Peter s'Jongers

Peter s'Jongers speaks with the calm authority of someone who built a company for nearly three decades and is now consciously stepping back, and the core of his thinking is a single idea he returns to again and again: growth is not something a company does to its people, it is something a company does with its people. "Als het bedrijf groeit dan kan het kansen geven aan de mensen die in het bedrijf zitten, die op hun beurt ook weer groeien en daardoor groeit het bedrijf," he says, describing a symbiosis rather than a trade-off between individual and organizational ambition ². This is not abstract for him; it is the operating logic of Protime, where he insists that "iedereen heeft talent... er is ongelooflijk veel talent, ook in Vlaanderen" ², and where the company's job is simply to create the conditions for that talent to compound.

That belief in distributed capability shapes his entire view of leadership. Rather than positioning the CEO as the source of decisions, s'Jongers wants decision-making pushed as far down as possible: "Ik zou graag hebben dat die 400 mensen bij Protime elke dag een beslissing nemen. Als die alle dagen een beslissing nemen, dan moet ik er waarschijnlijk nooit een nemen" ². He makes the same point in more general terms elsewhere, arguing that leadership is really about creating the frame within which people can take the hundreds of daily decisions themselves, and that if the CEO is the one making every call, something in the system has gone wrong ¹. It is a strikingly hands-off definition of the job, and it explains why he treats the transition from CEO to chairman not as a retreat but as a natural extension of a philosophy he had already been practicing.

On strategy, s'Jongers is skeptical of the grand, long-horizon plan. He argues that companies lose themselves in strategic goals that few employees can actually influence, and prefers short-term "matches to win" that everyone in the organization can feel they are moving the needle on, since in fast-changing times even a yearly plan is often shaky ground ². This philosophy is embodied in Protime's "State of the Union," an internal planning document he designed to deliberately exclude financial figures: each team sets its own qualitative priorities against the company's values and mission, and the sum of all those team-level pictures becomes the company's actual strategy, useful even for onboarding new hires ². It is a bottom-up alternative to top-down target-setting, consistent with his instinct to trust the 400 people making daily decisions rather than a single master plan.

Culture, for s'Jongers, is not a company-wide slogan but a team-level phenomenon, and he is blunt about the hierarchy: team culture "eats company culture for breakfast" ². His reasoning is practical rather than idealistic, a team of ten to fifteen people working together daily can steer behavior far more concretely than any company-wide value statement, which is why team members are heavily involved in hiring for fit within their own team first ². But he pairs this granular view with a bigger emotional claim about what culture is ultimately for. "Na verliefdheid is trots volgens mij de mooiste menselijke emotie die we hebben," he says, and he repeats the thought almost verbatim across appearances: "Wanneer alle medewerkers trots zijn op het bedrijf, op het team, dan ben je er qua bedrijfscultuur" ¹². Crucially, he locates that pride not in having a flashy product but in people recognizing their own added value, a subtle but important distinction that keeps the emphasis on people rather than branding ¹.

s'Jongers is equally candid about the mechanics and the mistakes of running a company for a long time. He dismisses the romance of "finding a gap in the market," arguing that Protime invented nothing new but simply noticed, with the rise of Windows in 1995, that value was shifting from hardware boxes to software, if you want to be an entrepreneur, he suggests, you can undertake almost anything as long as you do it slightly differently or better ². He is also willing to name his regrets plainly: not setting up an advisory board sooner, which left him feeling more alone than he needed to be, and in the early years not being decisive enough about letting go of people who were unhappy or toxic within a team ². On the sensitive question of managing a co-founder relationship over decades, his answer is not about avoiding conflict but about how to handle it, daring to speak up rather than letting resentment build, and just as importantly, being able to reconcile, forgive and forget, all while making sure employees never see the friction ². When SD Worx came in as a shareholder, he says the condition that mattered most to him was securing clear agreements on expectations so he could keep feeling like an entrepreneur and keep steering the company's own culture and growth path ².

Two smaller but telling details round out the picture of how he actually operates day to day. He has kept a daily diary for about ten years, noting what gave him energy and what cost him energy, a deliberate, almost engineering-minded practice for managing his own passion over the long run ². And when asked about prioritization, he draws a sharp line between two kinds of choices: "Kiezen wat ik ga doen is niet zo gigantisch moeilijk, maar kiezen wat ik níet ga doen is heel moeilijk" ². That tension, between abundant opportunity and the discipline of saying no, sits alongside his lighter, almost aphoristic closing line, "Time flies, but you are the pilot" ², as a fitting summary of a thinker who treats freedom and structure not as opposites but as two sides of the same symbiosis he keeps describing.