Programme · change · delivery — since 2004
Twenty years of programme, change and delivery leadership across South Africa and the Netherlands — an R85m development, a seven-entity group turnaround, a national process programme for Dutch local government, and the platforms three businesses run on today. Digital where digital is the answer. Not only where it isn't.
Why this combination is rare
Consultants deliver a report and leave before adoption — which is the only part that determines whether anything changed. The deliverable here is the working system and the people using it.
Holthuizen · 2007—2014
Re-engineered the back office and built the software that held the new process. €80,000 a year removed.
Life-Therapy · Since 2024
Sole technical owner, greenfield architecture through to production and post-launch stabilisation.
TOHI Group · 2021
Designed the restructure into a multi-entity holding, then owned the result for five years.
Dutch local government · 2021—2023
Redesigned civic-integration processes end to end, then won adoption without hierarchy.
TOHI Group · 2014—2026
Seven entities, 22 assets, the treasury mandate at Nedbank. R80,000 a month in losses to cash-flow positive.
Reporting
Monthly and quarterly to shareholders, in Dutch and English. CIPC filings, annual financial statements, SARS.
Developers get handed a spec. I write the spec, having sat in the meeting where the trade-off was argued.
Holthuizen · 2007—2014
Re-engineered the back office and built the software that held the new process. €80,000 a year removed.
Life-Therapy · Since 2024
Sole technical owner, greenfield architecture through to production and post-launch stabilisation.
TOHI Group · 2021
Designed the restructure into a multi-entity holding, then owned the result for five years.
Dutch local government · 2021—2023
Redesigned civic-integration processes end to end, then won adoption without hierarchy.
TOHI Group · 2014—2026
Seven entities, 22 assets, the treasury mandate at Nedbank. R80,000 a month in losses to cash-flow positive.
Reporting
Monthly and quarterly to shareholders, in Dutch and English. CIPC filings, annual financial statements, SARS.
Taking a seven-entity group from a monthly loss to cash-flow positive is not a theory about operating models. It is a P&L I signed for.
Holthuizen · 2007—2014
Re-engineered the back office and built the software that held the new process. €80,000 a year removed.
Life-Therapy · Since 2024
Sole technical owner, greenfield architecture through to production and post-launch stabilisation.
TOHI Group · 2021
Designed the restructure into a multi-entity holding, then owned the result for five years.
Dutch local government · 2021—2023
Redesigned civic-integration processes end to end, then won adoption without hierarchy.
TOHI Group · 2014—2026
Seven entities, 22 assets, the treasury mandate at Nedbank. R80,000 a month in losses to cash-flow positive.
Reporting
Monthly and quarterly to shareholders, in Dutch and English. CIPC filings, annual financial statements, SARS.
The projects
Ten years across two firms — a firm-wide system migration at the first, then back-office re-engineering worth €80,000 a year at the second, with the legal-workflow software built end to end and a team of thirteen carried through the change.
€80,000/year
Cost removed from the back office
13 people
Carried through the transformation
Eleven years with a family-held property group, ending in the executive seat — a restructure into a multi-entity holding, then full P&L across seven entities and 22 assets, from a monthly operating loss to cash-flow positive.
R80,000/month
Operating loss, to cash-flow positive
7 / 22
Entities / property assets
A R85m IDC-backed retail precinct built from shipping containers in about a third of the time conventional construction would have taken, with an entrepreneur incubation programme running inside it.
Covered by GroundUp
R85m
Phase 1 investment
127 units
Expanded from the first 54
Civic-integration processes redesigned end to end under new national legislation, across municipal departments, education providers and employers — with adoption won by evidence rather than authority.
Lean Six Sigma
Standardised for reuse across municipalities
A manual, paper-based counselling practice taken to a complete platform — bookings, client management, automated billing and multi-channel communications — as sole technical owner from greenfield to production.
8 templates
Approved WhatsApp comms flows
A multi-tenant platform for South African property management that puts six stakeholder journeys on one system, with POPIA and PPRA trust-account compliance enforced through the stack.
6 roles
Stakeholder journeys on one platform
5 bureaux
Credit-bureau aggregation
A CRM for regulated professional services, with per-tenant, per-country database isolation for buyers who have data-residency requirements they cannot waive.
13+ modules
Production-ready
4,000+ tests
Runtime cut 85%
What I do
Hold the seat, or run the programme. Months-long and retained. Sold on track record and entered through a conversation, never through a form.
Or map how it works now, redesign it, build the system, and stay through adoption. Phased, with explicit acceptance criteria. This is the distinctive one, and the reason the engagement ends when it works rather than when the deck lands.
What I decline, so it is said rather than discovered: advisory with no delivery attached; delivery without access to the people doing the work, because adoption is the deliverable; staff augmentation; fixed price before discovery; and one-off small websites, which go elsewhere with a recommendation.
Operations Diagnostic
You own the output whether or not you engage me afterwards.
A map of how the work actually flows today, not how the org chart says it does. Built from interviews with the people doing it.
A prioritised list of what is broken, each item with what it currently costs — money, time or risk.
A costed plan to fix it, sequenced, with the option to have me deliver it.
Stéan Bouwer · Founder
The person
Law firms, local government, a seven-entity group, a container precinct with no software in it at all. The shape does not change: something is being run manually, in pieces, or by habit. I map it, redesign it, then build or buy the system that makes the new way permanent — and I stay until people are actually using it. Digital where digital is the answer, and something else where it is not.
Qualifications
Languages and standing
Selected writing
27 controlled trials to find out what an AI agent review phase costs, and what it buys. The cost came back clean. The second question turned out to be unanswerable by this design — and establishing that took more work than the cost model did.
Most projects that run over budget, over time and over everyone's patience start from a brief too vague to say what success looks like. Seven questions that need no technical knowledge, and one that most briefs get backwards.
“Quicker and cheaper to build with than a normal concrete building, which would take about three times longer.”
In the press
GroundUp's report on the Container Walk expansion names the project manager and quotes him on why the precinct was built from containers.
Thirty minutes, no charge. If it isn’t a fit I’ll say so on the call.