What makes a great business different? Inside Voys’ steward-owned model

What makes a business genuinely successful?

Is it revenue, growth, market share, or the ability to continue creating value long after the people who founded it have moved on?

At Voys, we believe the answer lies somewhere deeper.

For founder Mark Vletter, 20 years of building Voys has provided plenty of reasons to look back with pride. But his focus is firmly on what comes next.

That forward-looking perspective is one of the reasons Voys has chosen a different approach to ownership.

The company has transitioned to a steward-owned model, designed to protect its purpose, independence and ability to make decisions with the long term in mind.

Rather than treating a company primarily as an asset to be bought, sold or maximised for shareholder return, steward ownership separates economic rights from control and places greater emphasis on protecting the organisation itself.

For Voys, it represents a fundamental question:

What is this company worth protecting?

It started with an experiment at TNO

Voys’ story does not begin with a carefully constructed business plan or a grand ambition to build an international telecommunications company.
It started with an experiment.

While writing his thesis at TNO, a Dutch research institute, Mark Vletter and three other young colleagues were given the opportunity to experiment with emerging internet technology.

They developed an online telephone platform for themselves, allowing them to be easily reached by telephone by the approximately 5,000 people working at the organisation.

Looking back, they had unknowingly built one of the first cloud telephone platforms in the world.

At the time, however, they had no idea what they had created.

The project eventually became Voys, growing from a student dorm room experiment into a multi-million-dollar telecommunications company.

But the company’s development wasn’t driven by one person alone.

As Vletter explains, Voys was built by a large group of colleagues who worked together to change the way telecommunications worked.

That realisation eventually led to a bigger question: if so many people contributed to creating the company’s value, should ownership and economic benefit remain concentrated in one place?

From founder ownership to shared responsibility

Traditional business models often connect ownership, economic rights and decision-making power.

The more you own, the greater your potential influence — and ultimately, the greater your financial benefit if the company grows.

Voys wanted to explore something different.

The company’s approach to freedom and responsibility has long meant giving colleagues significant autonomy while expecting them to take responsibility for their decisions.

The same philosophy influenced its thinking about ownership.

If employees, customers, technology, infrastructure and society all contribute to the ability of a company to exist and succeed, Voys believes that value should not be viewed solely through the lens of shareholder return.

This is where steward ownership comes in.

What is steward ownership?

Steward ownership separates governance rights from economic rights.

The intention is to ensure that control of the company remains focused on its purpose and long-term interests, rather than being determined primarily by who holds the greatest financial stake.

For Voys, this means protecting several principles that have been central to the organisation for years: independence, self-management, transparency, freedom and responsibility.

The structure is designed to ensure that Voys can continue making decisions based on its mission, customers, colleagues and wider impact.

It is not about removing commercial ambition.

It is about changing what commercial success is ultimately for.

Why give away parts of a successful company?

One of the most obvious questions people ask about steward ownership is simple:

Why would a founder give away parts of their company?

The answer is that ownership isn’t only about financial value.

It is also about responsibility.

As Voys developed, the company increasingly considered how it could remain independent and purposeful beyond the people who happened to own or lead it at any particular moment.

That led to the decision to explore a different approach to ownership.

In his own words, Vletter describes the thinking behind the decision:

For Voys, giving away parts of the company is ultimately about protecting the organisation rather than maximising what can personally be extracted from it.

It means creating structures that make it harder for the short-term interests of individual owners to override the long-term interests of the organisation.

Purpose comes before profit

This does not mean profitability is unimportant.

Quite the opposite.

A sustainable business needs to be financially healthy. Without that foundation, it cannot invest in its people, serve customers effectively or pursue its ambitions.

The difference is that profit becomes a means of building a healthy and resilient organisation, rather than the sole definition of success.

At Voys, this approach is closely connected to the principles of freedom and responsibility.

The company believes people should have the freedom to make decisions, but that freedom comes with responsibility for the consequences.

That requires trust.

And trust requires transparency.

It also means accepting that not every decision needs to be made at the top of the organisation.

Giving people responsibility

One of the consequences of Voys’ approach is a different relationship with employees.

When people understand why decisions are being made — and have meaningful autonomy within the organisation — they can move beyond simply executing instructions and become active contributors to the direction of the business.

This matters particularly in telecommunications and technology, where customer expectations and technology can change rapidly.

Businesses need people who can make decisions close to the customer, experiment, learn and adapt.

A rigid hierarchy can make that difficult.

Voys’ approach is built around distributing responsibility rather than concentrating every important decision at the top.

That doesn’t mean every decision is made collectively.

It means that, where appropriate, the people closest to a problem should have the authority to solve it.

Thinking in decades, not quarters

Perhaps the biggest difference stewardship can make is the time horizon.

A company designed to protect its independence can make decisions based on what it believes will create lasting value rather than what produces the fastest financial return.

That could mean investing in technology before there is an obvious short-term payoff.

It could mean investing in people and organisational development.

It could mean prioritising customer relationships over aggressive sales targets.

Or it could simply mean having the patience to build something properly.

Markets move quickly.

Building trust with customers, developing people and creating a strong organisational culture takes considerably longer.

Voys believes businesses need the freedom to think in both timeframes.

Could steward ownership offer another way forward?

Voys is not suggesting that steward ownership is the answer for every company.

But it does believe that businesses should question whether traditional ownership structures are always the best way to create long-term value.

The question becomes:

Who should a company ultimately serve?

Its shareholders?

Its customers?

Its employees?

Its wider community?

The answer does not necessarily have to be one or the other.

A healthy company needs to create value for all of these groups.

Steward ownership changes the mechanism through which those interests are protected.

For Voys, it is an attempt to ensure that commercial success supports something bigger: an organisation that can remain independent, responsible and purposeful over the long term.

Building something worth protecting

Twenty years of Voys is a significant milestone.

But perhaps the most important lesson from the journey is that building a company is not only about what you create.

It is also about what you leave behind.

Voys began as an experiment at TNO. It grew into a telecommunications company because customers believed in the product and colleagues contributed their knowledge, energy and expertise.

For the Future, the company is experimenting again — this time with ownership.

The objective is not to create a business without commercial ambition.

It is to create a business that can continue creating value even when its founders, leaders and circumstances change.

Mark Vletter has written more about the personal thinking behind Voys’ transition to steward ownership, including why he chose to give away large parts of his company, in his article “Why I’m giving away my multi-million dollar company.”

Read the full article on Voys’ website.

The story is ultimately about more than ownership.

It is about what a company chooses to value.

And perhaps that brings us back to the question we started with.

A great business isn’t necessarily the one that is worth the most.

It may be the one that creates enough value to remain worth protecting.

The question is no longer simply: “How much is this company worth?”

It is: “What is this company worth protecting?”