Wopke Kooistra is the Chief Financial Officer at Technobis, a group of engineering companies developing and manufacturing high-tech instruments and modules for businesses worldwide.

Wopke discusses his journey to becoming a CFO without a set career plan, the most rewarding aspects of his role, and key lessons learned. He also shares an insight into Technobis, including the key drivers to success and challenges that await.

What excites you about working for Technobis?

What excites me is our mission for society. We make pharmaceutical equipment that helps pharma companies speed up their R&D processes for new medicines, ultimately bringing medicines to patients faster.

Within Technobis, we also help healthcare start-ups bring their product and ideas to the market. For example, a company made a specific medical tong with sensors to better operate on the patient, as it relays immediate feedback. We helped the company make a prototype, develop it further, and scale up production if needed.

Also, what excites me is that it is tangible products that we make. We have a pretty diverse and dynamic group of 60 people, working in Engineering, R&D, Production, Sales, Purchasing, Finance, etc., all together under one roof. The size also means you know everyone, which is nice; I have worked with larger companies before, but I really like smaller, entrepreneurial-focused ones.

Is the entrepreneurial side something you have consciously followed?

It was more something that came on my path. In college, I studied Tax Economics, and I started as a Tax Lawyer/Tax Economist at PwC. But, after two years, it wasn’t making me happy, and I questioned what I was doing. You are educated to become a specialized consultant on a small piece of legislation, and that was not for me.

My father started a horse gear/equipment company with some others and needed assistance to speed up the business online, so I helped out. Looking back, I don't know how those pieces fit together. From an outside point of view, you wouldn't think that the Tax Lawyer would be entrepreneurial, but they fit together somehow. It always makes me enthusiastic and energetic to build out a company and be curious about how it can evolve.

What is the most rewarding part of your role as CFO?

As CFO and part of the Finance team, we are not involved in the day-to-day building of the pharmaceutical equipment, engineering, or developing new ideas for our customers. But what we do and what I'm proud of is keeping the company financially safe.

When I joined, the focus was more on taking the product to market and keeping the customer happy. I have shifted this focus slightly, as it’s important not to forget your financial health.

For example, we introduced down payments for all our equipment. People said, “No, we cannot do that,” but we had to do it to make our cashflow healthy. That worked out fine.

Before, we also liked to have a lot of stock here to be able to service our customers directly. We try to manage that a bit more in balance with the demand from our customer base. So, as a Finance team, we make the business more financially sound and business savvy.

When I worked at bigger companies, you always had a more specialized role. Here, as the company is small, we do everything and that's what I love. Sometimes it's very operational, sometimes it's more strategic, but I like the mix.

What are the key drivers to success for the business?

Staying innovative is key, so we spend a lot of time and money on innovation. We have started co-developing a new pharmaceutical machine with Pfizer, which we started four years ago because they saw a gap in their drug development process. It took some sweat and tears!

As we have the crystallization equipment, we have had a long-standing relationship with Pfizer, but also with other companies. Due to our size, we are quite agile and quick, so they approached us with the idea, which we took into development.

What’s key here is the stable business that we are driving; we saw that declining this year because many pharmaceutical companies were reorganizing after the corona pandemic and the demand for crystallization products declining. So, this partnership came as a gift from heaven – now the product is in the market, and we already see it flying. Not only for Pfizer, but many pharmaceutical companies have already purchased one or multiple or have an interest to purchase, so that is really balancing out now.

For the pharmaceutical equipment, our sales pipeline is very seasonal. It’s very back-end loaded in the year. So, the last quarter is booming for us because as many pharmaceutical companies or research companies spent their budgets, so it's important to track the pipelines throughout the year to maintain our cashflow health.

What challenges await your business and how do you hope to overcome them?

Getting the new machine into the market is a key focus for us. We are now focusing on some big companies that are going to work with the machine, and in 2025 we hope to double our sales.

The hope for us is that the crystallization stabilizes a bit and then we can grow there, too.

What have you learned as a leader in the last 12 months?

What I learned is that you can read about it, but to see it is something else.

That co-development with a customer is so important to get success. We could never have done this on our own.

