Entrepreneur and investor Pieter Schoen sold Nederlandse Energie Maatschappij to investment company Waterland in 2018, becoming a wealthy man. He is now nationally known as a judge on Dragons' Den, where he repeatedly sees his most important investor lesson confirmed. "First the guy, then the tent.
We are writing November 2021 and the Dutch energy market is on fire. Exploding gas prices have left several energy companies in trouble for not properly hedging their purchases. Consumers with variable tariffs are facing a doubling or even tripling of their energy bills.
A situation that entrepreneur and investor Pieter Schoen (46) knows how to deal with; he likes a little market turbulence. Sixteen years ago, Schoen, along with college friend Harald Swinkels, shook up the Dutch energy market with Nederlandse Energie Maatschappij (NLE). Using aggressive advertising campaigns and stunted rates, Schoen and Swinkels managed to grow from nothing into the fourth largest energy company in the Netherlands. In 2018, NLE was sold for 200 million euros to Nuts Groep, a stake of investment company Waterland.
At the negotiating table, Schoen managed to negotiate that his non-compete clause only covered his activities in the Dutch energy market. So it could happen that less than a month after closing in 2018, he entered the Belgian energy company Mega as an investor. After seven acquisitions and again intensive telemarketing campaigns, Mega has grown from 55,000 to 770,000 customers in three years and now operates in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.
Having owned several businesses from the mid-1990s onward as a graduate business administration student, Schoen has also been active as an investor for the last 15 years. Initially with venture capital company VOC Capital Partners that focuses primarily on startups, for the last five years with his own investment company Shoe Investments with which he focuses exclusively on scale-ups. In total, Shoe Investments involves eleven direct and twenty indirect investments in businesses and real estate. In addition to the stake in energy provider Mega, Shoe Investments currently also has interests in lender Swishfund, marketing company Creative Clicks and online glasses retailer Charlie Temple, among others.
But a 'hands-on' investor with more than thirty holdings, isn't that a bit too ambitious all around?
'Of course, I am not equally involved in every investment. Besides, I have a good team around me at Shoe Investments, together with my partner Ronald van der Heide. Together with management, we create a roadmap for the next five years with a dot on the horizon for each new investment to determine where we want to go. In the beginning we usually spend a lot of time and attention on the business and then we slowly build that down. We give the boat a good push and then it's up to the entrepreneur to stay the course. That is the most important lesson I have learned as an investor in the meantime: if there is a 'good head' on such an entrepreneur, then a business will automatically gain traction.
In your view, what is a "good headline"?
'The difference between a good entrepreneur and an excellent entrepreneur is whether the entrepreneur can go along with the growth of his business. Entrepreneurs are quite stubborn, don't want to outsource things and think they can do everything best themselves. They are very much on the Euros, which is also commendable in the early stages. But you also have to dare to think big and commit big actions to that. You are only an excellent entrepreneur if you can delegate and accept that some things are better outsourced to other people, simply because they are better at them. I had to learn that myself, by the way, haha.'
What do you consider your biggest investment success?
'Success can be defined on different levels. If I look purely at returns, Mega seems to be another hit, and Creative Click, with a money-multiple of thirty, isn't doing badly either. But as I said, we are still on board as shareholders, the exit is yet to come.'
Through your role as an investor on the TV show Dragons' Den, you have now become a well-known Dutchman. Does that give you an edge over other investment companies?
'That's definitely an advantage. If there has been a broadcast on TV, I sometimes have a thousand to two thousand new LinkedIn requests, often with great business plans. We even had to hire an extra employee to handle all those e-mails. I have to say that most of these plans do not fit our investment criteria; Shoe Investments does not participate in startups. But I don't want to reject everything out of hand. Sometimes there is an interesting proposition and then I have a special pot where I can do something from my own holding company.
