Do you struggle to close deals or identify your ideal clients’ real problems? Transform your sales approach and outsmart the competition! In today’s episode, Michael Zipursky sits down with Maarten van Kroonenburg, the innovative mind behind BW Ventures, to talk about Maarten’s unique journey from challenging the unicorn startup craze to cultivating the “blue whale” approach—creating sustainable and profitable companies that thrive long-term. Maarten also unveils his strategic secrets for winning government contracts and the essential role of automated systems in managing growth. Plus, discover why niching your services can be your greatest asset. You won’t want to miss this!
In this episode with Maarten, you’ll learn how to:
- Identify your prospects’ real issues to close more deals effectively.
- Build trust with customers to foster long-lasting relationships.
- Niche your value proposition to differentiate from competitors.
- Win government contracts through strategic insights and preparation.
- Set up automated systems to support and manage your growth efficiently.
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Connect with Maarten on LinkedIn
Learn more about BW Ventures
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Joining Michael on the show is Maarten van Kroonenburg, the Founder of BW Ventures. They’ve helped over 200 startups in their quest to find a durable and scalable business model by helping with a structured customer-centric process that helps them figure out why, how, and what they do. Before I tell you more about what you’re going to learn in this episode, are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients we work with started as podcast listeners just like you. A consistent theme they have shared with us is they wished they had reached out sooner about our clarity coaching program rather than waiting for that perfect time.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants like you, we are offering a free, no-pressure growth session call. We’re on the call. We will dive deep into your goals, challenges, and situation and outline a plan that is tailor-made for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time-consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. Don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free grow session call. Visit ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow to book your free call.
Let me break down what you’re going to learn by tuning in to this episode with Maarten. First is how to identify your prospect’s real issues to close more deals effectively, how to build trust with customers to foster long-lasting relationships, how to niche your value proposition to differentiate from your competitors, how to win government contracts through strategic insights and preparation, and how to set up automated systems to support and manage your growth efficiently. Plus, so much more. Here to share with you his insight and story is Maarten van Kroonenburg. Enjoy.
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Maarten, welcome.
Thank you for having me.
I’m looking forward to our conversation. We would start by having you explain what you state. You said, “We don’t create unicorns. We breed blue whales.” What does that mean?
We should go back about 7 to 8 years. That’s when I started BW Ventures, Blue Whale Ventures. We started to focus on startups, helping startups create value propositions that could last. If we go back 7 or 8 years into the startup scene, everyone was focused on creating unicorns. In my perspective, that wasn’t a good thing, especially if you lived in Europe, in which raising capital was way harder than it is or was in the US.
These unicorns were valued based on what the last investor valued you at. There’s due diligence there, and they have multiples. For me, it was a crazy idea to create unicorns based on paper value. Instead of creating lasting companies with durable business models, don’t overgrow them and grow at a 50% rate every year. It’s fine that you grow 15%, 20%, to 25%, but do that for twenty years and be profitable and durable.
That’s where we made the reference. A blue whale is the biggest animal on earth. It’s the fastest-growing animal, especially in the first three months. It grows 90 kilograms a day, which is a lot. The only thing is there are not a lot of blue whales anymore, sadly, but it’s a real creature. It’s not a myth that you’re chasing.
Let me ask you about that because, at that time, you decided to put a message into the world and into the marketplace that you wanted to serve, which was quite counter to the status quo or what the media was talking about. There’s a lesson inside this for all consultants and all consulting founders, but I’d love to hear what you see when you put that message out, “Everyone is talking about creating unicorns. We don’t believe that you should be focused on creating unicorns. You should be focused on creating a more sustainable and profitable.” It seems intuitive, yet the market was focused on this completely different and exciting let’s build billion-dollar unicorns. What was the response? What did you start to see? Was it a struggle, or did people latch onto it right away? What was your experience?
It was a struggle for at least startups in the beginning because they wanted to raise capital. That was the holy grail. The better the valuation, the better their story. We dive into a conversation with, at that moment, a startup. Later on, we also applied the same things to corporates, but more on that later. When we dived with startups into that conversation, they saw that creating a value proposition that delivers value for a customer is the main fuel that you need for your company. Once that clicked in a conversation, we didn’t need to sell anything anymore because they were like, “If I understand what my customer wants, and if I can deliver that with a great value proposition or a promise, all the rest will follow.”
