Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Royal Swinkels (formerly Swinkels Family Brewers; Bavaria is the flagship brand)
Er zit meer dan alleen bier in een flesje! | Peer Swinkels | TEDxVeghel
Wat hebben Mozart, Robinson Crusoe en een bierbrouwerij met elkaar gemeen? Op het oog helemaal niets, enkel en alleen het getal 300. In 1719 werd Mozart geboren, schreef Daniel Defoe het wereldberoemde boek Robinson Crusoe en kun je na enig speurwerk ook in de boeken voor het eerst iets over de historie van Bavaria terugvinden. Dit bedrijf ging nog weleens over in handen van anderen MAAR vanaf 1773 is de brouwerij onafgebroken in het bezit van de familie Swinkels. De alom bekende brouwerij, de tweede grootste in Nederland, behoort tot één van de oudste Nederlandse familiebedrijven. Tot maart...
About Peer Swinkels
Peer Swinkels, CEO of Royal Swinkels Family Brewers (formerly Bavaria), has discussed the company's 2018 rebranding from Bavaria to Royal Swinkels Family Brewers, stating that the change was made to reflect the company's expansion from a single brewery to seven breweries and 26 brands across 120 countries. He said the family name was chosen to emphasize the company's status as an independent family business. Swinkels has also spoken about the company's 300-year history, noting that only a small percentage of family businesses survive to the third generation, and described his focus on long-term strategy and continuous transformation. Swinkels has recounted the company's 2010 marketing stunt involving orange dresses at a World Cup match, which he said generated significant international press attention. He has also discussed the company's international growth strategy, including the acquisition of an importer in the United States and partnerships in England. Swinkels described meeting Playboy founder Hugh Hefner during a commercial shoot, characterizing Hefner as a "legend" with self-deprecating humor. He has also spoken about receiving Queen Máxima of the Netherlands at the brewery in 2019 during the company's 300th anniversary celebrations.
Transcript (39 segments)
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Peer Swinkels0:09
Good morning everyone, it's wonderful to be here today. When I was standing backstage, I realized what a special event this actually is — a small village in Brabant with a beautiful world initiative and a wonderful paradox. And that's what we love.
I must confess, just like Herman mentioned earlier this morning, I'm not entirely without nerves standing here. What is close to you also makes you most vulnerable. After all, I'm just a regular guy from Lieshout.
I have a question: how many family businesses do you think we have in the Netherlands? There are 275,000 family businesses in the Netherlands, and together they account for roughly 53 percent of gross national product and about half of all employment.
When you consider that only 30 percent of these businesses survive the first generational transition, only 13 percent survive the second, and only 3 percent make it to the third generation — I myself am from the seventh generation of a 100-year-old family business. But for me, family means much more than just those few people with the same last name. Every employee is family.
The challenge for many businesses, and certainly for family businesses, is not starting a company but making it future-proof. If you look at our sector alone: ten years ago there were just twelve breweries in the Netherlands. Now there are more than 600, almost all family-owned craft breweries. The average lifespan of a company in the 1950s was 56 years. Today it's only 15 years, and in a few years it will drop to five. That's not even a single generation, not by a long shot.
I was born into a real family business. When I was a child playing in my parents' garden, it was with crates of beer instead of Lego bricks. During school holidays as a teenager, I naturally already had a summer job — starting as a forklift driver, then operating machines, then as a delivery driver in hospitality, then in the administration department, and eventually in the office in England.
At fourteen, I first traveled abroad with my father — to Spain, Italy, and France — sitting beside him during negotiations with very large retailers. Beer and entrepreneurship were instilled in me from childhood.
For centuries, the brewery was actually a side activity of a farm. They were originally farmers, and that's how most brewers started. So it was really a farming business, and that down-to-earth approach is still in our DNA. So is the farmer's shrewdness. We always say: we don't need to be the biggest, we don't need to be the strongest, but we do want to be the smartest. Because in our world, it's David versus Goliath — and our family dares to collaborate.