The feedback that we get from Pfizer after working with the machine is completely different from how we would approach it, as there are more chemist-savvy people at Pfizer and more mechanically-savvy people at Technobis. The combination is key. Without that, we wouldn’t have the machine ready to go or up to customer standards, leading to financial issues as the machine has helped us overcome the drop in our existing portfolio. True partnering.

Additionally, as a leader, what we did do - but I think we could have done better - is having people provide better market intel and insights. I say that because after experiencing the drop in sales, I think if you had the right network, we could have predicted it a bit earlier.

Now, when we talk to people in our network, we get good intel. Combining that with our sales analytics creates a good picture for us and helps serve our story to the banks, our shareholders, etc. So, having a network of people is something I learned.

How does that impact the culture here?

I think people at Technobis are flexible. The entrepreneurial spirit is here; we are very good at fixing problems, which can also be seen as a negative...

Sometimes that means, in the longer term, things are postponed slightly, so that's something we can work on as a company.

Of course, the decline in sales was a shock to us and we needed to get together as a team again to overcome this. Unfortunately, we had to let go of some people at that time.

From a leadership perspective, how have you managed to retain talent? Is there something that you've learnt or changed over the last 12 months?

What is key is the open communication from everyone. Every year we start slow, because of the seasonal pattern, but 2024 was extremely slow.

We got together as a company in March – we didn’t exactly know what was going on but saw many organizations reorganizing and thought it influenced our sales - so people could understand that something was going on.

When we had a clear plan together with our shareholders and the bank’s involvement, we communicated that immediately to the organization.

We needed to rebalance the organization, and I think people appreciated that. It's not a nice message to spread, but they saw the urgency. It was a one-time fix.

Also, the people we needed to let go of understand the decision; what’s special to me is they said, “Although it's not nice for me, I had a tremendously good time here, definitely learned a lot, and you were always fair and square.” That’s key.

What does sustainability look like for your industry or company? Is that something that's on your radar?

We're not a big user of resources here; our production flow is quite small and not energy intensive. However, we focus on the efficiency of our machines. For example, partly why our new machine, the ReactAll™, is so successful is because it uses only a tenth of the material that Laborant uses in analyzing the reactions between the fluids that they trial for their medicines.

Other equipment uses a tenfold of those expensive and sometimes environmentally hazardous materials.

What strategies do you use to develop innovative, diverse teams?

When I joined more than a year ago, the team was already diverse. There are only three of us - one lady and two men. The most important thing is setting clear focus areas and responsibilities. I like to give a lot of freedom, but with opportunities for openness to check in and ask for help.

That really helped form the team and the freedom to operate within their area fully. For example, one of my teammates solely focuses on implementing part of the new ERP system. She loves it because it gives her a full focus and she's responsible for the project. She sometimes checks in to verify something. I think that's the key to building a successful team.

When you joined, did you look at the processes and reorganize the structure of people’s responsibilities?

We mainly reorganized the areas that each person was responsible for. A simple example is when I joined, the communication between us and creditors was poor. That was because a team member was responsible for it, and it wasn’t his key strength. However, he was very good in other areas of Finance.

I don’t think he was very happy with his responsibility, and neither he nor the company benefited. Instead, we said, “I take that part, and you take that part.” At that point, you saw people breathe a sigh of relief again.

Sometimes, that also happens with tools. Forecasting our cashflow here is key because we are an SME, so we do it on our own. The tools that we previously used were not adequate, so we changed them. That takes people a bit of time to overcome, as they are not used to certain tools, but now the process works much better, and we have their buy-in.

What advice would you give to someone starting their career in Finance?

I didn’t have a typical Finance career, because I started as a Tax Lawyer/Tax Economist at PwC. However, what I am proud of is taking the chance to try different things and change, as things work out in the end. I never figured that I would be a company CFO.

My advice would be to try and change roles when you feel stuck. What helps with that is having a good sponsor or someone in your network who truly sees something in you – sometimes that can come down to luck – but I had that in ERIKS and worked for the board of directors for two-plus years. They saw something in me, so I received more responsibilities and that’s where you learn really fast.   