Is there anything that you would do differently knowing what you know now and what you saw? If you were to go back in time and put that message out into the marketplace, is there anything that you would change?
I would put way more energy into brand identity and especially content. We did that in the first three months, but then operations took over. Every consultant has the same issues there, but I should have stuck to creating a habit of writing or creating content around the message we were trying to spread. If I could go back, I would change that and stick to that plan or habit.
Describe the structure of the business. You have eight different people who are involved in BW Ventures. What are their roles? What does that look like?
We have a quite atypical structure for a consulting company. We’ve got a holding company, which is BW Ventures. Within the holding company, we’ve got 5 to 6 people working on a payroll. They’re split in facilitation. We call them validators. They are the people who help our customers run the right experiments and gather the right data.
Next to the holding company, we have mini consulting boutiques. One is more focused on corporate finance and M&A. One is more focused on creating a pipeline philosophy for our customers, but all within the same vision and structure to grow these new ventures. The typical thing is with these mini boutiques, we’ve got, not partners, but they’re entrepreneurs within that boutique as well. As a holding company, we still have a majority stake there. It’s a little bit different compared to the others. I’m inspired by some Dutch agencies that run a lot of sub-labels. It helps us to position the smaller stories within the bigger story that we want to tell.
Is that another way of saying that you do this because you want each brand or mini boutique for the consulting side, and they are specialists or experts? Is that the goal? Have you considered any other model, or why not go to a more typical approach of having one company, one brand? You’re building that one company and one brand. You offer starting with 1, 2, or 3 services and add as you look to scale. Why not do that? Did you ever think about that? I’m interested in how you ended up with the model that you have now, which sounds like almost running 2 or 3 different companies at one time.
I’ve got two answers that answer your full question. Three or four years ago, I figured that getting ourselves into a new business, especially in Europe, is a matter of networking and getting the trust of your customers to help them create new value propositions. The trust factor was very important in sealing the deals.
What I figured is that once we were introduced and people trusted the one who introduced us, our closing rate was 80% to 90%, sometimes even within two days. The typical deal size that we do is starting from $25,000 up to $150,000 for one project. It’s quite a high ticket. The trust factor played a very important role.
We tried to scale BW Ventures by creating partnerships with companies. For example, technical engineers who were creating interesting technical solutions. My reasoning was if I partnered up with them and they had a big network, people would trust the company. What we can do is collaborate with them. You can get a technical product out, and our value proposition business type of consulting would help the customers grow.
The reasoning and the assumptions were good, but the outcomes were not that good because what happened was that there was not enough skin in the game for the other companies that we were working with. What practically happened is that we were still doing call acquisition to prove that we could deliver more value, but that wasn’t the experiment and the strategy that I had in mind. After two years of trying that, I quit the whole strategy. I stopped the partnerships.
The best moments are in the shower. The idea popped up. What if I do the same thing but focus on someone who has a unique skillset that helps with the problems that we solve for our customers, for example, corporate finance or M&A skills, but then look for an individual that has a network and see if we can get them on with skin in the game? We started with that two and a half years ago. That helped us to explore growth.
When you mentioned that you have an entrepreneur or somebody functioning like that inside each of these brands or boutiques, you found somebody, not necessarily a partner. We can talk about what that looks like in more detail, but it’s somebody who’s running that business or has skin in the game. They have an upside. There’s an incentive for them to go out and use their network. Why would they say yes to coming under your umbrella if they already had that network? Why wouldn’t they run their own business? What was the incentive? What was exciting for them to say, “Yes, we’d like to come under your brand and grow something together?”
Creating a value proposition that actually delivers value for a customer is the main fuel that you need for your company. Share on X
It’s the flywheel that we created within the boutique. I will dive deeper into what we do because it makes sense how the flywheel works. We’re an innovation consultancy boutique. We specialize in creating commercial success for innovation because that’s one of the biggest problems we see. They create great products and services, but they have a hard time putting and getting into the market and gaining traction on that.