Looking back at the fourth and fifth generations — my great-grandfather and his three sons — in 1924 they built a new brewery in Lieshout. It became a pilsner brewery. At that time in the Netherlands, people drank dark beer without foam, without carbonation. My great-great-grandfather invested all his money in this new brewery while closing the other one. That became the reason for our success: innovation. He foresaw that consumers were moving toward a different product.
Then you look at the sixth generation — my father Peter and his brother Fons. Armed with a tour guide and the latest football scores, they went to Italy. In the early 1970s, after traveling through Italy for a week, they sold a truckload of beer. That was the beginning of our export. Today, Italy is one of our largest export markets. Eighty percent of everything we do goes abroad now, all from that one truckload of beer sold in the early seventies.
Later they went to Nigeria and discovered that people there couldn't drink alcohol due to their religious beliefs. So my father called his nephew, whose factories were there, and asked if he could make an alcohol-free beer. His nephew agreed. That became the beginning of alcohol-free beer, and they became pioneers in the world of non-alcoholic beer.
And then the seventh generation — my generation. We too inherited that stubbornness from previous generations. We made acquisitions, invested, created another non-alcoholic beer while the segment was almost dead, and we've now started building a new brewery in Ethiopia. I hope we can make history there for the next generation. Every generation adds something.
There are now more than 200 family members involved in the company. As I said earlier, the company essentially consists of 1,800 family members — our employees. We're building the family legacy together. So far, the good news. But let me be honest: a family business is not always a blessing. Sometimes it can also be a curse.
Many family businesses face the same challenge: how do you successfully pass your business from one generation to the next? How do you ensure your children and grandchildren can enjoy your legacy? How do you keep everyone engaged, especially when there are so many family members? And how do you keep the courage to succeed without tripping over each other? And what makes a company future-proof at all? That doesn't just apply to family businesses.
Even if your business model and entire marketing mix are completely sound, there are still two reasons a family business can fail. The first is fiscal matters — there's not much we can do about that. The other is disagreements within the family. Don't worry, I won't talk about taxes today. What we noticed on Prinsjesdag is that our government doesn't pursue policy focused on the continuity of family businesses. So there's little news to report on that front. But family disagreements are the bottleneck for many family businesses. The family is both the greatest strength and the greatest challenge.
Six months ago, I was appointed as the soul of the company. I seized that moment to really reflect — to look back, to look around me. I asked myself those exact questions I just mentioned. I took the time to think deeply about it, and a few things emerged. What stood out especially was that the most successful companies are those that adapt to a new reality — that constantly adapt and renew themselves. You see this in constant transformation.
I don't believe in companies making a big short-term leap from A to B. I believe in a successful long-term strategy that includes constant renewal and transformation. You adopt new technologies and deploy your financial strength smartly. Companies that dare to invest in innovation — knowing that within three years it can become a substantial part of your revenue.
We grew by breaking old habits. Look at my great-grandfather who built an entirely new brewery in 1924 — he dared to take the risk of introducing a product nobody in the Netherlands knew. And yes, there's always that family aspect, but above all it's about focus on the market, objectives, results, and discipline.
If you asked people at the brewery about me, many would say: someone with tremendous dossier knowledge who knows every number down to the last decimal. After all, I'm an econometrician by training and a determined fighter, especially when things get tough. I operated from the conviction that the right business focus ultimately leads to results. But I now see things a bit differently.
Because at Swinkels, it's not just about business drive. In all successful companies, it's precisely about the family — and I don't mean that in the literal sense of the word. It's about all employees and family members in the sense of a loyal and safe environment where every employee can flourish and contribute. A strong family is everything. It can be the strength of any company, going beyond objectives, market conditions, and discipline.
Building a successful business model isn't really the art. It's about creating an environment where employees can make a real contribution. It's about empowerment in every one of us. When you have that empowerment and trust in each individual, it helps build relationships. And that means you're allowed to make mistakes, because nobody is perfect in a company. It's about being honest about what you do and learning from your mistakes.
In addition, in Dutch culture we have an extra challenge: we tend to elevate criticism to an art form. But in business, it's precisely about celebrating successes together.
