On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Van den Kroonenberg Award for successful young entrepreneurship, we spoke extensively with former winners. In this episode, John Schuilenburg, co-founder of PNO Consultants, which won the Van den Kroonenberg Award in 1987, speaks.
Interview: Gé Klein Wolterink & Maurice Essers
Text: Lidewey van Noord
The early years of PNO Consultants
In 1979, during the introductory period of his Public Administration studies, John Schuilenburg met his fellow students Lars Pieké and Rob Noltes. The three of them clicked immediately. Two years later, during their internship period, the idea arose to start a business together. Schuilenburg: “Lars and Rob did an internship in The Hague, Rob with the VVD faction in the House of Representatives, Lars at the Ministry of Finance. My internship was the Steering Group for the Integrated Structural Plan for the Northern Netherlands, in Groningen. All three of us saw that subsidy pots were often out of reach for companies.” One weekend, the three friends rented a house in Hoek van Holland. “We walked on the beach, it was freezing cold. That weekend, the first building blocks were laid for what would later be called PNO Consultants. Our plan was to make all those subsidy pots accessible to companies.”
Immediately after their internships, the three started working out the plans for their startup, which they combined with their studies, like other students have a part-time job. A year later, in 1982, they officially founded PNO Consultants. PNO stands for Pecunia Non Olet, a Latin expression that means ‘money doesn’t stink’. “The name is very student-like of course, but we thought it was very funny ourselves. It also gave us a lot of publicity. The fact that we were three brats who bravadoly announced that we had discovered access to large subsidy pots at the end of the rainbow also caused a stir.”
PNO’s business was advising companies and relieving them of their worries regarding subsidies. Their first assignment came in via Rob Noltes' father, who worked at HOLEC. "We had inventoried all the subsidy schemes and had identified around 3,000. We were able to make a scan for companies of which activities were eligible for subsidy." PNO then drew up a feasibility study and, very importantly, they took all the work off the company's hands. "Drawing up the subsidy applications, taking care of the appendices, submitting and further supervising the communication, we took care of everything. As mentioned, the first few months on a 'no cure, no pay' basis. So it was very tempting for companies to come forward. That was the basis of our success."
Stamps and business cards
It took a while before PNO started to run. "In the beginning, the customers were not yet queuing up, they did not immediately have confidence in those three students in their early twenties. At times, we had so little to do that we regretted not having been four, then we could at least have played cards." At the UT, those years were the time of the ‘big’ and the ‘little’ Harry: Rector Magnificus Harry van den Kroonenberg, the great visionary behind the concept of ‘the entrepreneurial university’, and head of finance Harry Fekkers, who ensured that big Harry’s plans were carried out. Nothing was too crazy for little Harry. The university wanted to stimulate entrepreneurship among students and staff, as well as closer cooperation with the business community. “It was a time of high unemployment and high inflation. Because we started our own company and were successful, we escaped that.” The start-up capital of PNO Consultants was modest: Schuilenburg, Pieké and Noltes each invested 40 guilders. “For stamps and business cards.”
Because their concept was good, the students were eligible for the ‘TOP-scheme’ that was established in 1979. TOP stands for Temporary Entrepreneur Placements and the scheme consists of an interest-free loan, office facilities and guidance in all kinds of areas. The support is intended to guide start-up companies through the difficult and crucial first year. The interest-free loan is intended for the livelihood of the starting entrepreneur, who can then invest his time in the new company. The guidance consists of substantive cooperation with the UT in the development of the product, coaching on a personal level, but also in the field of PR and the legal side of business operations.
The first office was in the ‘Boerderij’, the old student restaurant (Mensa). “We were in the attic. Freezing cold in the winter, boiling hot in the summer. Then we moved to the BB building (Bestuur en Beheer, the current Spiegel building). I think we were on the eighth floor.” In a building that only has six floors? Schuilenburg laughs. “Yes, they had set up an eighth floor for us, we were tucked away nicely. No, seriously: we were well served. We could use all the facilities of the UT.”
Media attention and three new cars
PNO Consultants only really started to take off after an article in the UT-Nieuws (the current UToday campus newspaper) about the three students and their funny company name, was picked up by newspaper Tubantia, and subsequently also by national media. Schuilenburg, Pieké and Noltes were even guests on Karel van de Graaf’s weekly TV-talk show. During the broadcast before their performance, on December 3, 1984, a fight broke out during the show, during which shots were fired, which of course caused quite a stir. At that time, TV viewers had a choice of two channels, and because they hoped that there would be a lot of spectacle again, millions of people tuned in for the broadcast a week later. “We were guests on the broadcast after the broadcast in which the shots were fired. Because so many people were watching, our phones were red hot from that TV appearance. Later, we were also flashed on camera by Veronica-TV.”
