Bart van Nol

He grew up in a small village near Amsterdam, with parents he describes as amazing and who, as it happens, were not entrepreneurs at all. His grandfathers were: one because he loved it, the other because the family needed the money and the labor market at the time was dreadful.

As a young man he was adventurous and ambitious, and very willing to prove himself. He succeeded at a great many things, though he is candid that most of it ran on survival instinct rather than intention. It took him until his thirties to start operating from what he actually wanted.

“I never planned to become an entrepreneur. It just happened.”

He describes what he became without much flattery: the warrior entrepreneurial type. Hard-working, seeing opportunity everywhere, and making a great many of the same mistakes repeatedly. What eventually gave him structure was Scaling Up, the frameworks, the coaches and the peers. His first companies did well enough to buy him the time to fail, learn and improve, and improving at leadership took him ten years.

The ambition underneath all of it is not complicated, and he states it the same way every time.

“Doing beautiful things, with beautiful people, in beautiful places.”

He means fun quite literally. The work should be enjoyable, and a founder's mission and passion ought to sustain that rather than consume it. Growth and enjoyment, in his view, are not opposing forces, and a company that requires the sacrifice of one for the other has been built wrong.

Away from the work, he is at art and music festivals.

He had every one of the problems he now coaches. Choosing a market strategy, holding focus, attracting good people and then learning to lead them. He was too eager, too opportunistic, too much in survival mode.

Then he came across Verne Harnish's Scaling Up, and rather than reading it and moving on, he went looking. He learned the methodology properly and trained as a certified coach.

What he found on the other side was the realization the company is built on: the problems are the same. Founder after founder, market after market, the same bottlenecks arrive in the same order, and every one of them was being solved from first principles by someone who thought they were alone with it. Nobody, he concluded, should have to reinvent the whole thing.

That is what ScaleUp Company was for. It started in a single local market, the Netherlands, with his partners. Then he wanted to take it global and widen its impact, which is where ScaleUp Company International came from.

Underneath it sits a conviction he has held throughout: that entrepreneurship can be a force for good, and can be enjoyable while it is.

The scale of what followed is its own answer. He has worked with more than 250 scale-ups over the past ten years. Of the founders he coached personally, eight grew their companies tenfold, eleven expanded into more than four countries, and fourteen made a full or partial exit.

The education arrived in stages, and he describes it in the neatest formulation anyone here has offered. In his first companies he had to learn to choose. In his thirties he had to learn to lead. In his forties he had to learn to be led, and to coach.

What he carries from all of it is short: reflect, ask for help and feedback, go slow to go fast, and choose better.

He starts by wanting to know what is going on in a founder's mind, and what kind of situation he has just walked into. Their horizon, their dream, the bottleneck, the worry, the pride. He has a particular fondness for the strange stories founders tell about their company's timeline and their own development alongside it. Connection first, because without it he cannot tell what would actually serve them. The One Page Strategy Plan comes after that.

With a founder stuck on a decision, he works out where in the decision they already are: what they truly want, what they genuinely fear, and what is holding them back. Then he helps produce clarity, and not only the rational kind. Emotional clarity matters more. Very few decisions, he points out, are genuinely irreversible; a handful in a decade at most.

When a session turns emotional, his response is unusual.

“In most of these situations I do nothing.”

He lets the emotion be, and helps both of them understand what is happening underneath it. Emotions, in his view, are great teachers. Comforting can come afterwards.

What he pushes on is decisions, and cutting the things a founder is attached to, until focus is something the whole leadership team feels rather than only the founder.

“What is the decision you already should have made that you are now ready for?”

People with ambition who are eager to learn and adapt, and who love what they do.

“If ego is bigger than passion and ambition, I'm not your coach!”