At Oomen Movers, we have been working for years to make our business process more sustainable. From solar panels to electric moving vans, sustainability is one of the main themes at Oomen Movers. That’s why our co-owner, Frans Oomen, gave an interview to Evofenedex magazine in the context of sustainability. Read on to find out what sustainability means to Oomen!
SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS AND POWER PLANT IN ONE
Oomen Movers is making great strides in sustainability. The company premises generate energy and thus money, and the fleet consists increasingly of moving vans running on solar power. But that didn’t happen by itself. According to Frans Oomen, sustainable business is only possible if you are fully committed and have everything under your own management.
.
Oomen has a short but powerful history. After graduating from high school, son Emile Oomen started delivering packages for PostNL with his own van. With the right papers in his pocket and now in possession of two vans, he started his own moving company on January 1, 2015. “You just can’t lift a bank by yourself,” father Frans notes, and so people soon joined the company. After the first year, the counter stood at 12 employees and Emile asked his father to join the company. Since 2016, Emile, his wife Stephanie and father Frans have continued to work on the business together as partners.
Company philosophy Oomen Movers
“We vinden het leuk om iets op te bouwen, voorop te lopen en duurzaam te zijn”, vat Frans de bedrijfsfilosofie samen. “Met elkaar vormen we een ambitieus team. De visie van Emile vormt de basis van wat we doen en mijn rol bestaat eruit om alle mensen en partijen bij elkaar te brengen die daarvoor nodig zijn.” Die aanpak is niet zonder succes gebleken. Vanuit de vestiging in opslagruimte Katwijk werken inmiddels zo’n 35 mensen. Door de overname van Nouwens Verhuizingen in Tilburg kwam datzelfde aantal medewerkers er in de zomer van 2023 nog eens bij.
.
Frans: “We are now among the largest private movers in the Netherlands. And our storage facility, with nine hundred containers, is also the largest available. We are a young and progressive company that is not held back by traditions. As a result, there is room to try new things and take risks. We love winning and doing business at the cutting edge. Of course things sometimes go wrong, but we learn a lot from that. The result of our way of working is that we have been growing by at least fifty percent a year for eight years in a row, and this year, thanks to the acquisition, even by one hundred percent. Actually, growth is limited only by the fact that it is challenging to find enough new employees.”
Energy Label A+++++
Bij de stappen die het bedrijf heeft gezet en nog wil zetten, hoort een passend gebouw. In Katwijk werkt Oomen sinds een kleine 3 jaar vanuit een maar liefst 24 meter hoge loods, met helemaal bovenin de kantoren van waaruit de duinen te zien zijn. Het moderne pand biedt ruimte aan het geautomatiseerde systeem voor Oomen opslag van huisraad en andere goederen in containers. Verdeeld over 2 locaties gaat het om zo’n 900 containers, en die zijn vrijwel allemaal in gebruik. Het gebouw is verder volledig ingericht op een zo duurzaam mogelijke bedrijfsvoering. Er zijn laadfaciliteiten voor elektrische auto’s en voor het groeiende aantal verhuiswagens op zonnestroom waarmee het bedrijf rijdt. Het pand is gasloos, levert meer energie op dan het kost en beschikt daardoor over het hoogste energielabel, namelijk A+++++.
.
All that energy, of course, comes from somewhere. There are six hundred solar panels on the specially designed roof and canopy of Oomen Movers’ building. The company only has a grid connection for small consumers, because the peaks in power consumption are met by energy stored in a number of batteries, the so-called peak shaving. But it certainly didn’t come about by itself, according to Frans. A lot of research had to be done and it requires substantial investment and economies of scale to break even.
Power plant
Frans: “You can really only do this profitably if your solar panels, connection, storage system and charging stations are your own. Our electricity costs us four euro cents per kilowatt hour and this is fixed for thirty years by guaranteeing all the systems and materials we use for this. With our small consumer connection, we are allowed to net and feed power back. In and around summer, with six hundred panels, we generate about double what we need ourselves, and in winter there is still enough to meet our own needs. Only in December and January do we call on the grid.”
.
He continues: “Thanks to smart meters at the charging stations, we earn Renewable Fuel Units (HBEs). We can sell these to companies who use them to offset their harmful emissions from transport, similar to trading CO2 rights. As a result, we even earn on the kilometers our moving vans drive on solar power, because they earn us sixteen cents per kilowatt hour. I sometimes say that we are not so much a very sustainable moving company, more like a power plant.”
Payback
For Oomen Movers, sustainability is not a tap from which money immediately started dripping as soon as it was turned open, Frans emphasizes. The company believes in sustainability and very much wants to be at the forefront of it. In that flight forward, Oomen has fully immersed itself in software, solar panels, inverters, HBEs, grid connections, subsidy schemes and a whole lot more. With that knowledge in-house, the company invested heavily – and to a large extent subsidy-free – because scale and volume are crucial ingredients for green success. This has created a situation where, on balance, the company is left with money from the power it generates itself, with the dot on the horizon that it can recoup its investments. This is possible because of the nature of the company’s work, for example.
.
“Bij verhuizen en in de distributie zijn de voertuigen niet de hele dag aan het rijden. Dat betekent dat je ze in de nacht met je eigen faciliteiten kunt opladen. Als we onze verhuiswagens langs de snelweg zouden moeten bijladen, vallen alle eerdergenoemde voordelen volledig weg door de kosten”, aldus Frans.
.
So for transportation companies, this approach is not yet feasible? “In any case, it is very challenging. If you drive every day on fixed routes or in a limited area, there are possibilities. But if you’re driving in Spain, there’s no getting around doing that electrically at the moment.”
Solar power
De zichtbaarste uiting van de werkwijze van Oomen zijn de verhuisauto’s op zonnestroom waarmee het bedrijf rijdt. Inmiddels heeft het bedrijf er zes in gebruik, en daarnaast zeven elektrische personenauto’s voor werknemers. Een deel van de circa dertig voertuigen tellende vloot rijdt nu nog op diesel en het verhuisbedrijf wil dat geleidelijk elektrificeren ook in Tilburg, waar de omstandigheden daarvoor nog gecreëerd moeten worden. “We rijden nog geregeld met een verhuiswagen op Spanje en zoals gezegd kan dat nog niet elektrisch. Maar we zullen alle dieselvoertuigen zo snel mogelijk vervangen door elektrische. Dat is overigens onbetaalbaar zonder Aan ZET-subsidie. Ik ken ook verhuizers die deze zijn misgelopen en daardoor nog niet kunnen vergroenen. We hebben dus ook gewoon het geluk dat wij daarvoor wél zijn ingeloot.”
Different mindset
Frans advises companies that cannot yet take the sustainability step to actively work toward the moment when they can. “You can already save up for the investment now, read up on it, prepare and set up your premises accordingly. To do this optimally, you actually need a new building, because an old building creates too many limitations.” By the way, Frans is happy to advise and assist others. “I would like to change the mentality from ‘it can’t be done’ to ‘what can be done’? The change is complicated to make, but it has to happen sometime and it can be done by starting small and on time. Entrepreneurs really need to start thinking differently to get sustainability and other big challenges done.”
.
Evofenedex magazine | October 2023
