On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Van den Kroonenberg Prize for successful young entrepreneurship, we spoke extensively with former winners. In this episode, Dick Theisens, founder of Symbol, which won the Van den Kroonenberg Prize in 2013, speaks.
Interview: Gé Klein Wolterink & Maurice Essers
Text: Lidewey van Noord
Grasshopper seller and DJ
Dick Theisens grew up in a small town called Bergentheim, on a farm, in an enterprising environment. Entrepreneurship was instilled in him from an early age. At the age of five, he emerged as a shrewd entrepreneur: he caught a grasshopper and managed to sell it to the neighbours. At school, he traded shiny asphalt stones, which he had picked up from a newly paved road, for marbles. His fascination with technology also arose at an early age. A boy from the neighbourhood had built a remote-controlled aircraft himself. “I wanted to be able to do that too.” He attended pre-university education (vwo) in Hardenberg, but had to go back to senior general secondary education (havo) for a while, because foreign languages were not his thing. Eventually, he did get his pre-university education (vwo) diploma and started studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Twente in 1988. Laughing: “I thought I was finally done with languages. I got all kinds of study books in English and German.”
Theisens continued to live at home during the first year, and in the second year he moved to a room in Hengelo. “I was looking for a part-time job and soon ended up at the discotheque Empire New York, one of the most famous discotheques in Hengelo and popular among students. I worked there as a DJ. In Hardenberg, I also played with now famous DJ Edwin Evers.” In addition to his DJ jobs, he had other part-time jobs that fueled his entrepreneurial spirit. On Saturdays, he worked in his parents’ bulb company and he was also a teaching assistant for Technical Design for many years.
Theisens was a serious student. “I completed my studies in exactly six years.” He was also a member of AEGEE and of Heerendispuut P.C.S.A. Incognito, the first and oldest dispuut of AEGEE. There he made peace with foreign languages. “From AEGEE I did several language courses abroad, also because it was a cheap way to go on holiday. But I also found it interesting to see several countries and get to know people from all over Europe.”
Encore: a big hit
Theisens graduated in 1994. It was crisis. “I wasn’t hired anywhere. That’s why I decided to stand in front of the class as a physics and chemistry teacher. I taught the third and fourth grades of MAVO and HAVO, but without a teaching qualification. That happened a lot in those days.” He enjoyed the experience, but soon discovered that his heart wasn’t in secondary education.
In his final year, Theisens started his first company, Encore Media Systems, from a room at the UT. The idea came from his work as a DJ: Encore developed systems that could automate entire radio studios. Theisens hired two friends, a programmer and an electronics specialist. “That system for radio studios was very complex. We probably sold about ten of them. In radio, you have to be lucky that they’ve just received a subsidy, otherwise there’s no money.”
What did become a big hit: a simple version of that automated music system, for the catering industry. “If you go to a café now, you still see music computers behind the bar. We originally made them with CD changers, but pretty soon you got MP3 and hard drives became big enough to store music.” The competition still worked with cassette tapes: catering entrepreneurs were sent six cassette tapes per month, the following month they had to return them and they received six new ones. “And then we came up with a system that contained 2000 songs. Our customers were sent a hundred new songs every month. Automatically, they didn’t have to hand in cassette tapes for that.”
In two years, Encore installed 3500 music systems in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. The company soon had forty employees. Encore was the first party in the Netherlands, perhaps even in the world, to sign a contract with a music rights organisation, BumaStemra, for the distribution of digital music files. “That was completely new to BumaStemra, they had never even thought about it.”
The internet didn’t exist yet. There were modem connections that you could dial into, but that didn't work for music. So Encore burned the songs onto CDs; every month they sent thousands of them to subscribed customers. They had to put that CD in the computer and then the system was automatically provided with new music and software updates. "At one point there was internet of course, but by then I had already left."
Theisens started to lose his fun in the company when two investors came on board and at one point there were thirteen shareholders. "That wasn't for me. I was more managing the shareholders than I was doing the business." During this period, Theisens saw quite a few advisors come and go. "That cost a lot of money, and the quality was not always what you would expect." He also hired a party to sell the systems, which turned out to be not at all reliable. "That guy ended up in jail."
In the Netherlands, Encore's music systems were usually purchased by the hospitality industry, but in Belgium they were mainly rented. "So we had to invest a lot of money in it. The idea was of course that we would receive money from the rental every month, but the hospitality industry is not the most loyal payer. That is why we could not go anywhere for external financing.” If a customer did not pay, Encore could shut down the system remotely. Preferably on Saturday evening, of course, because no establishment wants to be without music. “Then we sent our youngest employees out on Saturday to visit the defaulters. They came back with thousands of euros. And then the system was up and running again. But that was actually irresponsible.” In 2002, Theisens decided it was time for a new step.
Encore now has a different name, but it still exists. It has not grown into a kind of Spotify, which it could have potentially become, but now focuses more on hardware than on music. Nowadays, the hospitality industry often uses Spotify. But Theisens still sometimes sees similar players as those that were made in his time at Encore.
Solving big problems
After Theisens left Encore Media Systems, he started working as an independent consultant. He worked as a freelancer for about eight years, mainly for Texas Instruments and Sensata. “At first I was in design engineering, but I quickly switched to process engineering. There are always problems within an organization: production lines where things fail, malfunctions, quality problems.” Once he had ironed out a number of these issues, which resulted in quality improvement, shorter lead times and lower costs for those companies, he started to receive more and more requests from customers who wanted to optimize their processes.
