Philosophy
On ownership.
Why we buy to hold, and what that means for the people involved.
A letter
The businesses I admire most rarely make headlines, and they don't need to. They do something people rely on, every day, for decades. That is the kind of business I want Hardgreen to own: one you can explain in two sentences, and one that will still matter in twenty years.
My working life has been in security, risk and architecture, helping organisations stay reliable when things go wrong. Hardgreen applies the same idea to ownership. A business is more resilient when its owner isn't counting down to a sale.
So we don't flip. We buy and build to keep, and we try to leave every business stronger than we found it. If that sounds like the owner you've been looking for, I'd like to hear from you.
Gijs BrandenburgFounder, Hardgreen
Why we don't flip
No clock, no exit date.
Funds have to sell within a few years, because their investors expect their money back on schedule. That deadline shapes every decision: what to cut, what to postpone, how to dress the business up for the next buyer.
Hardgreen has no investors waiting and no fund to close. Our only question is what makes the business better over the next ten years. We sell something only when selling is right for that business, and we expect that to be rare.
What it looks like
Ownership, in practice.
Hands-on, but practical. After we take over, we work with the team on what makes a business sturdier: understanding customers better, clear governance, sound reporting, sensible use of digital tools and AI. Nothing imposed from above, and no transformation programme.
CTRL Disrupt
Our first business, founded by Hardgreen in 2022 and wholly owned. A Dutch firm focused on enterprise resilience. It's run the way we intend to run everything we own: steadily, by senior people, with no plan to sell.
Founders
Stay, step back or leave. Your call.
Some founders want to keep running the company for years. Some want to hand over in stages. Some want a clean, well-prepared exit. All three are fine, and we build the deal around the choice rather than the other way round.
We take full, majority or minority stakes. What we ask in return is honesty, about the business and about what you want.
Your team
What happens to the people.
When we buy a business, we buy it because of the people in it. We don't buy to merge, relocate or cut. The name usually stays, the team stays, and day-to-day work carries on.
What changes is that the company has an owner with time on its side, and support with governance, finance, IT and risk when it needs it.
What we're building
A small group, owned well.
Over the coming years we'll add a handful of businesses, each a serious company in its own right, mostly in essential services and in work tied to resilience, risk and security.
Ten businesses owned well are worth more to us than thirty held passably. We'd rather grow slowly and be known, privately, as an owner who does what it says.
Start a conversation.
A first conversation commits nobody to anything. Gijs reads every email himself.
gijs@hardgreen.nl