Ted Køhlert van Zwieten

He grew up in IJmuiden, on the Dutch coast. His father was not an entrepreneur but was certainly enterprising, running a meat-products factory among other ventures, which makes Ted the first actual entrepreneur in the family. He is candid about what that inheritance involved.

“Ambition was fed to me with the spoon at home. My family has always been ambitious. I am not sure that has only helped me, to be honest.”

His first ambition was to fly, until a physics teacher advised him in the strongest terms to consider another profession. He married a pilot instead.

The other constant began at five, when his grandparents kept an apartment in the Swiss Alps. He has skied ever since, and can still describe the anticipation precisely: butterflies the day before leaving, the sound of boots clicking into skis, snow creaking underfoot. He learned on a short brush slope in the Netherlands, of all places, under an Austrian instructor who taught him to ski properly and then how to teach it. He went on to teach in Austria and France, and still teaches family and friends.

“It is the best thing there is. After a good off-piste run, that is.”

What has stayed constant in the work is that he is a doer. After secondary school he came across the Small Business Entrepreneurship program at the Haarlem School of Business and recognised it immediately as the right direction. He is careful, though, about how far he takes the label. As he puts it, he would not describe himself as someone who has to build a company at any cost.

Ted is Dutch. The Danish half of his name arrived in 2006, in the Alps, where he was helping one of his closest friends run an après-ski bar and met Rikke. He describes falling in love on the spot.

She lived in the Netherlands for a period before the two of them moved to Denmark together in 2010. Certain she was the one, he began learning Danish straight away, and they married the following year. Rather than Rikke taking his surname in the traditional way, they merged the two.

“I built Pepperminds from nothing to 250 people, two countries and around DKK 35m in revenue, in six years. I also pushed it into a market it wasn't ready for and had to pull it back out again. The decisions I coach founders through are decisions I've made myself, including the expensive ones.”

The market in question was Sweden, and on paper the expansion was the obvious next move. In practice it meant drawing resources out of a business that still needed them and committing them to a country where Pepperminds had no foundation: too few people who understood how the company worked, and not enough structure to carry a second market.

The reckoning took years rather than months. By the time they accepted it and withdrew, the attempt had cost significant money and a great deal of stress. What has stayed with him is not the scale of the loss but how predictable it was in hindsight.

“It's textbook in the growth-phase model: we weren't ready for the phase we were trying to enter. From the inside, I couldn't see it.”

And then, the harder admission:

“Somewhere I knew we weren't ready, and I let ambition, and other people's input, talk me past it.”

It changed how he operates. When something does not sit right now, he stops rather than pushing through, and he doesn't wait for the numbers to confirm what the feeling is already telling him. It is also why his coaching never arrives as a lecture: he would rather help a founder recognise an expensive mistake a year earlier than he recognised his own.

When a founder is avoiding a decision, he stops the meeting and names the avoidance rather than the decision itself. In his experience most founders already know what they should do; what they lack is a setting in which the cost of waiting is stated aloud. So the delay gets a number attached to it: what does another quarter of indecision cost, in money, in people, in the founder's own time? At that point it becomes a decision with a price rather than a worry without a deadline, and it goes on the Rocks with a name and a date beside it, because a decision nobody owns is not a decision.

When a session turns emotional, he does remarkably little.

“I stay calm, and I listen. I don't jump in to solve it or repair it. Moving too quickly to fix something usually says more about my own discomfort than about what they need.”

Whatever has surfaced, he assumes, has been sitting underneath the previous three conversations and deserves to be taken seriously. The work resumes when the founder is ready and not before.

The point he presses hardest is also the least welcome: that founders must let go of decisions they remain perfectly capable of making. The very thing that made the company work, a founder close to everything, is precisely what the next phase cannot support.

“What used to be your strength is now your constraint.”

He is quick to add that this is not a failure but a phase, and that every growing company walks into it.

He is at his best with a founder still close to the business, supported by a genuine leadership team, in a company of roughly twenty to a hundred people. The founder who benefits most can already feel that the organisation has outgrown the way it is being run, and would rather address that than be reassured about it. Ted values ambition, openness to learning, and teams that enjoy being challenged. Familiarity with Scaling Up is not required; most of the founders he works with had never encountered it.

He is equally direct about the inverse.

“If the founder dominates the room, authoritarian, overruling the people around him, I can't work with that, and honestly neither can the company. What I do depends on a team that wants to be challenged and can hear it. Without that, no framework is going to help.”

Beyond that, there are things he points out that a page like this cannot convey.

“I listen more than I talk, and I stay calm when a room gets uncomfortable. What I'm not good at is pretending something is fine when it isn't. If I see it, I'll say it, even when it would be easier for both of us if I didn't.”

“And if I don't think I can help you, I'll tell you that too.”