Wim ten Brinke and Peter Zents in an interview with Porsche Consulting Magazine

Anchoring values is not enough on its own. They have to be lived. This is often easier to do in family businesses with a long tradition. And often the formulas there sound amazingly simple, appear timeless and become "classics. This is the case with the Dutch construction company Ten Brinke, founded in 1902 as a local bricklaying business: "I learned from my father that you should build with love," says Managing Director Wim ten Brinke. He, too, relies on passion as a core value, passed down from generation to generation.

Passion? Is that still possible at all, especially in an industry with particularly tough conditions? "Admittedly, it is becoming increasingly difficult," says Wim ten Brinke. That's why he is building on a solid strategic foundation. This consists of firm principles: "We prefer to carry out projects almost exclusively in which our company takes over all service phases - from preliminary planning and property identification to handing over the keys," says the boss.

Solid craftsmanship - the cornerstone of success
In 1902, Theodorus ten Brinke founded his company as a small construction firm in Varsseveld, the Netherlands. The bricklayer was quickly successful and laid the foundation for the history of today's Ten Brinke Group B. V. Over the past decades, Ten Brinke has grown into an internationally innovative construction company, general contractor, project developer, capital provider and investor. With 1,300 employees and 24 branches in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Greece, the group has an average annual turnover of over one billion euros.

Identification with one's own work and the common goal is important if customer satisfaction is to achieve top marks. That is why Ten Brinke focuses on deploying its own expertise along the entire value chain. The aim is to provide clients with advantages in terms of construction time, quality and value for money. And what has always been accepted as seemingly unavoidable in construction is to be drastically reduced: unnecessary delays, cost-driving supplements during construction, costly rectification of defects after completion and the associated costs of errors, as well as demoralizing disputes between the contracting parties - often triggered by a lack of transparency. "We look at the property as a whole. Project development, planning and operational construction have to work together perfectly right from the start if the result is to be right. For us, project developers and property developers are a team: each has their own project that contributes to the joint property - and that's what matters in the end," says the managing director.

Involved companies

  • Ten Brinke