BLOG: interview with Evert Thielen

I’m 54 years old, and I have a 26-year-old son and a 28-year-old daughter. In my spare time, I enjoy Rotterdam, the beautiful city where I live. You’d be right to say that I appreciate the good life, as I’m a fan of good food and nice drinks with family and friends.

I’ve already been the director of Javado for more than a decade. The years have flown by, partly because it’s such a fantastic company. I know from experience that the atmosphere in the workplace isn’t always this good. I like to give people lots of freedom and responsibility, and I encourage them to be confident about the decisions they make.

We’ve managed to grow strongly, because our team is both reliable and agile at the same time. That’s pretty special. I saw the strength of Javado when the world changed overnight in March 2020. We all had to act quickly, and we managed to transform the organisation rapidly.

When I first started at Javado, my greatest challenge was to set up an organisation in which we could continue to expand in our current magnificent building. We had added new country teams in the UK/Ireland, Spain/Portugal, and the Czech Republic/Slovakia. These sales teams have done an amazing job, and really conquered their markets. Each country has its own specific logistics needs, so it was very important to organise all incoming and outgoing flows really well. Bringing forward the latest ordering time helped enormously in this respect. The organisation is now easier to plan, which allows us to generate a large turnover with a relatively small team. We’ve now got even more country teams: we serve Northeastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and our own home market, the Netherlands.

It doesn’t take a visionary to realise that some challenges will come our way. In my opinion, the shortage of labour and increasing pressure on staff are important issues. We’ve taken measures to deal with this as well as possible (ed.: see Page 44). Everyone is having to face these issues, so at busy times it may become difficult for growers to deliver all orders, and for haulage companies to keep all their trucks on the road. I think it’s important that our customers can be confident that we’re doing all we can to make sure that everything is properly arranged behind the scenes. With the exceptional growth of 2021 as our base, we’re ready to make 2022 a great success.

Published on: 9 March 2022