Sarah Parent

The through-line

Sarah Parent's consistent position is that impact only happens if the commercial machine underneath it is healthy, and that a founder's job is to point ordinary sales and marketing craft at an environmental problem rather than to run a charity. "Ik zet mega hard mijn sales en marketing skills in voor een groenere wereld" [1] is the compressed version, and it explains almost every decision she describes: the deliberate choice of B2B over donor fundraising, the eight sales calls a day, the willingness to take money from companies other planters refuse. Her own definition of success follows the same logic: "Ik zal mezelf pas succesvol vinden als ik veel impact gemaakt heb, direct maar ook indirect" [2], and "als ondernemer moet je het verschil willen maken in de sector of het domein waarin je actief bent" [2].

What has visibly moved is her relationship to sacrifice. The early Go Forest was funded by squeezing margins to almost nothing so that the maximum went to projects [1], and by a founder running on pure survival energy through a supermarket checkout that read "saldo ontoereikend" [2]. The later position is the opposite: overhead deliberately raised, prices raised, hours managed, on the reasoning that "als wij niet kunnen bestaan, kan ik ook geen impact meer maken" [2]. The hunger is still endorsed, but with a time limit attached [2].

On transparency as the product

Go Forest's differentiator is not the trees, it is the proof. Parent states the ambition plainly: "Mijn droom, en dat is misschien naïef, is om de meest transparante bomenplanter in de wereld te zijn" [1]. The impact platform uses satellite imagery and AI pattern recognition to count trees, draws a perimeter around each individual client's planting, and has a third party timestamp the yearly results in blockchain so they cannot afterwards be disputed [1]. Her argument for the method is four words long: "Satelliet ligt niet" [1].

The reason this matters commercially is the behaviour it forecloses. In the early days a company asked to order 1,000 trees and then claim in its communication that it had planted a million; a client-specific, satellite-verified perimeter makes that kind of greenwashing impossible [1]. Transparency here is both an ethical stance and a sales asset, the thing that separates a verifiable restoration contract from a claim.

On the blockchain app that burned the budget

The first version of that proof system nearly ended the company. The plan was to photograph and register every planted tree in a blockchain app, and it failed on contact with reality: most planting sites have no internet and often no satellite signal, data was lost in the Amazon, photos came back duplicated, and Parent ended up personally acting as helpdesk [1][2]. It consumed the €50,000 starting budget quickly [2] and effectively burned the entire startup capital [1]. Her lesson is that technology assumptions have to be validated in the field before they are built [2]; in year two she replaced the whole approach with satellite monitoring [1].

She is careful not to write the episode off entirely. The blockchain angle generated press, and a single article on Bloovi brought in roughly ten clients [1]. The failure was operational, not reputational.

On pricing impact honestly

Parent treats underpricing as the founder error she most regrets. Her initial margins were "unhealthily low" because she wanted the maximum amount of money flowing to the projects, and the fix came from a pricing lesson she picked up from a Kamal Kharmach television episode: raise prices slightly, cut what doesn't sell [1]. Go Forest also raised its overhead from under 10% to 25% on the explicit reasoning that a company that cannot exist cannot make impact [2].

The same argument applies to the market's cheap end. "One dollar one tree" schemes cannot fund maintenance and monitoring, and a tree that dies after its first year is pointless, so Go Forest charges €3 to €9 per tree with 30 years of maintenance and monitoring included [1]. Corporate nature restoration is a voluntary market with structurally underweighted budgets [1], which makes the temptation to compete on price permanent and, in her view, self-defeating.

On B2B and the volume game

The choice of customer was deliberate. Companies free up bigger budgets, more budget equals more impact, and the B2C donor market can be left to organisations like WWF [1]. Within B2B the same logic pushed her away from small recurring subscriptions: many €50-a-month tree subscribers generate onboarding costs that are heavy relative to the impact they produce, so Go Forest is shifting toward fewer, much larger deals to grow impact faster [2].

What remains is a high-tempo sales operation rather than a boutique one. "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]. She also has a clear read on who actually moves inside a client: it is usually the young employees, junior marketing managers and the like, who push impact initiatives, while part of the older generation shows what she calls a strange discrepancy, willing to do anything for their children and grandchildren except protect the planet for them [1].

On which clients to take and where the trees go

Her screening rule is unusual in the sector. She refuses a client like a foie gras producer, but accepts "blacklisted" polluting companies that other tree-planting organisations turn away, on the grounds that with deforestation at this scale every tree counts and the worst polluters are precisely the ones who should be giving the most back [2]. The house-fire image belongs here too: "De living van het huis brandt. Er moet sowieso die living geblust worden zodat de rest van het huis niet afbrandt" [2].

