Meet the team: Fleur van Vliet

Fleur van Vliet 's career involves diverse industries, always focusing on helping people and organizations to succeed. During our interview, we explored the depths of her professional journey, and from flowers to cakes, what is her life outside of work.

Could you please introduce yourself and share more about your role within Aknostic?

I'm Fleur van Vliet, I'm 39 years old. I live in Enkhuizen, together with my husband Cor-Jan and I have three kids. My role in Aknostic is Chief of Staff. For that role, I want Aknostic to grow to the next level, especially with setting the goals for the coming year, providing guidance in the growth as a team, as well as structuring and organising the business.

You have quite an extensive entrepreneurship and business career already. Can you share more about your professional background and the journey that led you here?

My professional career began when I started my study in Human Movement Sciences. As a side job I started working together with Jurg, my brother, and soon with Jasper and Flavia. After I finished my study, the four of us founded 9apps, which is now Aknostic, quite soon. With this same founding team, we also started 30MHz, where we built a data platform for the agricultural sector and our own wireless sensor network to acquire data from greenhouses globally. From this journey, I gained a lot of experience with all the aspects of growing a business and building a team. We started 30MHz from scratch and we grew to 30 people.

What attracts you most to Aknostic current company culture?

What I love here is the way people work together. It's a flexible culture, but people are taking responsibility for their work and what they must do to achieve. It makes it a great environment to grow and achieve the goals of Aknostic. It gives people space to have a great balance in personal and working life as well as room to be themselves so they can achieve all their goals, personally and business-wise.

What I love the most about an organisation is that people together achieve more than they do alone. Teams and people thrive when they are in their best shape or their best environment. I like to, now and then, check in with the people, it gives a good insight into how people are doing apart from the usual meetings you have together. Being able to offer support and give guidance to people, gives me joy to witness their growth and collaboration as a team. 

What do you think sets Aknostic apart from other companies in this industry?

The first thing is that the Aknostic is a great team, with a lot of experience. There are a lot of different types of people, with a lot of characteristics that they bring to the working environment. What I also love is that Jurg always has a long-term vision of the future and he will always bring it to the company, next to serving our customers it is important to have a view on what we want Aknostic to grow to, to keep challenging ourselves but also to look at the sustainability challenges we are facing and how we can contribute from our knowledge and help our customers on these topics.  

Can you please describe a typical day in your role?

A typical day is an office day because I like office days the most. It is coming in, grabbing a coffee, catching up with someone you walk into, having some meetings, and getting together for lunch. Once a month on Thursday we do an All Hands meeting to talk about the progress we made the month before, and where team members can share what they achieved or learned —a great way to know what keeps people busy in the different departments. 

You’ve been working for various industries like cloud consultancy, and horticulture. Any other secret industry you worked for?

As a side step now, I got to know a woman in Enkhuizen who created her sustainable concept store. When she needs to be away, I help her now and then in the store for half a day or a day. I enjoy it, especially because I support her and the concept of her store.

You have been playing volleyball for more than 30 years. What do you like the most in this sport?

When I was younger, I wanted to become better and win. I was a fanatic. My role changed over the years mostly because I play with girls and women between 15 and 25 years old. Now I’m also coaching and helping the team because I have the most experience. 

My other hobby is something I started last year with my sister-in-law, it’s called “pluktuin” in Dutch, picking garden flowers. It's something I love to do because you forget about the time. And we already got a lot of flowers out of it last summer. 

It was your birthday on the 10th of March. What does your dream cake taste like?

I like a lot of cakes, but mostly the ones my friend makes. She always makes different gluten-free cakes and they're delicious, like passionfruit cheesecake, chocolate cake, cocos, and lemon cake. I can’t choose which I want and always get small pieces of every cake on one plate.