Looking at my own career over the past fifteen years, I've had moments when I had no confidence or didn't feel confident — afraid of what others might say, afraid of reactions when I came up with some crazy idea again. I can tell you, that's not a pleasant feeling, and at those moments you're definitely not at your best.
Ultimately, you want to bring out happiness in people by giving them trust. American research shows that happy employees are 43 percent more productive than unhappy ones. And if you look at the Netherlands, I find it truly appalling: half of the Dutch don't even find their work worthwhile.
I'd love to hear your stories. I'll ask you a question, and I'd like you to raise your hands firmly. Who among you knows someone in their environment who has ever had a burnout? All hands go up. It's truly incredible. Since 2012, according to CBS, the number of burnouts in the Dutch business world has doubled.
In my view, this has become the scourge of the business world. Companies have become machines. Companies have become managed by numbers, but the human factor has been forgotten, and that truly concerns me. I believe all CEOs have a responsibility to address this. Nobody becomes unhappy from hard work, but you do become unhappy working in an unhealthy and unsafe environment.
An unhealthy and unsafe environment means excessive gossip, unrealistic work pressure, unrealistic goals being set, no appreciation or recognition for your people, office politics, working behind people's backs — that gives people stress. And when you consider you spend a large part of your life at work, you don't want to spend all day worrying about criticism from others and what your colleagues are all doing behind your back. A waste of time and energy, and that feeling comes home with you and lingers for a long time.
You might ask: what does Peer actually do himself at the company to create that good work environment? I'll say right away, we're nowhere near there yet. But a few months ago I introduced something called the 'Brouwerspraat' — a live stream broadcast from a company location to all employees worldwide at every location.
What I do is take people along in where we stand and where we're going as a company. But the most important thing about the Brouwerspraat is that it gives me a moment to spotlight colleagues — people who've delivered a small or great achievement. They're brought forward because I want people to be seen.
Take for example Sandra, our production planner here in the Lieshout brewery. Summer is always a huge challenge for us — people are on holiday, temporary workers come in, production never runs well. But Sandra ensured we had excellent personnel planning this year, so our production ran like clockwork. People like that need to be seen.
Or take Peter and Bibianne. We had a years-long dispute in Albania over a trademark infringement, and they fought for years to resolve it. I want everyone's contribution to be recognized.
The greatest feeling of trust you can have, in my view, is when amid your colleagues you dare to take a risk while knowing others think differently. That's true trust. Because believe me, I'm not a man of compromises. I don't believe in compromises in business, because in the middle of the road you have the greatest chance of being run over.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. A million Russian soldiers in East Germany had to go back home — no money, no work. We saw that as a chance to start selling beer in Russia. It was a huge risk: would we ever get our money back? Before we knew it, hundreds of containers of frozen beer were standing at the Russian border in the middle of winter. There's not much you can do with that — though we joked we could have made ice cream out of it.
Russia remains one of our most important markets to this day. Why? Because we dared to bet on it. If you don't dare to win, you don't dare to lose.
I'm now at the start of my own journey, and I know it will be a journey where I'll fall and get back up. A family business, I can tell you, has a long memory — that's beautiful, you have common ground, but emotions linger. That's why, for me, a happy family comes first in everything we do — family members and employees. Because I truly believe it moves our business forward.
The challenge for me will be to pass the company successfully to the next generation — more than 120 family members, and you can see them standing behind me here. I sincerely hope they will surpass us. Because they receive the trust, and they feel that they can take risks — ideally with a big smile on their face. Because if it's only about money, you're poor as a church mouse, as we'd say here in Brabant.
We all have the task of bringing that smile out — as leaders of the company. Because it's about people and their personal motivations. Do you know, for example, what truly drives your colleague to come to work every day? Do you know what your colleague would change in the company? Or whether they're genuinely happy with their work? If you don't know, go ask them.
I want to be the one percent who hands the family business to the eighth generation. Even more, I want to be the quarter percent who brings it to the ninth generation. I hope I'll live to see it — the oldest of the next generation is three years old, and then I'll probably be standing on the sidelines thinking I know better.
I want to leave the family business for the next generation — for family members and for employees. That is my mission and my contribution. Because the art is to turn your company and your family into a family business. Thank you.