Ton’s story

Don't focus on what your employees can't do - focus on what they can do.

Goedmakers recalls a young autistic woman who once dreamed of working in healthcare, and one day, passing through an eldercare home, he spotted her sitting with a dementia patient. The proud woman, employed by Vebego, was mono focused on patiently and repeatedly reminding the elderly woman to take another bite of her sandwich. Dementia patients often forget when and how to eat. 

At another facility, Goedmakers saw an autistic man standing against a doorframe, waiting for a patient to finish their visit with a healthcare worker. That man’s job was ‘chaperoning’ dementia patients, ensuring they safely and on time got from their room to physiotherapy and back, say, without wandering off and getting lost. Goedmakers approached the young man and started chatting but didn’t receive the reaction he expected. “He glanced at me quickly and said, ‘Hey! I'm working!’ He took his job totally seriously.”

It’s how a CEO wins devotion from staff, and why staff become highly motivated

Goedmakers’ colorful stories about imbuing menial jobs with purpose and dignity made us recall the American management guru Peter Drucker. In 1989, Forbes reported, the chairman of ServiceMaster Co., a company in the same lines of business as Vebego, arranged for his board of directors to meet the unpretentious Drucker, who then proceeded to ask each director what their business was. Some said insect extermination, others housecleaning, and others still said lawncare. 

"You're all wrong," Drucker said. "Gentlemen, you do not understand your business. Your business is to train the least-skilled people and make them functional."

More than that. Their business was to make employees cleaning toilets and exterminating mice feel like they were making a valuable contribution to society – which they are. “Like you suggest in the Peter Drucker story,” says Goedmakers, “we are good at helping people who need a little bit of extra help becoming productive members of society,” an ethos restated in the firm’s motto, “We stand for meaningful work, which helps our employees live more meaningful lives.”

The firm’s approach has been hardwired into its DNA ever since its founding

Goedmakers insists his firm’s approach is not some ESG-driven objective suddenly imposed from the top because it’s the current rage but has in fact been hardwired into Vebego’s DNA ever since its founding. The CEO’s grandfather, Ton “Tonny” Goedmakers, came of age in Nazi occupied Holland, in a town five kilometers from the German border. In 1941, the local German Reichskommisar started rounding up 500,000 Dutch citizens as forced labor to work the Nazi factories supplying the war effort. In 1943, looking for a loophole, Tonny founded Vebego’s predecessor company, Hago, hired his closest friends, and then went out and won contracts to clean the offices of the State Mines and the Limburg tram company. 

Tonny’s survival strategy worked. The Reichskommisar never rounded up company founders or raided companies deemed essential to the smooth running of society, quite simply because it wasn’t in Germany’s interest to trigger the Dutch state’s total economic and civil collapse. In short, the very purpose of Vebego from the start was to save lives and provide a work sanctuary that shielded employees from war. 

His best employees are hard-working immigrants

Which Goedmakers and Vebego are still doing today. The CEO says his best employees are hard-working immigrants who are often fleeing war elsewhere in the world and need a starter job when they arrive in their new home country. “At the time, the meaning of the job for Tonny and his friends was survival. Nowadays, for a lot of our employees, who have fled Syria or Ukraine, for example, Vebego is also a way of surviving and a way of becoming part of a new society.”

Goedmakers says many of these highly motivated immigrants are already educated and their first cleaning or security jobs at Vebego are, ideally, only a temporary stop on their journey to becoming fully integrated and major contributors to their new home. To help them along their way, Vebego provides language lessons, financial literacy instruction, and trade-skill vocational classes, besides the 12 Euro to 25 Euro an hour they earn for their labor, always above the host country’s minimum wage. 

Other workers require more management time to help them find their footing in society

But other workers – from uneducated immigrants to the severely autistic – require more management time to help them find their footing in society. “Imagine, you just call and get a TV for free – and then you must pay 50 Euros every month to pay it off or pay 100 euros in fines for late payment. That’s huge. It's the money they need for their food.” Vebego line managers are, for such reasons, encouraged to know their pool of 20 or 30 workers and to become mentors to them and their families in the larger sense, if possible.

Erwin Hubert, confined to a wheelchair since birth, worked for 15 years in the administration of the Vebego landscaping firm. His work ethic and contribution were recognized, and the company installed an elevator so he could move freely throughout the whole office, besides helping him create a fitness program tailored to his condition. Last year, Erwin became terminally ill. In the final days of his life, his manager asked Erwin if the company could help him fulfill a last wish. His only request was to come back to the office and eat some cake with his former colleagues. His manager and colleagues arranged for Erwin to visit his favorite soccer team on pitch, before returning him one last time to the workplace where he was of value and valued – and had been most happy.

The goal: to become a little bit more aware of how, as an employer, they can have impact

Of course, such efforts consume large amounts of management time (and cost) in a relatively low-margin business. Which gets us to the Vebego restructuring that Goedmakers is overseeing. His grandfather, father, and uncle before him built Vebego opportunistically through 150 highly decentralized regional companies in Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland. Goedmakers is reducing this sprawl to 11 companies offering just four lines of business: facility services and cleaning, healthcare, facility management, and landscaping. In the process, Goedmakers is eliminating the layers of middle managers that have built up over the years and have been wearing down the company’s agility, a move he assures us his entrepreneurial grandfather would highly approve of. 

This drive to flatten the organization is not just to make Vebego more entrepreneurial and profitable but is also meant to boost the frontline managers working directly with staff. “You need management at that immediate level of watching the autistic worker, making sure they’re having a good day, but do you really need six procurement officers?” The housecleaning is a work in progress: The restructuring of the German operation is complete, the Netherlands is underway, and all the countries will have been transformed by 2025.

Still, this conventional business ambition to become more efficient isn’t exactly knocking Goedmakers off his unusual take of the world. “How great would it be to create over 100,000 meaningful jobs by 2030,” he says wistfully. “But for me, more important, is to inspire other companies to become a little bit more aware of how, as an employer, they can have impact on their employees, the families and children around their employees, and therefore the next generation. Now, that's the butterfly effect.”

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