As I mentioned in your first question, it starts with building and testing a good value proposition. That in itself is what the holding company does. What we figured is that if you have a good value proposition, corporates have a hard time getting sales traction and all the new value propositions because they’re used to selling what they know and creating a sales pipeline for something that people don’t know. They don’t know how the sales playbook works. It’s still a lot of grinding. You have to get out there, have the conversations, and lose a lot of the sales calls, then you start to figure out how it works. That’s the second phase.
The third phase is that most of the boards and directors state, “Can we grow this quicker and faster because we see traction?” They start to say, “Are there any competitors that we can potentially buy? Are there any smaller companies that we can add to this to make it explode?” This flywheel is what they’re all interested in because they know we can get in with something small, but gain all the trust of especially our corporate clients. Based on that, we could expand within the customers that we have.
What I’m hearing from you is you have tried this idea of partnerships. You are partnering with external firms with the idea that they already have access to your ideal clients. They can introduce, refer, and help to sell you into those organizations. What you found over a couple of years of trying is that because they didn’t have skin in the game and didn’t have the greatest incentive, they were running their own business. You’re a separate business. You weren’t getting the uptake or enough of that.
Instead of doing that, you thought, “Let’s find somebody who has a network, experience, and expertise. Let’s bring them into our company or create some entity together. They have the network and experience, but we have the machine that will help the end client to be successful with our pipeline building, consulting, strategy, and value prop.” It’s somebody who is a craftsman or woman, but you give them the tools, the sharpened tools, and the tool belt. They have what they need to get the job done. The value for them is that you’re giving them what they need to be successful. Is that accurate?
Yes, that’s accurate. The second part of the answer is I like to go niche instead of going mass market and being a consultancy firm for everything in business. I don’t believe in that. I’d rather have one label that is niche and is focused on creating a value proposition. Creating a pipeline makes a lot of sense and makes a difference for the client because we can position ourselves differently compared to a typical marketing agency, sales agency, or innovation agency, especially with these labels. It helps to sharply position us in a niche there.
If you’re not a household brand or a big consulting firm specialization focus, that perception of delivering greater value, having deeper insights, and being the expert makes a lot of sense. The question, Maarten, that many people will have as they’re listening to what you’re sharing is, you’re finding great people who have these networks, but how do you find them? Walk us through where you found these people. I’d also love to hear about what the actual structure looks like to bring them in terms of compensation. Are they paid a base salary plus performance? Is it equity? What do those pieces look like? Whatever you’re comfortable sharing, so people have an idea of how to structure all that.
The first question I will answer is the structure. It depends if we’re creating something completely new, a new service for the BW Holding Group. It ranges between 40% to 50% of equity. There’s no guarantee on salary because we’re growing something new there. I’m not going to fund your base salary because, for me, that is also skin in the game. We created something from zero. We’re going to do the same thing.
What BW Ventures brings is already a portfolio of clients and a high rate of how customers experience our service. That’s what we bring there. Once they start to earn, they get a priority on cashflows. We negotiate. It’s not a salary, but it’s the priority of cashflows. After that, there’s a split. We do dividends, and we’ll figure it out. It’s not about the dividends. It’s about compounding in the upcoming 10 to 15 years. That’s where the value is. I’m happy to share that.
If we are not creating a new product because we like to productize our services, that is important right now. If we go into a specific niche, for example, energy transition, but we still use the products that we have, the equity stake will be lower. The salary is higher there because we’re not creating new intellectual property. You’re using what we already have. We’re not creating something from scratch. The equity is between 10 to 20.
That’s because you create the whole operating system of BW Ventures with all its products. The only thing that we do is create or niche down to a more specific niche or industry. How do we find these people? It’s funny because we have a young team of consultants. Most of the people who are on our payroll are super young. We gain a lot of trust from boards.
When you say super young, so people know because it could mean different things to different people.
It’s 22 years old until 30 years old. I’m the oldest one in our team. I’m 33 years old. That’s quite young compared to all the other consultancy boutiques. It’s not that we have feedback, “You’re too young. It’s not working out.” It’s in what value you deliver, and age doesn’t matter. What I wanted was to have some people around me that I could learn from as well. That was what we first started to look for. These are people who have earned their respect and projects over many years.
