Sarah Parent

Sarah Parent talks about building Go Forest less as a story of vision and more as a story of relentless, almost bodily perseverance. "Ik ben zo iemand die bij manier van spreken een halve marathon zou lopen gewoon op karakter," she says of herself, and that self-description runs through everything else she says about the early years ². She is candid that founders need a kind of existential pressure to function: "Je moet honger hebben, letterlijk. Maar als ge het niet doet vanuit een overleving, ga je niet die extra mijl gaan. Maar dat mag niet te lang duren" ². The image she returns to for that period is arriving at the supermarket checkout with insufficient balance and asking herself "hoe hard ga ik volledig tegen de limiet" ². For her, entrepreneurship is inseparable from self-confrontation: "Het is gewoon één van de coolste journeys dat je kunt doen, is ondernemen, omdat je gewoon uzelf ook 100 keer tegenkomt" ¹.

That survival-mode period produced one of her clearest lessons about honesty under pressure. With €1,500 left, she pitched Go Forest to the CEO of the world's largest climate consultancy and secured the capital that let her hire her first employees. She is precise about how she frames this: "Ik heb mij gewoon overbluft. Alleen niet mezelf, maar gewoon heel Go Forest. Dat waren geen leugens, maar overcellen" ². She distinguishes overselling from lying, and treats the moment as a hinge point where readiness had to be manufactured rather than waited for: "ik zei: ik ben er klaar voor of ik ben er klaar mee" ².

On the business model itself, her thinking visibly evolved. She started with margins she now calls unhealthily low because she wanted maximum money flowing straight into planting projects, and only after a pricing lesson from a televised business segment did she raise prices and cut what didn't sell, making the company viable ¹. In the earlier account she frames the same shift more starkly, describing overhead going from under 10% to 25% with the reasoning "als wij niet kunnen bestaan, kan ik ook geen impact meer maken" ². This is paired with a firm choice of B2B over B2C: companies free up bigger budgets, and bigger budgets mean more impact, so she leaves individual donors to organizations like WWF ¹ and is moving away from small €50/month subscribers toward fewer, larger deals because the onboarding cost of many small supporters outweighs their impact ². Concretely, the company now runs on volume: "Het is een volumegame. Dus dat zijn steunpunten van €3000, €5000, €1000, €500. Dat zijn de deals die we dagelijks binnenhalen" ¹, sustained by eight video calls a day and disciplined CRM follow-up ¹.

Her first attempt at radical transparency, a blockchain app photographing every planted tree, is one of her most instructive failures. It burned through her entire €50,000 starting budget and collapsed operationally because most planting sites had no internet or signal, data was lost in the Amazon, photos duplicated, and she ended up running her own helpdesk ¹². The lesson she draws is not abstract: tech assumptions have to be tested in the field before they're built into a business model. Yet she also notes the failed app still generated press, including a single article that brought in roughly ten clients, so even the wrong tool wasn't a wasted move ¹. What replaced it, satellite and AI monitoring that draws a perimeter around each client's trees and timestamps yearly results via a third party, became the company's real differentiator, summed up in her flattest and most repeated line: "Satelliet ligt niet" ¹. The ambition behind it is explicit: "Mijn droom, en dat is misschien naïef, is om de meest transparante bomenplanter in de wereld te zijn" ¹.

Her theory of impact is deliberately anti-perfectionist. Rather than chasing flawless climate purity among a small group, she wants breadth: "Ik geloof dat je eerder 1000 mensen naar het midden kunt brengen en dat je dan een grote impact hebt dan dat je 10 mensen naar de perfectie krijgt" ¹. That same logic shapes who she'll work with. She turns away certain clients, like a foie gras producer, but accepts companies other tree-planting organizations blacklist for pollution, on the reasoning that the worst polluters should give back the most and every tree still counts against the scale of deforestation ². It also shapes where she plants: the stated mission is "to represent the underrepresented," meaning the most deforested and poorest regions abroad, and inside Belgium mainly Wallonia, where subsidy gaps make funding harder, rather than the easier, already well-supported plots in Flanders ¹.

She is unusually blunt about criticism and feedback, treating them as fuel rather than threat: "Durf echt op uw bakkes krijgen. Durf gewoon feedback ontvangen dat op niets trekt. Maar dat gaat u wel duwen naar wat dat wel werkt," and, more bluntly, "Nooit bang zijn van kritiek, want een grijze muis valt niet op en daar gaan ze ook niet over babbelen" ¹. This same appetite for hard truths shaped the company before launch, when she put prospective corporate clients through interviews she describes as grinding her into the floor, pushing them to say exactly why they wouldn't buy so the product could be shaped around real resistance rather than assumption ¹.

On burnout, her position shifted from something closer to conventional wisdom to something more contrarian. After 25 blood values came back out of balance and a doctor recommended six months of rest, she instead restructured around coaching, energy management and delayed responsiveness, concluding that productivity matters more than raw hours ¹. In the earlier account she is explicit that a full six-month stop can make the return harder, especially for self-employed people who cannot simply switch off, and argues instead for immediately building a "new normal" with a multidisciplinary team of coaches and psychologists ². She also insists burnout is physical as much as mental, pointing to her own thyroid and gut problems as evidence that medical support and supplements mattered as much as rest ². Throughout, she frames her commercial instincts and her environmental aim as the same project rather than a compromise between them: "Ik zet mega hard mijn sales en marketing skills in voor een groenere wereld" ¹, and the underlying belief that makes the whole model work commercially is simple: "mensen kopen van mensen. Dus bouw iets waar dat uzelf echt achter staat" [