Sam van Gentevoort, founder of Perfect-translation agency, on making purpose work

About Sam van Gentevoort

We had the great pleasure to interview Sam van Gentevoort on how he makes purpose work. He is the founder and sole owner of Perfect-translation agency.

Sam shares his journey from early entrepreneurial life focusing mainly on conservative ideas and approaches and then shifting to a more holistic approach. One of co-creation and autonomy underpinned by a modern organizational design. It is no surprise, as founder and owner, that his personal and professional journey are very much intertwined with his company’s journey.

Sam also speaks about dealing with conflict, breaking down obsolete systems, applying positive psychology, leading from empathy, profit allocation and self-organization.

Continu reading for the full interview.

Introduction

Context

Leon: Our planet and our society are facing big and complex challenges. Stakeholders expect companies to step up and make a difference. The pressure they apply has changed the landscape. Organizational purpose and positive impact are rapidly becoming a necessity. And this leads to a pressing question. How to make purpose work? 

Today, Sam van Gentevoort, founder and owner of Perfect-translation agency, will share his insights. I'm excited to have you on the show. Welcome Sam and thank you very much for joining us. 

Sam van Gentevoort, founder of Perfect-translation agency

Leon: Would you mind introducing your company?

Sam: My name is Sam van Gentevoort and I’m the founder and sole owner of Perfect-Translation Agency. In addition, we have a translation platform Fairlingo and we are active on the German market with Übersetzungsbüro Perfekt. We are mainly active in the B2B market. We also serve, albeit to a lesser extent, consumers directly. We take pride in our strong focus on purpose and positive impact. 

Personal connection to purpose and positive impact

Leon: What is your personal connection to purpose and positive impact? 

Sam: I’m very fortunate to have grown-up on Vlieland, a tiny Dutch island. I think the proximity to nature and the relatively small communities’ size there made me aware of how everything is connected. But also, that real progress is possible as small communities often make big strides. For example, the island of Samsø in Denmark, which is only slightly bigger than Vlieland, but now has completely switched to self-generated, renewable energy. I’m inspired by that dynamic and those achievements. I’m convinced there are important lessons there for business and I make it my priority to apply those. 

I started this company in 2008. I was 21 at the time and entrepreneurship was a new adventure. In the first years I got excited by the contemporary idea of success. I think this was a result of my age at the time and the different zeitgeist. A few years ago, I felt the need to move to a more spiritual approach to entrepreneurship. 

By doing so, I moved away from the kind of behavior I see at many of our competitors. They are taking on a lot of debt to acquire other entities or they allow themselves to be acquired. I think this is driven largely by a disconnect between the real and financial economy with maximum financial growth and scale as supreme goals.

From my pioneering role, I am trying to let go of obsolete systems and create new ways together. Our biggest challenge there, on a macro level, is that we operate in a larger system. Like in Vlieland, everything is connected. And we simply cannot go much faster than the vanguard in this. We try to go one step further than the status quo and contribute to transitioning to a world in which we live in harmony with each other and the earth. I feel we simply must do so, given the many challenges impacting planet and society.

Allow me to be specific and share some current initiatives.

• We are focusing on more meaningful connections with our customers, and we actively invite them to participate. 

• We are increasingly applying technological advances to serve the common good. 

• We also strive to grow in knowledge and skills. For this, as a Bcorp, we leverage in large part on lessons learned from the B-corp assessment.  

Also, I want to talk a bit more about two organizational pillars. Employee wellbeing and our organizational model.

Concerning employee wellbeing, we focus more than ever on what drives people and creates well-being. Positive psychology gives us five aspects that we want to focus on to make people ´flourish´: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. We actively set conditions to make those five key-aspects part of our DNA. This way, we hope to contribute to a positive mindset that translates into happiness. 

Regarding our business model. We do business based on our core values and we strike a balance between welfare and prosperity. In concrete terms, this means that when drawing up plans and making decisions, we do not look at it solely from an economic perspective. This line of thinking is core to our organizational model. Our goal is not to optimize profits and we do not incur debts in order to grow faster. We invest 10% of our profits in sustainability and 10% of our profits are earmarked for collective profit sharing. This year, for example, we have fully compensated our co2 emissions, ran online vitality program for employees, switched to green electricity, improved waste separation and donated to charities.

Set-up of the interview

Leon: Thanks Sam, for sharing your journey and ideas. Before we continue to the questions of the interview itself, I want to explain a little bit about the setup of this interview. 

There are three segments. We’ll start with some key aspects to positive impact, followed by one specific action that delivered on positive impact for your company. We will finish with an organizational tool that you find helpful in your positive impact journey. 

So first some key aspects to positive impact. I'm going to ask you 8 questions. 

Key aspects to positive impact

As someone that is making positive impact work, you may need to push boundaries. When does it make sense for your organization to lead and when is it best to follow?

I believe in co-creation and unfolding a world of possibilities by letting go. This is the Wu Wei principle of Taoism. Living and acting from an open mind. Act without acting, without forcing. I think too often we act out of a need for control or fear of the new. Take, for example, saving the banks in 2008 or supporting airline companies such as KLM during the Covid-19 pandemic. Aren't these obsolete systems we're forcibly trying to save? It seems to me that these same dynamics play-out in companies as well.

I try to create and maintain flow by minimizing similar dynamics in my own company. So, when it comes to leading change and pushing boundaries I focus on co-creation and supporting change that comes from intrinsic motivation. I think it is best to inspire each other and create new initiatives that are supported by a large part of the people in the organization.

