I ran the online shop of Douwe Egberts in the Netherlands and took it from one million euros to 1.6 million in a year. I had the title, the salary and the house. I was bored, which is more dangerous than being tired, because it does not hurt. I could see the next promotion and the one after it, and what my life would look like at forty if I stayed. The picture was fine. That was the problem. So I packed two suitcases and flew to Aruba, an island I already knew from an internship in 2006. Everyone told me not to.
The plan was to bring e-commerce to the Caribbean. It was airtight in the Netherlands and useless the moment I landed. Most businesses here were not on Google at all, and you cannot sell a checkout flow to a company without a website. So I changed the plan in the first month instead of spending a year explaining to the island why it was wrong. The real opportunity was visibility. My first client was Jolly Pirates, who wanted social media and Google Ads. I had managed agencies who did both for years, so I knew what good looked like. I had never built either myself. I learned it at night and delivered it the next morning.
I founded The Lab in 2012 with one employee and no network. Today it is 22 people across Aruba, Curaçao and Colombia, the only Google Premier Partner in the ABC islands, with more than 120 clients including McDonald's, Marriott, Hilton and the Aruba Tourism Authority. It won Best in Business in 2017. Two decisions shaped it more than any campaign we ran. We cut the client list from 120 to 90 by raising prices on the smallest, most demanding accounts, and revenue stayed exactly the same. And I handed the team to Omaily, my right hand, then spent a year learning to stay out of it, which was harder than handing it over. This year we recorded our highest Net Promoter Score ever: 9.3. Not while I was running the accounts. After I stopped.
In 2020 I joined the board of the Aruba Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In January 2024 the board elected me President, and re-elected me in 2025 and 2026. I was not the obvious choice and people said so: poor Papiamento, Dutch, not the right contacts. Underneath that sat a real problem that had nothing to do with me. The business community felt unheard, and the Chamber was seen as a registration office when registration is a fraction of what it does. I wrote a strategic plan, kept it to ten slides, under one word: connect. Since then, support on the labour shortage, joint projects with the Netherlands and the other islands, trade missions abroad including the one I led to Suriname, and a modernised organisation behind all of it.
Alongside the agency I invest: ArubaRental.com, a stake in Coldwell Banker Curaçao, a share in the Landmark Boutique Hotel in Medellín, and property in Colombia. Since 2017 I have organised the E-Aruba, E-Curaçao and E-SXM business seminars with a partner, which bring around two thousand people a year into a room. Not everything worked. The Lab Medellín reached fifteen clients before the market showed me what it was, and getting out took two years I should not have spent. A rule you only apply to other people's projects is not a rule. It is an opinion.
I train because it is the cheapest performance tool there is and because the results cannot be argued with. In 2023 I finished the IRONMAN 5150 in Cartagena in 3:39:29, eight months after I could not swim front crawl. In 2024 I competed twice in men's physique, Mr Aruba and the IFBB in Cali five weeks later, and came second in both. Training did not make me a winner. It made me harder to break, and that is the part that transfers. I speak Dutch, English, German, Spanish and Papiamento, and in 2026 I put all of it into one book: Built for Performance.