In 2007, Jasper Meinema started his own business based on an error in his employer’s energy bill. He was doing the administration there and came across a big mistake in the energy bills: too much was being paid! As he discovered errors in more energy bills, he thought “I’m going to make this my business,” and so YES Energy Advice was born. The company has now grown into a full-fledged enterprise with 21 staff. YES supports and helps SMEs and real estate companies with energy tax reclaiming, purchasing energy contracts, and realising solar panels, among other things.
Lara Kranendijk has been working at YES for two years: she started as an Energy Tax employee and was later promoted to team leader. Setting priorities, professionalising, and managing were new challenges for her when she became team leader. Because Jasper had already been coached by Brilliant Work for some time, the step of arranging a business coach for her was easily made.
‘Lizanne Jakobs taught me to guard my boundaries.’
“Lizanne Jakobs of Brilliant Work especially taught me how to prioritize. At first, everything seemed important, but she explained to me how to choose: ‘what is urgent and what is not’? She literally said, “The team must be able to function first, so if one of your team members has a question for you, that’s the most important thing. Your team can get on with their work after answering that question’. I still apply this advice every day.”
”She also told me that you need to teach a team to be as independent as possible. This starts with the smallest things, like having clear rules about who empties the dishwasher or who puts the rubbish out on the street. This way, I avoid taking on a ‘mother role’ as a team leader, which is a point of attention when working with students,” Lara explains. “I primarily learned from Lizanne how to guard your boundaries. At the beginning of my new role, I wanted to tackle everything and learn everything, but you quickly realise you don’t have enough time. Now I experience that I have sufficient time to take on many tasks and projects, where I work carefully and manage to ensure quality.”
Transferring Knowledge from Founder to Team
“I had good one-on-one conversations with Lizanne. I found it incredibly helpful that there was so much attention paid to me and my questions. She also genuinely helped me with leadership: how you can be a good and not overworked team leader. But Lizanne did more: she also gave sales training to all our employees. In this, she used really concrete examples and explained what types of people there are according to the DISC method. That’s very useful for us as a company that has a lot of customer contact,” Lara explains.
Since recently, YES has started addressing its employee policy (with the help of a subsidy). ”There’s a lot of knowledge in Jasper’s head – our founder – and the idea now is to delegate that knowledge more to the team. This way, Jasper can focus on strategic matters, and the team can continue to function fully when Jasper visits clients. A second advantage is that we can then tackle things even faster and provide optimal service to clients. We’ve also appointed a new team leader from September 2023, so the span of control is smaller, and there’s more than sufficient attention for individual employees.”
‘Lizanne and Martine have an enormous amount of experience.’
”Together with Martine Pauw, HR-coach at Brilliant Work, we recently drew up a very clear step-by-step plan for our employee policy, for instance, for job profiles and an improvement in the development discussions with our employees. We want to continue growing, for which building a clear structure in our HR policy is the first step.”
”I notice that Lizanne and Martine really have an enormous amount of experience,” Lara explains. “Many situations or questions are very recognisable to them, allowing them to immediately help you get started. Martine, for example, had a very good sense of what was important now and that the knowledge transfer from Jasper should come first.” Lara is very satisfied with Brilliant Work’s coaching, partly because she finds that Brilliant Work is always easily accessible. “For instance, we can always call with questions.”
YES’s future plans are already quite elaborate. “We recently opened an office in Maastricht under the name Mosae Energy so we’re locally accessible in that corner of the country. Furthermore, we’ve set up ‘Brixa Vastgoedbeheer’ to unburden landlords and property owners in their administrative and technical management. Now, primarily with the help of Brilliant Work, we want to bring structure and expand with personnel.”
Do you also want to take steps in growing your company with the help of a subsidy? Then feel free to contact us without obligation!
