I have spent twenty years being handed things that are not working, and staying until they do.

That sentence is doing a lot of work, so here is what is underneath it.

I started in Dutch law firms, which is a better training ground than it sounds. A law firm measures fee-earning time to the minute, so every disruption has a visible price and nobody has to be persuaded that it matters. If you want to learn how to change the way an organisation works without stopping it working, that is a good place to learn it.

At Kolkman Solicitors, from 2004, I ran a firm-wide platform migration — a new office and case-handling system, from requirements and vendor selection through data migration, training and post-implementation optimisation. The whole design constraint was that the fee-earners should barely notice, which meant the sequencing mattered more than the speed.

At Holthuizen Solicitors, from 2007, I was recruited to do two jobs that usually go to two people: re-engineer the back office, and design and build the firm's legal-workflow software. The re-engineering took €80,000 a year out of operating cost. I managed thirteen people through it — the same people whose work was being redesigned. The software went from requirements to deployment, built for the process as redesigned rather than the process as found.

Seven years is long enough to see whether a redesign holds. That turned out to be a conservative test. The firm still runs on that system today, fourteen years on, and still describes it on their own website as how they work. That is where the method came from, and I have not needed a different one since.

Along the way I took a Higher Management Diploma at ICM — post-HBO, the Dutch tier that sits after the applied bachelor's degree — and in 2012 a Lean Six Sigma DMAIC Green Belt, which formalised what I had been doing by instinct and gave me the vocabulary to argue for it.

From 2014 the work became South African.

TOHI Group, in Paarl, was a family-held property investment and development business founded in 2006 as The Orange House Investments, with shareholders in the Netherlands, running at roughly R80,000 a month in operating losses by the time I arrived. I joined as project manager, became managing director in 2018, and was registered with the CIPC as an executive director in November 2024.

Then COVID-19 arrived, and it made the structural problem impossible to ignore. A single entity holding everything gave us nowhere to isolate risk, no clean view of which parts were carrying the business and which were draining it, and no way to finance them differently. In 2021 I designed and delivered the restructure into a multi-entity holding — TOHI Properties, TOHI Operations and TOHI Developments, with a further subsidiary per property.

Then I carried it: full P&L across seven entities and 22 assets, the banking and treasury mandate at Nedbank, CIPC filings, annual financial statements, SARS submissions, group payroll. Monthly and quarterly reporting to shareholders, in Dutch and English.

The restructure is what turned it. The group went cash-flow positive on the other side of it and held there. I exited in March 2026 with it in that position, and the structure still doing its job — which is the only real test of an operating model.

Running in parallel, from 2015, was the Philippi Village Container Walk: an R85m development backed by the Industrial Development Corporation, delivering a 54-container retail precinct in four months, roughly a third of the time conventional construction would have taken. It grew to 127 units. Alongside the build I ran the tenant incubation programme the IDC's mandate required — fifteen entrepreneurs at a time, on a three-year path to self-sufficiency.

I mention Philippi early because it is the clearest evidence that none of this is software-shaped. Containers, contractors, site health and safety, an IDC mandate and a community-development obligation running at the same time. Same method, no code.

In 2018 I finished an Advanced Diploma in Project Management at Cranefield College — NQF Level 7, SAQA-registered, degree-level and PMBOK-aligned. In 2024 I added a Higher Certificate in Wealth Management at the Moonstone Business School of Excellence, because by then I was signing for a P&L and wanted the financial side properly learned rather than picked up.

From 2021 to 2023 I worked with the umbrella body representing all Dutch municipalities, redesigning civic-integration processes end to end under new national legislation. It ran across municipal departments, education and language providers, and employers, and it handled GDPR-sensitive data about vulnerable people.

I had no authority in that structure. Change was won by evidence and facilitation, which is a useful thing to have had to do. I delivered it remotely from South Africa, as I did cross-border planning and workforce-process work for Facilicom Group and its Unikidz operation in 2022 and 2023.

Since 2024 I have been the architect on the platforms Yoros delivers.

Life-Therapy took a manual, paper-based practice to a complete platform — bookings, client management, automated billing, multi-channel communications over WhatsApp and email. I was the sole technical owner, from greenfield architecture to production. The practice is my wife's. Sterreveld followed: experiences, bookings and a dynamic pricing engine for a Klein Karoo eco-tourism property, built config-driven so it goes live the day the property is secured.

Blindly is a different kind of build. It sells custom window blinds, where the price turns on type, material, thickness, colour, width and drop — and the supplier publishes that as width-by-drop lookup matrices across forty-odd spreadsheets. The platform imports them, applies the markup, and puts a configurator in front of the customer that prices a window as the measurements are typed. That is the same problem as everything else on this page, in miniature: knowledge that lived in a filing cabinet, made repeatable.

Pleks and UFlow are my own products. Pleks puts six stakeholder journeys on one platform for South African property management, with POPIA and PPRA trust-account compliance enforced through the stack, and AI routed by task complexity under explicit cost and review governance. UFlow is a CRM for regulated professional services, with per-tenant, per-country database isolation for buyers who have data-residency requirements.

I include them because a person recommending that you build a system is arguing from a different position if he has built and now operates two.

Yoros has been my consultancy and project-management vehicle since 2015. I work nationally — on site where the work needs someone in the room, remotely where it doesn't.

What I offer is the whole arc rather than a piece of it. Map how it works now. Redesign it. Build or buy what makes the new way permanent. Stay until people are actually using it, because adoption is the only part that determines whether anything changed. Most organisations can buy advice, or buy build. Buying both from one person who has also carried the P&L is harder.

That method has held across a law firm's back office, a seven-entity restructure, a container precinct and a national government programme. It does not care much what the sector is.

What I am looking for is a programme, transformation or operations seat where the problem is real and the mandate is to fix it — permanent, fixed-term or fractional.

I am a Dutch and South African citizen. English and Dutch are both native; Afrikaans is fluent.