is now
Running a small business is a on-going battle between risk management, opportunism, long-term strategy and medium-long-term thinking. The joy of being small however, and having a short decision cycle, is to be able to act and re-act swiftly, and to make a point when it matters rather than when the media campaign dictates. We've made a small decision a few weeks ago we're quite proud about, and we want to share it with you.
That decision is to go Volvo for our entire car fleet. OK, it's a small fleet, however we feel the message behind this decision is important. The car industry is going through an extremely bad time at the moment, and needs any help it can get. Being a large industry, car manufactures do a lot of outsourcing and subcontracting, which means other companies will be impacted as well.
Volvo is one of the more important employers in the Ghent region, and should get credits for that. Local employment is very important in order to cut traffic and thus pollution, but it also builds a spirit of togetherness and entrepreneurship for the entire Ghent region. That's why we joined Gent BC right from its start: Ghent is a great region to work from, and we're proud to share that region with companies like Volvo.
The Volvo brand, in our minds, is a factor of quality, cost/value balance but also a level of environmental awareness we want to be tied to. Not so much the pure ecological values, but an awareness of a product existing, operating, evolving in a certain context. A sense of ungreediness, not abusing the available resources - very much like we try to grow the business context of our open source products: by finding customers that want to share our common ideals and goals, by growing common platforms where win-win solutions can be created.
Plus, they're great cars to drive as well, obviously. ;-)
So from now on, our car brand will be Volvo, preferable car models which are assembled in the Ghent manufacturing plant, and purchased by our leasing partner at a local Volvo dealership (ACG).
Disclosure: Volvo isn't on our customer list.