I’m still figuring out how this works, but I got some introductions to people. They introduced me to new people. We sat down and had a conversation about what I had in mind. They were like, “Yeah, let’s do this.” It’s in 1 or 2 conversations. What convinced them was the story and the freedom that I gave them. Once I mentioned, “Let’s do this and dive into what you are already doing and what you have,” the pieces started to click, and there weren’t even real negotiations there. It was clean. They stick to the plan. They committed themselves.
How many hires like this have you made? Is this happened twice or more times? What does that look like?
It’s number four.
You’ve done this four times. Has the experience across all four been relatively similar?
Yes.
When you put this out to the market, as you said, you got introductions from people that you know to these actual people you end up partnering with, did you reach out to people that you know and say, “Here’s what I’m looking for?” Did you post on LinkedIn or social media? How did you get to that?
I didn’t put this on LinkedIn because I’m not quite sure if LinkedIn is the right spot to find people for these roles. I’ve got a small network of people that I trust 100%. I have regular conversations with them to structure my mind on what I’m trying to do. They pick out the right stuff. I don’t want to manage them. I’m not asking for something. They come back to me and say, “You should talk to them.”
That trust factor is very, very important to sealing the deals. Share on X
For people introduction, they don’t have an incentive there, but I incentivize them in a different way. That is where the magic happens. They know that I don’t want to be introduced to somebody randomly. Think about who you introduce. I fully trust that they introduced the right people. That’s a balance that I created. It took some years to refine that.
When I get the introductions, I know that they are good. I have an open conversation. I’m not trying to ask them something. I’m having a conversation about what I’m trying to do and what my IDs are. You’ll see how the other end responds. If that clicks and you figure out that you both have the same mindset and way of thinking, the rest will come there.
You mentioned earlier on that one thing that if you were able to go back in time and do a little bit differently, you would have done more content publishing more regularly, sharing more of your beliefs and ideas. Let’s fast forward to the present day from a marketing perspective and lead generation perspective. What are you finding is working best to bring clients in the door to get to the point where you’re having meetings and conversations with ideal clients? What are you doing?
We’re doing three things. We created an actual operating system for this. We’ve got a BW Operating System, or BOS, as we call it internally. The BOS helps us to define the strategic pillars of BW Ventures. With regards to this question, we’ve got two important value pillars, which is one customer closing. That tracks how we are closing customers and where they come from. The main driver is the network. The second one is our prospecting operating system. We’re constantly running prospecting campaigns. It’s either LinkedIn, calling, or emailing. It’s like 10% to 15% of new business comes from prospecting.
What percentage is coming from your network?
Seventy percent.
Let me ask you because, on the prospecting side, this is an area that people are generally quite interested in. Getting opportunities from your network is something that most people already understand. It’s quite commonplace, but prospecting effectively is a challenge for many people. Can you share what you do or say? I know you mentioned it. It’s email, phone, and LinkedIn. It’s the few different channels that you’re using. When you’re reaching out to people you don’t know, what are you initially saying to them? What is the overall message? What are you finding is working best to get people’s attention so they want to move to that next step and have a conversation with you?
Within prospecting, you’ve got two ends of the spectrum. You’ve got blanketing and spearing. Blanketing is blasting out emails. You’re sending a mass email. You’re personalizing the name and title. The other end is digging in deep to figure out how to connect to one prospect and do more manual work. It depends on what services you’re going to deliver or where on that spectrum you need to be. In the beginning, it’s experimenting. You can’t just have one magical formula that brings it to you.
What we do is we create tier one, tier two, and tier three types of customers or prospects. Tier ones are the ones that we fully spear on. For example, we helped with some projects in the Netherlands. We figured that most of them were financed by the Dutch Ministry of Defense. What we saw is that most of these companies had quite a lot of trouble getting into the market. They were focused on serving that one potential customer, the Ministry of Defense.
