What personal habit helped you accelerate your personal growth?
Balancing reflection & silence (= listening to my soul), exchanging perspectives (= learning from others) and doing (= taking risks).
What do you do to maintain balance in your life?
Doing things that ground me: spending time in nature, playing football. And the most important one: being close with my family.
What book do you recommend the most?
“The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. It helped me cultivate some of what I consider to be the most important habits in life and business.
What's your secret sauce for building a great team?
Cultivating continuous appreciative feedback.
What motivated you to become an entrepreneur / leader?
Building the home I want to live in, with my hands and my heart.
What should leaders understand about their own role and responsibility?
You can’t manage other people, unless you manage yourself first.
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What should leaders understand about their own role and responsibility?
Your own time and energy is the most precious resource you have. Use it wisely, and learn what gives you energy, and what saps you. In the early years of building something, you need to throw a huge amount of time at it - and do many things you perhaps don’t like doing. But as you scale, it’s vital to take a step back and build a business that can grow rapidly beyond the time you put into it.
What shift in perspective has allowed you to see things differently?
It may sound simple, but realizing and truly understanding that we are all different and driven by different things has made a significant impact on me. This insight has changed the way I approach relationships and leadership.
What’s a guiding principle that informs the way you build and run your business?
One of our core values at Cozero is radical candor. It is the idea that the willingness to repeatedly enter uncomfortable situations to speak the truth benefits everyone in the long run. We believe that in order to grow and improve as an organization, we need to create an environment where our team is not afraid to challenge processes and decisions. Making this a core value guides us in difficult situations when it’s not clear which road to take.
What's a mistake that you're happy you've made?
I'm happy I chose a highly regulated market, even though it was tough. It taught me a lot about patience, attention to detail, and the importance of doing things right. These lessons have made me better at what I do.