Tom Coronel is a racing driver and entrepreneur. Not only on the race track, but also with his businesses he always goes flat out. As an entrepreneur, the sale of Create2Fit should have been his dream exit, but things turned out differently. "A good adviser would have saved us a lot of money.
Things are quiet at Coronel Sports, a large fitness and tennis center in Huizen. In the tennis hall four older men are playing doubles, two girls are having a drink at the bar, outside the irregular tapping of the new padel courts can be heard. When Tom Coronel makes his entrance, the quiet is quickly over. 'Sorry I'm a little late,' Coronel apologizes. 'Would you like another bakkie?'
Coronel is best known to the general public as a racing driver - he once tested for the Arrows Formula 1 team - but has also been active as an entrepreneur for 25 years. Together with his brothers Tim and Raymond, he is co-owner of Coronel Sports, a go-kart center and some real estate. He himself is currently still active with the social media consultancy Booster Media Solutions.
Sale of majority stake
But by far the most high-profile activities of the past two decades were Coronel's e-commerce activities. Together with his childhood friend Marc Koster, Coronel began selling radars, child seats and televisions online in 1999. Under the name Create2Fit, this grew in ten years into a serious e-commerce company with revenues of 32 million euros. Coronel was even named "E-Commerce Man of the Year" by Emerce magazine.
The success of Coronel and Create2Fit did not go unnoticed. In 2009, RFS Holland, Wehkamp's parent company, showed up on his doorstep. Wehkamp, at the time owned by a group of investors including former KPN CEO Ad Scheepbouwer, had ambitious growth plans. Coronel: "Wehkamp was really a very big player at that time and we saw a lot of opportunities to benefit from their marketing and purchasing power.
After prosperous negotiations, Coronel and Koster decided to sell a majority stake of Create2fit to RFS Holland with a five-year earn-out. Coronel: 'The sale earned us both about one and a half million euros, but that was minus the tax. The real hit had to come from the earn-out and extra bonuses, but unfortunately little came of that.'
Too enthusiastic
One reason was that the earn-out was contingent on achieving certain profit targets. But Wehkamp mainly wanted revenue growth and was not at all interested in profits. It also proved difficult for Coronel and Koster to operate within Wehkamp's rigid meeting culture. Coronel: "In retrospect, we entered into the partnership far too enthusiastically. We simply should have looked more closely at the risks and defined who was responsible for what in the new structure. A good adviser could have saved us a lot of money and misery.'
In 2015, Wehkamp itself was acquired by British investment company Apax Partners. It soon became clear that the new owners wanted to get rid of the badly run Create2fit as quickly as possible. Coronel: "We absolutely wanted to prevent them from pulling the plug on the business. In all haste, we were then able to buy Create2Fit back for 1 euro. But it was 1 minute to twelve, we had to lay off 30 employees immediately.'
Bankrupt
Coronel and Koster had to rebuild everything from the ground up, as there had been hardly any investment in the business in recent years. In the end, the development of a new IT system became such an expensive project that Create2fitf still went bankrupt in 2019. Anno 2022 Coronel looks back on it with mixed feelings.
Coronel: "In hindsight, we sold to Wehkamp too early. That initially earned us a nice sum, but we also lost control immediately. Within such a large company you quickly become part of an oil tanker that can hardly be steered. It kept me awake for quite a while, but you have to keep going. The windshield is always bigger than the rearview mirror.
