Who is
José?
I built QISS IT from nothing. Grew it to €10M yearly revenue. Sold it to a German private equity firm. Moved to Curaçao. And now I'm here to share what I learned.
Built because I believed.
I was born in the 80s. I live on Curaçao. I built because I believe in what I do. Because your business deserves a heartbeat that thrives.
At 19 I was teaching aerobics, doing hostess work on the side, handing out brochures next to cars I wasn't buying anytime soon. What I really wanted was to work for myself. Make my own decisions. Make my own money. I didn't have a plan yet, I just had the urge.
Then I turned 27. My father died that year. About a week after the funeral, the company I worked for decided I wasn't quite myself, which was actually true, and figured the right move was to shift me to another department.
I walked into that meeting expecting them to say "we want to keep you, what do you need?" Instead they said "pack your stuff, you can leave tomorrow."
They handed me a decent chunk of money for my shares and showed me the door. That was the entire startup budget for what would become QISS IT.
"I was angry. I was 27. I had something to prove and nobody to prove it to. Which turns out to be the best fuel you can run on for a few years."
Ten years. Sixty million. Then what?
So I built it. Eight years later we were hitting €10 million in yearly revenue with 150 employees, over €60 million in total, and I sold the whole thing to a German private equity firm. I worked straight through my second pregnancy and was back online an hour after giving birth. Don't ask me to recommend that.
By then I had two kids and a company that demanded the same kind of attention as a third one. I was raising all three at once.
And then it was done. The Germans signed, the money was in the account, and I went home. I was relieved. For about a week.
After that I couldn't sleep for three months. Not because of stress. Because of the absence of it. For eight years I had been QISS IT. Suddenly I was just José. I had no idea what that meant.
A year of nothing.
After that I moved to Curaçao, spent a year doing nothing, and slowly figured out who I was without a company attached to my name.
That answer is what I'm building now as The Dutch Sales Doctor. Keynote stages, advisory work, the occasional intervention for founders who are working hard at the wrong things.
The question my coach asked.
In 2021, my coach asked me what I actually liked doing for work. I had built a 10 million euro company. What I said next is the reason I do what I do today.
We were sparring about my next chapter. People kept asking when I'd start my next venture and I kept saying "soon" while quietly knowing I had no idea what that next venture should be.
Then she asked it: "José, what do you actually like doing?"
I sat there for a while. This is a woman who's been in my corner for years, and even she had managed to ask me something I couldn't answer in one go.
"You get extremely good at solving everyone else's problems. So good that you forget to check whether you still like the kind of problems you've been solving."
After a while I started talking. Half to her, half to myself. I said that what really gets me out of bed is walking into a business and noticing within five minutes what nobody else has put words to yet.
A broken process here, a sales team confusing busy with effective, a founder quietly creating the exact culture they keep complaining about.
I also love a stage. The bigger the room of entrepreneurs, the better. Give me people who think they have it figured out and let me give them three reasons to reconsider by lunch.
What I do now.
My coach let me finish. Then she said: "So you're sales. You like selling. You like making companies healthier. There's your name." The Dutch Sales Doctor came out of that conversation.
Most weeks I'm on a stage somewhere diagnosing a room, or in a one-on-one with a scale-up founder pointing at what's actually broken in their business. The rest of the time I'm running sales trainings or walking a team through the 7 Organs framework I use to read a company the way a GP reads a patient.
I don't have to work. The reason I still do is because two years before that conversation, I had no answer to my coach's question. And every week since, I've been getting closer to it.
Most of the founders I sit across from are stuck on the same kind of question, without realising it. Curious what yours is.
Ready to find out what's actually going on?
A strategic session, a keynote, or the waiting list. The diagnosis is always the first step.