Around the time that PNO took off, the men also submitted their application for the TOP-scheme. “As a subsidy advisor, you can't pass up a subsidy for yourself. But at the time we submitted the application, we already had quite a bit of income. Coincidentally, we had just ordered three cars.” Laughing: “The day after we were awarded the TOP-scheme, we drove onto campus in three brand new cars.”
There was no internet yet, everything was done by telephone. So when the publicity picked up, the operators at the UT telephone exchange had to process thousands of calls a week. “They went completely crazy. We regularly had to bring cake.” Looking back, Schuilenburg knows one thing for sure: “We really thought about everything, but we handled everything extremely inefficiently.”
At the same time, there was also efficiency, for example in the division of tasks and the combination of study and start-up. “Lars was more about the content and Rob about the commerce, I was more about the organizational side and operational management. But the three of us discussed everything. We wrote our business plan as part of a course and got an eight for it. When we started hiring people, in 1985, 1986, we took some HR courses. So that's how we got by. That was efficient and a good example of how the entrepreneurial university facilitated its entrepreneurial students.”
The company quickly grew and PNO was able to exchange the proverbial eighth floor of the BB building for a villa on the Deldener street in Hengelo.
Flag on a mud barge
Because PNO initially had some difficulty being taken seriously – “because we were such a brats” – the students set up a Supervisory Board, consisting of Errist van Ginkel, the commercial director of HOLEC, Loek Hermans, Member of Parliament for the VVD, and big Harry, Harry van den Kroonenberg. “That Supervisory Board was actually a bit like a flag on a mud barge, of course. But it was important.” Laughing: “The disadvantage of the presence of Rector Van den Kroonenberg was that he started every meeting with the question: ‘And when will the gentlemen graduate?’ He believed that as a commissioner he could not allow the students who formed the flagship of the entrepreneurial university not to graduate.”
They certainly intended to graduate, but they had other priorities. When Schuilenburg was on the graduation committee for the sixth time, the chairman said after an hour: “Get your agenda, then we can make an appointment...” Schuilenburg thought he wanted to make a follow-up appointment and said: “Look, now it’s enough, I’ve already invested enough time in this.” But the chairman continued: “… to set a graduation date.” “I had spoken out of turn. The great thing was that Rob and I got an eight for our graduation assignment. I said: ‘You know that I would have been satisfied with a six, did I invest too much time in it?’ The answer I got was: ‘As the flagship of the program, we couldn’t let you graduate with a six, could we?’ Then I cursed profusely.”
The Van den Kroonenberg Award
In 1987, PNO Consultants won the UT Entrepreneurship Award, which was renamed the Van den Kroonenberg Award after the death of Harry van den Kroonenberg. The sum of money, 10,000 guilders, was divided by PNO among the staff. “We were already earning enough ourselves.”
At the time they received the award, they did not really see the importance of it. “We were in a flow of ‘we are young and we can do anything’. We had already been on TV and were running a mature organisation.” It was only later that the importance of the UT Entrepreneurship Award dawned on the young entrepreneurs. “The fact that we won the UT Entrepreneurship Award gave our potential customers confidence in our services. That award was a seal of quality and that recognition was important to our customers.”
The statuette stood in the PNO office for a while, but one day it disappeared. “I suspect that Rob took it with him. He liked that kind of thing.”
Schuilenburg’s two laws
After seven years, Schuilenburg left PNO, because he needed more of a challenge and more free time. “The company was mature and steady. I remember that I once had to work through Christmas to submit a last-minute subsidy application before the deadline of 31 December. I was really fed up with it, but I neatly drew up and submitted the application. Later I calculated that I had earned more than 80,000 guilders per hour – we charged 15 percent of the amount to be received as a fee, which was still possible at the time because we had few competitors. But I was not interested in the money. In my opinion, each subsequent year would be a repetition of the previous one. I am not the person for that.”
Moreover, there were now so many good, highly educated people working at PNO that they could do everything better based on their expertise. “You can continue to play the role of director, but that is no more than a technical chairmanship. In fact, you make yourself redundant by hiring and training good staff. You also have to give those people space, for new ideas and a different dynamic.”
Schuilenburg has also always experienced that the quality of an organization decreases when the organization stops growing. He himself calls that Schuilenburg's Second Law. “Say that the normal distribution of your workforce is 40-40-20: 40 percent is good, 40 percent is average and 20 percent is bad. The good ones keep leaving, they look for new challenges or are poached. They are replaced by a new cohort with the normal distribution of 40-40-20. So the number of good ones keeps decreasing!”
The fact that approximately 20 percent of people leave each year, and that these are the good ones, is therefore a law. “You should always give these people a festive farewell and hoist them on a shield. They are the ambassadors of your organization.” Ultimately, there are almost no good employees left and the organization has to be shaken up and reorganized.