Based on that, we did a campaign of ten people. What we did is we looked for the people within the Ministry of Defense who were responsible for innovation and stimulating SME companies. Because we had experience with two of the projects that were quite important projects for the Ministry of Defense, that opened up the door immediately. Within a week, we had seven conversations. One of them was with the highest-ranked officer within the Ministry of Defense. They were like, “Come to the Hague.”
How did you get to that point where you got seven conversations? Did you send the emails, phone calls, or LinkedIn? Was it a mixture? What did you say? Is it, “Here’s what we do. We’ve worked on these other projects that are similar. We can help you to do X.” What did that messaging look like?
Disclaimer here. Don’t do this in all your prospecting campaigns. In this case, we figured something that these projects get quite some subsidies or grants. You shouldn’t name it subsidies or grants. It’s more like money that is used for R&D, but it’s tax money. We figured out that only 1% or 2% of all the projects that get funded will get a contract for the longer run. There’s a lot of money there being spent. Everybody knows it, but the SMEs are not feeling that.
That’s what we mentioned in the email. We’ve worked on two of their projects. We see there’s a big risk for them. The ministry won’t be a contractor for them for 2 or 3 years. We think we can do this way better in a matter that you do not take the risks that you are taking, Ministry of Defense. We can also help your SME companies to broaden their view and make or get some other contractors there as well.
That opened the door. Why did it open the door? It’s because we focused on one experience. We mentioned to them, “We think we know how to fix your problem because this should be a problem. If you feel it or not, it’s too big not to look at it.” That was the main reason that out of ten people, seven people got into the conversation.
You mentioned there are tiers, tier one, tier two, and tier three. Tier one is the highest value. It’s the dream client. It’s worth your time and the team’s time to do the manual research and customize the emails or communications fully. Tier two might be less research and customization. Tier three is a merge tag. They’re changing their name or company name. It’s automated. You can send out a preset sequence of messages and have them go out easily.
When you look at the results you’ve seen across all the years of doing this, how would you connect the actual results from each one of those tiers? If you had to do only tier one, tier two, or tier three, which one would you do? Where are you seeing better results? Is it split equally? Are you seeing better results from the customization and more manual research? Even though it takes more time, you’re reaching fewer people. How do you view that based on actual results?
We create a mix. We continuously do tier-three, tier-two, and tier-one outreach. Tier one is campaign-focused. It’s an idea that pops up. You think about it and you try to get in. Sometimes, it’s just one customer there. It requires quite a lot of insight and creativity. That’s not something that will be out there continuously.
For tier three, we can run campaigns continuously, and you don’t need too much creativity for that. On the other hand, the results are way lower. Don’t expect ten customers out of a campaign of 100 people. What we create to track our results are unit cases. The unit case is known in SaaS. We created a model for ourselves there based on the SaaS model.
What we track is what our inputs are in a unit case. How many people do we reach out to every single month? That’s a target that we set. How many people are interested in one way or another? How many people show up in a discovery call? How many get an offer? How many get a deal? For tier three, tier two, and tier one, we’ve got different models because for tier one, you can’t reach 400, as I mentioned.
What we do is for every campaign, we track what we put in. The input is the most important one because we can manage that. We can manage how many people we reach out to. I can’t manage the outcomes there. That’s what we track. That’s a mini data flywheel that you create within your own company because the more you do it, the better you learn and start to understand which campaigns are going to work and which are not.
In the beginning, prospecting is just experimenting. You can’t just have one magical formula that brings it to you. Share on X
Some people might be thinking, “That sounds fantastic.” You have a good strategy and approach to this in how you manage it, but it also sounds like it could be a lot of work. Share with us who because you’ve referred to “we.” Who is doing this? Is this you? Is it somebody else on your team? How many people are involved in sending the emails or doing the communications and actual lead generation work? How many people are involved in tracking all of the results of this on a regular basis?
Three people are involved in BW Ventures. If we look at their actual time spent on our own campaign, so not for customers, it’s 10% of their time. That’s not a lot. I’m involved. A sales development specialist and account manager are involved if you put it in the old-school terminology.
You’re saying that this is a service that you provide for your clients. This is the pipeline type of work you’re providing for the clients that you work with. Three people spend 10% of their time on this business development and lead generation activity using the systems that you use for your clients but you also use it internally.