How has leadership style changed at your organization to make purpose work?

We are now trying to create more bottom-up initiatives. If initiatives encounter opposition, I think it is even more important to act from empathy, to listen carefully and truly understand each other. From that understanding we either find a mutual path or let go of the initiative all together. I'm now trying to lead less from the ego and more from the heart. More holistic rather than Newtonian on which many Western management theories are based.

What is the most effective behavior you see around you that supports positive impact?

Much of our impact on planet and society is hard to understand due to elaborate and extensive value chains. It’s not easy to connect individual actions to impact somewhere down the line. Yet it’s very important to do so and that’s the most effective behavior I see around me. Because if people are aware of their impact as an individual or our impact as a company, then they are more likely to maximize that positive impact. 

I notice that people best equipped to do so, are people that have a less materialistic understanding of success and focus more on elements such as relationships, hobbies and less consumption. They thus link their impact to a lifestyle that creates sustainable happiness.

Which 3 organizational tools do you find most useful in your positive impact journey?

▪       Fostering an open dialogue 

▪       Continuous learning by applying the Deming Cycle (plan do check act method)

▪       Bcorp Assesment

Name the 3 types of stakeholders that have the biggest impact on your organization's positive impact journey and rank them in order of impact.

▪       Clients

▪       Employees

▪       Owner

How do you stay informed about and connected to your highest-ranking stakeholder, that is, your clients?

For us it’s all about client intimacy. We discuss with the customer whether they are open to new initiatives and use rapid experimentation and customer feedback to learn about new opportunities. We also follow closely and learn from customer-oriented initiatives of companies that we regard as sustainable leaders.

Which benefits do you see from putting positive impact front and center for your organization?

The main benefit is that our work becomes more meaningful which in turn stimulates happiness at work. A secondary and welcome effect is that the company is more future-proof and it’s easier to attract like-minded talent.

Which downsides do you notice?

Sometimes we would want to go faster than the market, people and we ourselves allow. Despite the best of intentions, either our ambitions aren’t aligned to the bigger system we’re part of, there’s a paralyzing fear that buy-in is too low or change itself triggers fear. Either way, progress stops. 

I notice it’s sometimes quite challenging to strike a balance between gains and stakes. The risk of losing something one is attached to, often triumphs a new positive prospect. In hindsight change is often perceived as positive but looking ahead fear sometimes is the predominant emotion.

Profit allocation

Leon: Next, I would like to learn about a specific action that has delivered on positive impact. 

Name and describe the action and share why it matters to you.

Sam: As part of our organizational model, we originally distributed all profits above 10% among employees. The underlying idea was to share profit collectively. We changed that approach. Now we allocate 10% profit to sustainability initiatives and 10% to collective profit sharing. 

I think this is important because many listed companies still focus on shareholder value which usually leads to short-term profit maximization. Sustainability and positive impact require a long-term approach, taking into account many stakeholders 

Also, especially among SMEs, I notice a lack of transparency about actions and investments regarding sustainability.

Our organizational model aims to address these issues. 

Name both the key challenge and an unexpected challenge you encountered. How did you overcome these?

I’m the sole owner of the company. A key challenge for me as shareholder, was to move partly away from the general capitalist thinking in which short-term profit maximization is often central. I think, like a lot of people, I internalized the capitalist mindset. 

Reading books and researching on meaningful entrepreneurship has made me more aware that things can be done differently. Take, for example, the research from the book conscious capitalism which shows that purpose driven companies in the long-term even perform better financially than companies that are not purpose driven.

Name both the key success and an unexpected success. How did you maximize these?

Thanks to our organizational model, we are very precise and conscious in respect to our sustainability investments. Also, we are transparent about our investment choices. This ability is a success in itself with the unexpected success that people feel more engaged and are more motivated to find meaningful investments.

To maintain flow, we have a sustainability team made up of employees and myself. We meet monthly to discuss opportunities and actions. This is a co-creation event and all attendees can put forward their own ideas which we prioritize as a group.

Self-organization

Leon: So, there's one segment left. The final segment is about a tool that you find useful in an organization's positive impact journey.  

Which organizational tool did you choose and why?

Self-organization, because I believe that bottom-up change and co-creation can contribute to a much-needed overhaul of an obsolete system. 

What would you like to change most in your organization regarding self-organization, and why?

I would like to increase awareness within the company of our positive impact as an accelerator for our purpose-driven approach to doing business. Thus, creating an environment that even more nourishes positive impact creation. One way of doing this is by strengthening our stakeholder engagement to achieve more together for instance with customers and suppliers.

What is the biggest success in your organization regarding self-organizing, and how so?

We have been working for 8 years refining self-organization and co-creation including employee profit allocation. I think people in general know deep down in their heart what is good for each other, the planet and themselves and are capable of taking each other into consideration. By giving employees autonomy, we strive to unlock and deepen a mindset of empathy and positive impact. 

All this formed a solid foundation for our B-corp certification. Thanks to self-organization there is less inequality within the organization and more attention to planet, society and employees. People enjoy more freedom and are more able to be the best version of themselves. This is a great achievement and our biggest success. 

Wrap-up

Leon: with that final question, we have reached the end of the interview. Sam, I’m very happy and grateful that you dedicated time to share with us your insights. I’ve enjoyed this a lot. Thanks so much.

A final word to the audience. Visit our website if you want to read this interview with Sam van Gentevoort: www.makingpurposework.com/blog. If you enjoyed reading this interview, then please do like, share and follow through our LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. 

That's it. Thanks for reading and I hope to see you again on our next show. Thanks.