product development for health insurance companies, picking out the one happy thing they cover; pregnancy. Building that out for healthcare insurance companies to something to widely advertise with by developing products they could show with happy maternity boxes and booklets.

Then being part of the internet bubble (and the implosion of it) we developed the first B2B  internet auction, selling the stuff of bankrupt companies directly to the end-user, cutting out the whole middle industry. For me also the opportunity to start selling the healthy parts of bankrupt companies for the liquidator. That really formed my ability to quickly identify strategic win-win solutions to find potential buyers and get a good price. To further substantialize I completed a post-doc in business valuation, rebuilding the methodology to evaluate a bankrupt company.

I thought it to be good business and more positive to help companies not to go bankrupt by solving their insolvency problems. Technically that worked but often they relapsed. I did conclude there was another root cause but did not explore further.

The drive to be part of something that was inherently good, brought me to a start-up developing an imaging system that could make cancer visible to surgeons during surgery. It was a technology-driven company and I was the first non-engineer with a huge task to keep the company going with a non-finished product in a market that was in the early pioneer stage. Building an international distributor network, training them, setting up reference hospitals, raising research budgets, finding partners, and slowly improving the system eventually led to an IPO making the company sufficiently viable.

When it comes together

Here I also learned the dynamics and effects of culture and personal development. That was a tough lesson with lots to learn. I dug into conscious leadership. Developing myself and learning how to assess leadership to find out and help solve what people hold back in becoming a more complete person and a better leader.

Also the importance of getting a grip on the culture of a company (Barrett Culture Assessment), assessing it, and making it high performing and fun, I made part of my practice.

It has come together in Conscious Business Nederland where we bring awareness to the business model that makes companies successful for all their stakeholders. Shareholders earn more and at the same time, all other stakeholders win equally, including the environment and society. This is my way to work on a better world and elevate humanity and how I live my Purpose.

For companies that need active support in becoming a Conscious Business, I founded Merchants of Meaning.