Van Vulpen
culture
strategy
expression
Jan 2026
Story: Van Vulpen
Van Vulpen connects wind farms and solar fields to the places people live. The human challenge was just as vital: grow a family-like culture that can scale without thinning out, and attract the next generation of pioneers.
Van Vulpen
Drive past a construction site and you mostly see mud, machinery and orange vests. At Van Vulpen, the actually interesting story is under your feet: they build the cables and pipes that connect wind farms and solar fields to the places people live. Quiet work, visible grid.
The brief wasn't about the work, it was about the people doing it. The order book was growing fast, and a family-feeling culture can thin out very efficiently under that kind of expansion. The question was how to scale the thing Van Vulpen is loved for without accidentally dilute-washing it along the way.
Listening to the people who actually pour the concrete
We didn't start with a values deck. We started on the yard, in the offices, and in the trucks, with the people who already carry the culture without thinking about it.
Using 23plusone we tested which of the 24 fundamental human drivers were already pulling hardest inside Van Vulpen. Craft, obviously. Belonging, obviously. And a quieter one that turned out to matter more than expected: care for each other. Not as a poster on the wall, but the small version: noticing when a colleague is having a rough week and adjusting the day around it. That's a very specific family-business muscle, and it was absolutely worth protecting before it had a chance to thin out.
One of the team members we worked with put it neatly: "Working with BR-ND People gave us the words for what we always felt but could never quite grasp."
A culture you can actually use on Monday morning
Out of that came a shared language and a practical set of tools, not a one-off culture programme. Values translated into concrete, recognisable behaviours that hold on the construction site and in the office, so the culture can travel with the organisation as it grows instead of eroding underneath it.
The goal, in Van Vulpen's own words, is to make the internal energy of the people as powerful as the green energy they connect across the country. A strong cultural foundation now helps Van Vulpen attract the next generation of pioneers without needing to oversell itself. A family feel that doesn't get thinner as the map gets bigger.
Keeping a family-feel culture intact while the organisation grows?
If your organisation is scaling fast and you can feel the thing that made it good starting to thin out, there's a way to translate the culture into recognisable everyday behaviour so it travels with the growth instead of getting lost in it. Let's talk about it.
Reach out to Kim or Alexander if you're looking for something similar