Mastery

After almost twenty years in advertising it is time for a new chapter.

I have had companies since my teenage years. As a student I repaired computers in people's homes. At fourteen I started one of the first editorial websites in the Netherlands. And I built the PR agencies Glasnost and Fitzgerald, which I eventually sold to advertising group Ace.

But over the past years I have increasingly immersed myself in business strategy. And that, together with the practical experience I have built around growth and exits, is what I now want to pass on to other founders. This is the story of how I got there.

Glasnost

I started Glasnost because I wanted to create a new sound in the world between corporate and marketing PR. The name, which sounds slightly controversial today, comes from Russian and means "openness". It refers to the reform movement Gorbachev started in the late eighties together with perestroika.

We embraced the theme fully in how the company was set up. Our house drink became a self-distilled vodka. A black-wrapped Trabant from Hungary stood in the office. We became well-known among major A-brands who found us without marketing or proactive sales. By the name, yes, but mostly through the quality of the work.

Growth barrier

And then we got stuck. Not because things went badly, but precisely because they went so well. Clients kept coming, new colleagues were not hard to find, we had generous benefits. On-site massages, two extra holiday days, annual workations to cities like Odessa, Saint Petersburg and Split — fully on theme.

With fifteen comrades (as we called our colleagues) I noticed we delivered great work, but not everyone contributed to the culture anymore. The era of managing by walking around was over. I had to start letting things go. Certain processes ran clumsily. There was no shared goal anymore beyond growth itself.

I then immersed myself in business strategy, followed a growth program and started to redesign the company.

The biggest shift

From working in your business to working on your business. That is it. Sounds small. It is not.

We made our core values active and brought them to life in the office. We hung our BHAG in a visible spot so colleagues and clients could see where we were heading. And it worked. It went so well that we had to set up a second agency next to Glasnost to handle conflicting accounts. That became Fitzgerald.

For me as a founder I had reached at that moment everything I wanted to reach. In the autumn of 2019 I told my partners I wanted to work toward an exit. A year later that was realised, with advertising group Ace as buyer. Since 2025, Glasnost and Fitzgerald have become part of Ace PR as brand names.

What I discovered after

At Ace I got the chance in the years after to develop a growth program myself, and to coach the various agencies inside the group with it. What struck me was that some agencies had worked with business strategy from the start, while others had grown purely on instinct and revenue, without a plan and without bigger goals. Each agency had its own path, its own blockers, its own opportunities.

And I noticed the conversations I had about it were not about advertising or PR. They were about growth. About letting go. About how you build a company that can run without you. About how to work toward an exit without giving away your life's work for next to nothing.

I noticed I enjoyed those conversations. That I knew something about it from my own experience. And that I wanted to do this on a larger scale than within one agency group. That became Go Delphi.

The oracle

At the oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece, notables came to ask advice on pressing matters. With Go Delphi I want to play a similar role for founders today. Whether it is a scale-up wanting to secure the foundations of growth with a growth program, a founder working toward an exit, or a founder who ad hoc needs sparring.

At Go Delphi you get access to me, and to the network of specialists I have built around me. The temple of Delphi was inscribed with "Know thyself", a famous saying from Socrates. And that is, I think, why I am taking on this new venture with so much joy.

Because every founder journey starts there. With the question of who you are, where you want to go, and who you need alongside you to get there.

Three years later

I wrote this piece in the summer of 2023, during the week I left the group and started Go Delphi. By now I have guided 140 founders and speak with three or four every day. What do I know about mastery now that I did not know then? Three things.

The first is that I am not the oracle. I always say that now. I have access to the knowledge and people a founder needs; sometimes I am the general practitioner, sometimes the specialist. What I do is bring the energy of a shareholder. If a decision involving 25,000 euros is at stake, I put myself in the founder's position and think alongside them as a critical co-founder: what are the scenarios, what is the impact, what would I do? The choice remains theirs. I always started my companies alone and know how lonely that can be. That is what I come to bring.

The second is an honest crack. I teach founders to make themselves dispensable, while at Go Delphi I am the company. Good people work around me, but the client comes for me. I am harder to scale than an agency, and that is the task for the coming years. Something I did not have at Glasnost helps me here: from time to time I organise a Strangers Dinner, a table full of founders who do not know one another. They have the conversations, including about vulnerable subjects. I sit there and watch. I used to manage the campaign myself. Now I enjoy what emerges when I do nothing. That is the role that fits: not the captain on the bridge, but the person who brings the right people aboard.

The third is the bar. For years I measured Go Delphi against Glasnost: the Christmas party, the clients, the forty people. That bar came from another company, in another phase of my life. The problem after an exit is rarely the second company; it is the bar set by the first. I once said I had stood in Camp Nou with Glasnost and had it in me to get there again. I still mean that. But the stadium was the wrong measure. I now stand on the touchline, and the impact I make there, with 140 founders on the field, is greater than it was at Glasnost. In 2020, my feelings were nowhere on the agenda. Now they are my instrument. That is what mastery has become for me: not proving once again that I can do it, but building something that can continue without me. I now have a name for that: legacy builders.