The Bierboutique, millions and Hong Kong: 24 hours of Bonsai

Across from me, someone is doing a Mammoet jigsaw puzzle. You know, the company that lifts really heavy stuff. Earlier that night he had met a lovely woman who practically begged him to come home with her from the club. Still, he thought it was a brilliant idea to come back to the office instead. After all, I was still working there.

To spare you the cliffhanger: she went home alone. We both had to hold out until 5 a.m., and a deal is a deal, lovely woman or not.

Why? Well, at Bonsai we do a 24-hour marathon. Twenty-four hours of work. From Friday 5 a.m. to Saturday 5 a.m. Who came up with that? Someone who was apparently bored. Not enough of a challenge, I suppose. As if we were not already drowning in work.

A fever dream

Bonsai regularly feels like a fever dream.

You walk in on Monday morning. Double espressos at everyone's lips, 'Parada de Tettas' or 'Brazil' blasting at full volume, and everyone gets straight to it. Nice for the neighbours? No. Good for the vibe? 100%.

Then the most important port in Europe puts its trust in your hands to solve an absurd problem, with billions in economic and societal consequences. I would love to tell you more about it, but that will have to wait for another time.

A few hours later you are walking through Rotterdam and someone starts explaining, unprompted, where the best place to buy crack is. After which you go and wolf down half a kilo of quark yourself, under the guise of treating yourself.

Somewhere in between, there is of course also work to be done. Except that does not happen, because every man and his dog is calling you. Stories about lawsuits, feuds between clients and internal office politics, which means that 200K project is not going ahead just yet after all.

Meanwhile the espresso machine keeps happily rattling away, and before you know it, it is 5 p.m. again.

And then? Then the working day really begins.

Finally you can sit down for a bit and actually get some work done. Until you have to go out to dinner with a partner after all, or head to Feyenoord to close a little deal.

Rough life, huh?

From the Maasvlakte to Hong Kong

Anyway, the week goes on. And although it is almost impossible to describe a typical week at Bonsai, I will give it a try.

From the Maasvlakte to Dublin, Cologne, Qatar and Hong Kong. We talk to, visit and meet people from all over the world. Between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. there is pretty much always someone working or reachable. And in an average week, everyone is structurally far too busy.

One time we digitise a freight forwarder in three months. Another time we watch ships sail down the Maas that were planned in our systems. Or you are driving down the motorway and suddenly see a few of your clients drive past.

Those moments never stop being special. Things that were once nothing more than an idea on a whiteboard are now literally driving or sailing right in front of you.

We have become a company that operates worldwide. And that takes quite a lot.

Running a company takes a lot anyway. But especially if you want to do it at the pace we want to do it. And without funding, on top of that.

It is war every day. Genuinely.

Everyone wants the same bite out of the market as you. But is everyone also willing to put in the same in return?

I don't think so. And that is just as well, because otherwise it would get very hard indeed.

Turning the burners down

And that actually brings me to the heart of this story.

People mostly see the nice side of running a company like Bonsai is today. And don't get me wrong, that side really is amazing.

Building seriously hard things every day for some of the biggest organisations in the world. Having a laugh together at the office. Travelling all over the world for work, constantly discovering new places and people, dinners with clients and partners. And so on.

But the sacrifices on the other side are bigger than you might imagine.

I am not going to tell some sob story here about how hard it all is. That does nobody any good. But it does come down to this: you have to turn a few burners down so the one for your business can burn hotter.

Whether that is 'friends' you lose along the way, your health sometimes suffering, or the fact that you regularly have genuinely no idea what day it is anymore.

It comes with the territory if you want more. If you want to go harder than normal.

That 24-hour marathon is actually a nice example of it.

Because the fact that an organisation decides together to do something like that is, of course, fantastic. Not everything that happened during those 24 hours is fit for publication on the internet, by the way, haha.

But it does show something.

That as an organisation we want more than others. And above all, that we are willing to do more for it than others.

The funny thing is that the market picked up on it that way too. Completely unintentionally. Because we did not do that marathon to prove anything to the outside world. We mostly did it for ourselves. To have fun, to push limits and to see how far we could go.

People do business with people

And I actually believe that exactly that is the most important thing that has brought Bonsai this far over the past two years.

Not that we necessarily have smarter people. Not that we build better. Or that we have more experience than the rest.

In fact, I notice that people often do not care that much about those things at all.

And rightly so.

People do business with people.

With people who stand for something. Who go all in on something. Who keep their promises, solve problems and do not bail as soon as things get complicated.

And that is exactly what I am incredibly grateful for.

Because when I look at the people who work at Bonsai, I see, one by one, people who sometimes seem to have a screw loose. In the best possible way.

People who always find another limit to push. Who want to go just that little bit harder. Who do not easily settle for 'it can't be done'. And who simply love building something together.

Our clients notice that. And I think that is exactly what they value in us.

We have to hold on to that.

But be aware that it asks a lot. Sometimes an awful lot.

And still we keep pushing those limits.

New frontiers

Soon Bonsai opens its first office in Germany. On top of that, we are starting work for major clients in one of the most important port cities in Asia: Hong Kong.

New frontiers, literally and figuratively.

It is going to be great. And we are going to fly.

Back at the Bierboutique

But perhaps the next part is the most bizarre of all to me.

Two hours ago I was standing in the Bierboutique with our people. Laughing a bit and marvelling at how far we have come.

Exactly two years and a few days ago, I was standing in exactly the same spot.

Only back then with a completely different group of people, most of whom I hardly see anymore. And with minus 84 euros in the business account, because of the registration with the Chamber of Commerce.

Two years.

From an empty bank account and an idea to a company active all over the world. From people you lose along the way to people you sit with at the office at 4:36 a.m., when you should have been in bed long ago.

And maybe that is the biggest lesson of the past two years.

You are rich because of the people around you.

I realise that all too well at moments like this.

And when I see who we are building with now, how much fun we have along the way and everything that still lies ahead of us, mostly I think: we have only just begun.

As Thom once put it so well:

'Unless it's something like building an atom bomb, it can be done, mate.' - Thom

Exactly. The rest will work out.