Yes. Setting up an automated system costs is the biggest time investment. We coded some things. It’s low code, but we connected some tools to each other. We’ve got something in HubSpot. We created this Power BI dashboard that tracks the results combined with the unit case. That is because we know it works for us, and that’s why we put in the time investment.
On the other hand, if you create an Excel and you know what targets you have, in the bottom line, you have a good ROI on marketing and sales expenditures, including tracking your time. If you have a good model, the only thing you need to do is count how many calls a day that you have. Use your agenda. It’s the easiest way. How many emails, LinkedIn messages, or phone calls did I make? These two are the easiest inputs. The rest, you can do that without any coding or software, even on a note block, if you would like to.
Before we wrap up, I want to ask you more about one thing that you talked about, which is that you started off focusing more on startups as being clients, and you’ve shifted to more of a focus on corporates. Question number one is, what is the percentage of your actual client base? Is it all corporates? Is it still some startups? My second question is, why the shift?
A lot of people experience this when they start off focusing on one type of client. Often, it could be startups or smaller businesses. They have a belief it’s going to be easier and more fun to work with, whatever that might be. They start to see certain things that open their eyes. This may not be the best client for us to focus on to create the business that we want. I’d love to hear about your experience and why you’ve made that shift. First of all, what percentage of your business is corporate versus startup?
It’s 95% corporate and 5% startup. What we did is we shifted the paying customer, and the end user is still the same. Our end users could still be startups, but the one that pays the bills are the corporates. Why did we shift? Our vision was quite vague about eight years ago. We had quite some trouble there.
Quite a trouble with reaching startups or getting startups?
No. The equity part was fine. We always have equity in the business. That’s also why we had an investor in BW Ventures, which is quite atypical for a consultancy company. The main strategy was to create a portfolio of small equity stakes. The first and biggest mistake that we made there was that we bought a marketing sales and web on-app development agency. We shouldn’t have done that. That’s short.
We bought it. The biggest client ran out almost immediately after signing, which made it a money-losing company. I needed to make some bold choices there because there was no cashflow coming in. We had a nice portfolio of equities, but it’s going to take 50 years until it starts to create value. It’s one of the main reasons that I also split with my co-founder.
I had one opportunity. My investor mentioned to me, “You’re going to get half a year to reinvent the company, but you’ve got one goal. Make sure that you are cashflow neutral. You’re not going to ask for more money.” There are two things I ask from him. I was like, “At least give me half a year.” The second one is, “I want to get rid of everything that we built so far. I want to get rid of the things that we bought. I want to get rid of everything.” He helped me with that.
Within half a year, I applied our own process to figure out who had the biggest problem, which customer group experienced the problem, and who wanted to pay for a solution in that. These two are the big differences. That’s where I came up with corporates that have innovation teams running for 2 or 3 years and have quite some trouble scaling their ventures and startup investments, and gaining traction there.
I figured that if you follow that money from the corporates, it makes a lot of sense to start invoicing them and position ourselves in between there. From there on, we got way more into the corporate innovation landscape and figured out that there was way more to do in corporate innovation and corporate business building than just investing or helping the startups. That’s the reason why we did it. If you boil it down, it has a lot to do with where you gain your own traction and how to figure out your own model there.
Maarten, I want to thank you for coming on and sharing some of your journey. There’s so much more that we could dive into. We’ve only scratched the surface here, learning about you and your business. In the meantime, before we may look to continue that conversation. It’d be great to have you share where people can learn more about you, BW Ventures, and everything you have going on. What’s the one place for them to go to learn more?
The one place is LinkedIn. As I mentioned in the beginning, I should have started recreating content from the get-go and continued that habit. I built the habit. Twice a week, I post IDs and stuff that we do. That’s the main platform where you should follow me. From there, you can get into Substack and all the other platforms, but LinkedIn is the main one.
Maarten, thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me again.
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There you have it for this episode between Michael and Maarten. If you enjoy this episode, then be sure to hit that subscribe button. If you want to help support this show, I’d encourage you to leave a rating and review. That’s the end of the line. We’ll be back with another episode. Until next time.
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