BuurtzorgT
Must knows
Mental healthcare services – The Netherlands- 2012 - SME - 450 employees
Golden share model since 2020
BuurtzorgT is a fast-growing provider of mental healthcare services in the Netherlands. The company focuses on patients with complex psychiatric and social issues. The services are delivered by local teams of health care professionals that are embedded in their neighborhood who put the patient central and seek to provide efficient, qualitative care.
In 2020, BuurtzorgT transitioned to steward-ownership to reflect its transformative approach to health care and psychiatric care in particular.
It just made sense. Steward-ownership as a governance structure mirrors the organizational set-up of BuurtzorgT. It is the logical continuation of the self-steering nature of the organization. If you really want to make self-steering work, you have to be steward-owned.
In 2019, five years after its foundation, the organization had grown to 180 employees in 34 teams. The concept was very well established and successful, the organizational set-up stable and scalable.
BuurtzorgT had become a blueprint for a more humane, effective future in mental health treatment. However, the two founders had two major challenges they needed to overcome: Companies in the mental healthcare sector in the Netherlands were only allowed to invoice the work done for a patient either at the end of the calendar year or when the treatment was completed. This regulatory requirement meant that BuurtzorgT had to pre-finance all the work delivered.
In addition, both Jos and Nico were getting closer to retirement age and started to look into succession planning and management-buy-out options for their company that would not require them to sell the entire business and endanger its special setup and values. In 2019, the company urgently needed an external capital injection to finance the growth spur. Nico and Jos were faced with a dilemma. "Taking on capital from investors would have been the easy solution, they were all casting their nets at us," Nico recalls. "But we did not want to sell our soul". Both founders had seen over and over again how, especially in the healthcare sector, organizations started to change after investors had been taken on.
In conventional investments, the whole relationship is based on control, with excel sheets and targets clouding the vision of the entrepreneurs and the organization’s turning more and more into formalized, soulless entities, losing their strength and soul.
Read more about the case of Sumthing,
Their journey towards steward-ownership
| The information on this page is rooted in the knowledge of We Are Stewards|