When you know you want to move on, where have you found the next opportunity?

Gaining that opportunity at ERIKS was a key step in my career, because I wasn’t happy at PwC. After two years of experience, I went into the horse-riding equipment business with my father. I did that for another two years and then sold the company. That was really fun, but I had to think about what’s next.

A friend knew someone working at ERIKS was looking for a Business Controller for the head office. I originally didn't know the company, but I researched it and wrote an open letter.

While I was researching, I learned that ERIKS was a distributer of technical goods, owned by SHV, with a large office in the Netherlands.

After I started, ERIKS gave me endless opportunities.

That’s brilliant. Being open to seeing what the opportunities were and embracing them has led you on this great journey.

Yes, and learn while you're doing it. I never had a concreate plan and my journey was a bit weird.

If you knew with certainty you wanted to be a CFO, you’d probably take different career steps than I. Many CFOs start as an Accountant for a couple of years, then work in a company as a Business Controller or Financial Controller, and then maybe move to a CFO role.

My advice is if deep down in your heart, you know that you have to take a different turn, take it. I see too many people not make the change because of many reasons. Those may be valid, but if you don’t make the move, you won’t be happier, as you already feel and know the role is not for you.

What is a memorable moment from your career and why?

What comes to mind now is at my previous company, we made big machines that printed sustainable food packaging. We had a huge customer in US that was adopting our machines really fast, but we got too reliant on them.

That customer got into financial problems - they lied to us, actually, and stopped paying. That was a time where I learned a lot as a person, but also as a Finance professional; how people interact and sometimes think about their own interests first and not the company’s. It was a tough time.

How did you get through that?

For me, it’s always important to go into fixing mode with the people that really matter. The shareholder and the management team were important stakeholders. So, it was important to get a plan together to get it fixed. It wasn’t nice as we had to let go of many people to help the company survive. It was tough and I also left.

It was a big lesson to learn as a person.

Sometimes you can learn more when things don't go as expected.

What risks have you taken throughout your career and how did they help you to get to CFO?

As I said, I didn't plan my career, I just went from one role to the other. I like to try new things. For example, at ERIKS, I was responsible for all the web shops worldwide and the EDI connections between us and the customers. It was a completely new experience for me. Yes, I did some shop work in the horse-riding business, but that was much smaller.

I like to take the challenge. In my previous company, the ERP system needed to be renewed completely because it was so old, almost at the level of breakdown. We needed to get that fixed and I had never implemented an ERP, but I did it with my team. Of course, some things went wrong and some went right. In the end, with a lot of focus, dedication, and teamwork, we got it fixed.

But we also had a US entity, and their ERP parts were 25 years old. It was one server, and it could have broken down any moment.

We did our ERP in two months. It was crazy, but we got it right, but then the server broke down after one week of going live... I can laugh about it now!

What is your advice for aspiring leaders?

Be open to new projects. Do things that you maybe did not do before and do what's needed in the company. Take those risks because you learn a lot from them.

Later, I learned a lot by truly daring to rely on my team. That helps build team spirit.

What I like to do as a business leader is be very transparent, open, and give a lot of clarity, so people know what to expect and how they can contribute to the success of the company.

If you could change one thing in your career, what would it be?

I don't think I’d like to change a lot of things.

In a life, you can only do a little portion of what's available in a market. It’s a bit of a daydream, but I don't know if I would have been a good physician – I would like to, but it's almost impossible that you would be able to do different things in life.

Maybe in a couple of years, I would like to do something completely different, a governmental job or working in sustainability, helping people, for example.

Why did you choose Tax?

In high school, I liked Economics and Maths. My father was also a Lawyer, and I thought the mix was nice.

What would have been your second career choice?

Apart from becoming a football player, I don’t have any previous wishes.

Do you play football?

I did when I was young, and I also went to the US to play for college. But I'm not nearly as good as I needed to be. I liked it though.

Thank you to Wopke for speaking to Georgia Wright, Director in our Finance & Accountancy recruitment division in the Netherlands.

Views and opinions contained within our Executive Interviews are those of the interviewee and not views shared by EMEA Recruitment.