“Soon, I will mark my 40-year anniversary. I'm going to reach it”, Kees says with a big radiant smile. “I have been working here since 1 December 1980. At this time, the company was still called Ingenieurs- en Architectenbureau H. Veth. Founder Henk Veth was the director at the time. In the 38 years that I have been working here, I have never had a day that I thought: ugh, I have to go to work. I have experienced so many beautiful things here that I could talk about it for hours.”
Kees thinks the greatest business development he has experienced is how Iv has grown. It began around 1985 when Grootint, then a well-known bridge and lock constructor, divested their drawing department and Iv took it over. The big growth really started at this point. Acquisitions followed in the Netherlands and far beyond the borders. Kees: “We also used to have a branch in the United Arab Emirates. I also have a nice story about that. Henk Veth had his own aircraft and with that, he flew to the Emirates whenever he had to be there. I still remember working quietly on a Monday afternoon when the phone rang: ‘Hey Kees, is there any news? Over.’ It was Henk, he had called from his plane for a discussion about work via Eurocontrol. After every sentence, an ‘over’ followed and finally ‘over and out’. He was a nice guy. In terms of work activities, I really enjoyed the acquisitions, but of course, also all the other experiences to do with the acquisitions. For example, I once sat with the branch director of our Malaysian office at the Libyan embassy in Malaysia because we wanted to set up a Libyan entity. We had to give our passports to a porter but were unable to get them back. We were put in a room and the door was closed. There we were, on Libyan territory, without a passport. But luckily it all worked out well in the end and we eventually set up the entity.”