The same refusal of the easy option governs where the trees actually go. The mission of representing the underrepresented means planting in the top-three most deforested and poorest regions, and in Belgium mainly in Wallonia where subsidy gaps exist, deliberately avoiding Flemish plots that are simple to fund [1].

On imperfect activism

Parent's theory of change is explicitly anti-purist: "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]. Imperfect climate activism, in her framing, is what makes the message reachable for a mass audience [1].

She pairs this with a psychological diagnosis of why the subject fails to move people. CO2 emissions are intangible and operate on a 20 to 30 year delay, so what we feel now comes from our parents' emissions, which is why people worry more about coffee running out than about the climate [2]. The implication runs straight back into her product decisions: if the harm is invisible and deferred, the proof of repair has to be visible and immediate.

On hunger, overselling and perseverance

Parent founded the company mid-COVID with almost no money and treats that pressure as functional. "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]; prolonged survival mode destroys the perspective needed to close deals [2]. Reaching the checkout with "saldo ontoereikend" was her marker of how hard she was pushing against the limit [2].

With €1,500 left she pitched the CEO of the world's largest climate consultancy and, in her own accounting, oversold the company: "Ik heb mij gewoon overbluft. Alleen niet mezelf, maar gewoon heel Go Forest. Dat waren geen leugens, maar overcellen" [2]. It produced a commitment to help, then capital, then her first hires [2]. Asked whether she was ready, her answer was "ik ben er klaar voor of ik ben er klaar mee" [2]. She describes herself as someone who would run a half marathon on character alone [2], and the underlying belief as "de aanhouder gaat echt winnen" [1]. Entrepreneurship, for her, is worth it precisely because of what it exposes: "Het is gewoon één van de coolste journeys dat je kunt doen, is ondernemen, omdat je gewoon uzelf ook 100 keer tegenkomt" [1].

On validation and taking criticism

Before launching, Parent ran brutal qualitative interviews with companies that, in her words, ground her into the floor, probing why they would not buy and what would have to change for them to do so; the answers shaped the product over the six months before she went to market [1]. That habit hardens into general advice: "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" [1], and "Nooit bang zijn van kritiek, want een grijze muis valt niet op en daar gaan ze ook niet over babbelen" [1]. Visibility and criticism arrive together, and the alternative is being ignored.

Behind it sits her view of how deals actually close: "Ik zeg altijd: mensen kopen van mensen. Dus bouw iets waar dat uzelf echt achter staat" [1].

On burnout, and the contrarian recovery

Her burnout was measurable, not vague. Twenty-five blood values were out of balance and a doctor advised six months of rest [1]; the bloodwork showed thyroid and gut problems, and she insists the condition be treated as physical as well as mental, with supplements and medical support mattering alongside rest and psychology [2]. Her advice on the six months is contrarian: a full stop of that length makes the way back harder, and many self-employed people simply cannot switch off for that long, so the better move is to start practising a "new normal" immediately with a multidisciplinary team of coaches and psychologists [2]. Her own restructuring took that form: coaching, energy management, delayed out-of-office replies, and the realisation that productivity beats sheer quantity of hours [1].

On what growth looks like next

Expansion through franchising into neighbouring countries only works after the brand and a well-oiled operational structure exist in Belgium; the model has to be worth copy-pasting before it is copy-pasted [2].

Takeaways

• Prove impact with instruments that cannot be argued with: satellite imagery, AI tree counting, per-client perimeters and third-party blockchain timestamps, because "Satelliet ligt niet" [1].
• Validate technology in the field before building it; the blockchain photo app failed on missing internet and satellite signal at planting sites and burned the €50,000 starting budget [1][2].
• Underpricing impact work kills the company that delivers it; raise prices, cut what doesn't sell, and lift overhead from under 10% to 25% if that is what solvency requires [1][2].
• Charge enough to cover the full lifecycle: €3 to €9 per tree including 30 years of maintenance and monitoring, since a tree that dies after year one achieves nothing [1].
• Choose the customer with the bigger budget: B2B corporates over B2C donors, and fewer large deals over many €50-a-month subscribers whose onboarding cost outweighs their impact [1][2].
• Run impact sales as a volume game, eight video calls a day and tight CRM follow-up, closing €500 to €5,000 deals daily [1].
• Take money from heavy polluters other planters blacklist, on the reasoning that the biggest emitters should give back the most, while still refusing clients whose core business you reject [2].
• Aim for breadth over purity: "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].
• Treat burnout medically and behaviourally at once, and prefer an immediate "new normal" with coaches and psychologists over a six-month full stop [1][2].