He found solving these big problems the most fun. “Because if it doesn’t work, you can’t do anything about it, because it’s so big that no one else can do it either. But if you do manage to do it, you get increasingly interesting assignments. For example, I ended up in Mexico, in an interim team at a company that was not doing well. With six others, four Americans and two Dutch, I strengthened the management there for three and a half months. I could do a lot there, solve problems, set up new lines. That was really fun.”
Texas Instruments and Sensata were ahead of other companies in terms of methods to solve persistent quality problems. Theisens learned to work with Lean and Six Sigma, two methodologies that eventually inspired him to set up his company Symbol. “I learned the broad outlines of everything I do and apply there.” Today, there are few companies that do not act the way Sensata and Texas Instruments acted twenty years ago. “It was a really good learning experience, they were way ahead of their time.”
The founding of Symbol
After working as an independent consultant for eight years, Theisens started to get the itch: he wanted to build a company again. He decided to go into consultancy and training, in the field of Lean and Six Sigma. In January 2008, he founded Symbol and hired his first employee. “We started on what later turned out to be the first day of the credit crisis. A difficult time, because we had hired people, but we didn't have any fat on our bones yet." But after that tough start, Symbol became a success. The company now employs around thirty people.
At the time Symbol was founded, Lean and Six Sigma were still two separate methodologies. Competing companies chose one of them. Theisens, on the other hand, was convinced that the combination of Lean and Six Sigma led to the best results. "Lean is more about shortening lead times. So everything that is time-related, especially logistical processes, you tackle with Lean. If you produce efficiently, the quality also increases. Then you can use Six Sigma to apply statistical techniques to reduce variation, with the aim of solving persistent quality problems. You can only do that efficiently if you have a stable process, thanks to Lean. In 2008, working at the interface of Lean and Six Sigma was really a new way of thinking." Someone who was very important to Theisens and Symbol in that early period was professor Fred van Houten of the University of Twente. Theisens approached him and pointed out that he had not learned everything he had learned at Texas Instruments and Sensata during his mechanical engineering studies. “While he should have. Tackling, solving and preventing process and production problems are very relevant skills for a mechanical engineer. I said that I wanted to start giving training courses to companies and asked whether the university could provide certification for this. A special request as a start-up company at a university of course, but Fred van Houten was happy to cooperate.” Professor Van Houten suggested tackling it on a large scale. His plan was to approach a number of other parties and submit an application to the European Commission for a project within the framework of the European Union’s Leonardo da Vinci programme, which aims to improve the quality of vocational training in the EU. Together with a number of international parties, they could jointly set the European standard for education on combining Lean and Six Sigma. In two years, they developed the teaching material and the exams and Theisens started teaching the subject Lean Six Sigma at the UT. Symbol still teaches that subject at the UT to this day, now for 140 students per year. But they don't just teach it to students, they also teach it to people from the business world.
The Van den Kroonenberg Award
In 2013, the Van den Kroonenberg Prize was awarded to Symbol. “We had been in business for five years at the time, so we had gone through the start-up phase and had customers. 2013 was an important year for us. We had taken over a small company in Zwolle, which consisted of eight people, so that takeover was quite extensive for us. We also built a business premises and we were in the Fast 50 as a fast grower.”
But for Theisens, the Van den Kroonenberg Prize was the best recognition. “Because it is a substantive prize. The jury looks at what you do and how you do business, at what you have meant for Twente and for the collaboration with the university. It is about much more than just fast growth.” Especially since the corona crisis, Theisens no longer believes that fast growth is the most important thing there is. “We have always found it important that we radiate quality, that we create something that the university can be proud of.”
Theisens believes that the fact that Symbol teaches at the UT is good for the company. “We teach a master’s course, so we are still fresh in the minds of interested students after they graduate. This is how we recruit talent. Not just from the UT, mind you, our employees come from all over the Netherlands. Our consultants usually have a background in mechanical engineering, technical business administration or chemistry.”
Better, faster, cheaper
Not only companies that are facing major problems come to Symbol. Companies that are already doing very well also know where to find Symbol. “It can always be done differently or better, and faster and cheaper. Companies know that, but sometimes they don’t know how to approach it and what to focus on. They come to us because they want to take a step. For example, when it comes to finding out where their priorities lie, or in terms of content, when they have to learn new techniques in order to grow.”
Theisens speaks about Symbol in the plural. Even though he is still the sole shareholder and director, he certainly doesn’t do it alone; he works together with a small management team. “I like the fact that I don’t do it alone. There really is an organization behind it. In addition to a team of experienced consultants and trainers, we have a marketing team, a sales team and a back office. We now also have an office in Amersfoort and Eindhoven. We are a small company, but we have everything well organized, because of course we try to implement everything we explain to customers ourselves. And for us too, it is always possible to do things smarter and better.”
Not only Symbol became a success, even with Theisens’ languages, everything turned out well in the end. He now speaks good German. “I have been to Germany a lot, followed language courses, did a few months of internship in Switzerland. And I have written a few books, both in Dutch and in English.” Laughing: “But I did have them checked, mind you.”