Oh, and what is Schuilenburg's First Law? Schuilenburg, laughing: “That is: ‘you do know I'm always right’, the title of a booklet full of platitudes that I received when I left my later job at the municipality of Enschede.”
A crazy transition
After leaving PNO, Schuilenburg made what he calls “a crazy transition”: from his own company to a management position at Wageningen University. “That's where I learned the trade, everything about finance and organization. I was soon on the central management team.” After seven years, he was asked to supervise a merger of the thirteen livestock improvement organisations into the umbrella organisation Nederlandse Veeverbeteringsorganisate (later CR Delta). “The number of farms was decreasing, so a merger was obvious. It sounds rather boring, but I have been abroad a lot, including seven times to Brazil. After the merger, I wanted to take the organisation further, but my boss thought that things needed to calm down for a while. So I resigned.”
Schuilenburg was in his thirties and not ready for rest. He worked for a construction company for a year and a half, where he managed the organisational and financial side. He then ended up at the municipality of Enschede. “That was in 2000, just after the fireworks disaster. My roots lie in Twente and Enschede, so I wanted to help the city.” Schuilenburg was particularly attracted to the ambition to revitalise the municipal organisation. “The civil servants walked through the city hall with a central question: how could that disaster have happened? In addition, it was a challenge to get the municipality's finances in order. So that's what I did."
In the meantime, he was also allowed to lend a helping hand to FC Twente. The club was in financial difficulties and appealed to the municipality. "I really enjoyed that process. The consultation with those club directors was challenging, hard against hard." With a wink: "It's great that we came out of that well and that we laid the foundation for the national championship."
The period after the fireworks disaster was a special phase for the municipality of Enschede. Much was possible. "The end justified the means. Act first, then ask permission. I thrived in that. Later, when the hectic nature of the disaster subsided, that changed again. Then I thought it was time to leave again."
Schuilenburg became director of finance at the municipality of Utrecht, three months later he was director HR, and after a year he was asked to become municipal secretary (general-director). “It was a hectic time at the municipality of Utrecht, with a lot of political fuss in the council, falling colleges, a mayor who had a print run of a local rag destroyed.” Schuilenburg really turned things upside down. “I am in favor of change, of movement, of reorganization, not as a goal in itself, but to gain focus from your product or objectives. Utrecht was the republic of the seventeen incompatible services, all little kingdoms. I strongly opposed that. After that I left.”
Back to the business world
After leaving the municipality of Utrecht, Schuilenburg worked for a year at BMC as an advisor, until he was called by Harry Romkema and Leo Essink of Utopics, a UT spin-off that was awarded the Van den Kroonenberg Award in 1994. “They asked if I wanted to take on some organizational tasks at their new company Topicus. The company had grown quite quickly and there was a lot of organizational work to be done.” He thought it would be a fun job, so he agreed, even though his children laughed at him. “They said: ‘You at an IT company? You don’t even know how to work your phone!’ Nevertheless, I have professionalized the organization extensively. And in those years we grew from 200 to 600 people.”
According to his wife, Schuilenburg has a limited shelf life in his positions. It is the nature of the beast. “I want to organize things, set them up properly, and then I am done, I want a new challenge.” Making an organization function better is, as far as he is concerned, the best thing there is, and dealing with resistance appeals to him. “Everyone wants change, but no one wants to change. That is the problem. I am quite headstrong, not really into the polder model. Not a coffee drinking director, not someone who wants to have an informal after-party. After the meeting I am gone.” He has a vision and he discusses it. “Discussion is possible and things can be adjusted, but after that we will get to work on implementing it.”
During the time he worked for Topicus, Schuilenburg was faced with health problems. First, he had to undergo a double bypass and in 2017 he suffered a stroke. According to the rehabilitation physician, he fortunately had a large cognitive reserve, but shortly after his stroke he had difficulty speaking due to paralysis. Thanks to intensive rehabilitation, that improved, but he still has to deal with residual symptoms, especially an increased sensitivity to stimuli. “Attending meetings is not possible, and listening to music while driving is also too tiring. I have to avoid parties and cafes.”
Schuilenburg is retiring and investing and is still doing some projects. For example, he was one of the founders of De Gasfabriek in Deventer, a Business Innovation Campus where start-ups, startups and scale-ups can establish themselves. “The plan is to develop the campus considerably in the coming years.” He is also co-founder of a company in sensor technology for healthcare. “It develops software that uses sensors under the four legs of the bed to perform all kinds of measurements of the patient’s behavior, based on which predictions are made.”
Schuilenburg still has occasional contact with his PNO colleagues Rob and Lars, who also left the company a long time ago. But he is mainly enjoying life with his wife. “We sail a lot and play bridge. I don’t mind having to take it easy. I think that few people have been able to gain such a broad range of experiences as I have.”