Eric Wilborts, since the age of sixteen, developed an interest towards sports, health and fitness. As a matter of fact, he reflected his enthusiasm in these areas by creating his own businesses. He is the founder of HealthCity and co-founder of Basic-Fit, two successful companies that reflect his passions and values.
Eric was born and grew up in Tilburg, the Netherlands. At the age of sixteen, he decided to quit high school to follow his dream: becoming a professional tennis player. Since then, his athletic career increased rapidly. Soon, he became popular among tennis athletes and won the second title in the tennis junior worldwide championships. His popularity continued to rise until he had to quit his athletic career at the age of 21, due to an injury. However, this event did not stop him in pursuing his interests. At the age of 24, in 1992, he decided to open his own tennis sports center with the money earned from successful tennis competitions. In each of the subsequent years, he travelled to the USA to spot opportunities and new evolving trends. For instance, in 1999, he took initiative on a trend leading towards premium fitness concepts by opening an exclusive sport center named HealthCity. In the meanwhile, he sold his other tennis center, abandoning the focus on racket sports and concentrating on the concepts of fitness and wellness. In the period between 1999 and 2004, Eric Wilborts opened five gym clubs. Aiming to achieve high growth, he partnered with Rene Moos, both a friend and competitor, owning eight sport clubs with the same concept. The shared business was able to grow significantly, thanks to a continuously growing demand and shared resources, and by the end of 2007, HealthCity owned 125 clubs. However, the trend was evolving towards low cost fitness clubs. Thus, Eric and Rene decided to introduce Basic-Fit and sell HealthCity, to target the low-cost market. Until 2016 the company was held private, but due to the planned expansions and the need for capital, it was made public. Currently, Basic-Fit operates 440 clubs in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Spain, with more than 1.2 million registered members.
Eric Wilborts’ career path illustrates the definition of an entrepreneur: “An entrepreneur creates and/or exploits change for profit by innovating, accepting risk and moving resources to areas of higher return” (Burns, 2016). By observing the facts and growing numbers of the company, he is considered as a successful entrepreneur. With this report, we aim to examine whether personal traits and characteristics mentioned in the academic theory significantly influence the success of being an entrepreneur. Therefore, the scope of this report consists in analyzing if these theoretical concepts align with the insights we gained through the interview.
Firstly, the paper presents the methodology used before, during and after the interview. Secondly, it determines the major influences in Eric Wilborts’ career. Thirdly, the paper describes his personality traits through a five factor model, and analyses his motivation and sacrifices. Fourthly, it provides an overview of the findings and implications for students.
2. Methodology
We decided to emphasize personality and behavioral aspects due to the nature of the business and the prior knowledge we had about Eric Wilborts. We already knew details about his family and social background that could have influenced his personality and attitudes, thus, we wanted to examine whether our suppositions were true. Therefore, our scope consisted in analyzing his character traits and examining specific events and situations in Eric’s career that he considered to have played a major role in influencing his personality, attitudes, and skills. The interview questions were based on the course book, written by Paul Burns, relating to character traits, influences, and motivations. While preparing the interview questions, we decided to first focus on his career path as an entrepreneur, then proceed to detailed, personal questions, and end with implications for students (Appendix 1). The interview with Eric Wilborts took place in Tilburg at Hotel Mercure on the 12th May 2017. It lasted 55 minutes, characterized by a friendly and relaxed atmosphere. We considered the interview to be value-adding not only for the project, but also for our personal development by broadening our views.
3. Influences
As mentioned by Burns, there are several factors that influence the decision of starting a business. The interview with Eric Wilborts suggested four main factors that affected his character and determination. First, as mentioned before, Eric never finished his educational path. However, he considers himself as being self-taught, through the experiences and mistakes made as an athlete. Second, his family background greatly influenced him. His father was an entrepreneur, and through all his life Eric observed him acting and thinking based on an entrepreneurial mentality, leading him to develop a similar mindset. Third, we consider that his lifestyle considerably influenced him. His start as an athlete can be regarded as the foundation for his successive decisions and actions in the business field. Fourth, in a later stage, the partnership with Rene Moos allowed him to achieve his ambitions related to high growth and expansion. Therefore, by examining these factors, we concluded that the influences mentioned in the literature are similar and related to real-life examples specified in this interview.
4. Personality traits
Burns discusses the Five Factor Model, a framework used to identify traits that differentiate entrepreneurs consisting of five characteristics: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (Burns, 2016). Even though Eric left high school in an early age and focused on his athletic career, his ambition for learning was significantly high. As a professional tennis player, he developed important competences such as discipline, sociality and open-mindedness, and, most importantly, learning from failure. These factors determine two of the five character traits: openness and conscientiousness. Moreover, in relation to extraversion, he described himself as being optimistic, and he greatly highlighted his ability and willingness of being an influencer, capable of affecting and motivating other people’s decisions and mindsets. Furthermore, Eric possesses a low degree of neuroticism, by admitting his great confidence and control in taking decisions, and his determination. Agreeableness is the factor he possesses the least. He considers honesty as a core element in the entrepreneurial setting although it may create situations of conflict and disagreement. More specifically, Eric holds: “There are few people you can trust, […] it is necessary to limit trust”, relating to the mistakes of trusting partners and people too quickly.
As Zhao et al. (2010) concluded, the factors that significantly represent entrepreneurs are four: high levels of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and a low level of neuroticism (Zhao, 2010). Furthermore, the study added risk propensity as a characteristic of entrepreneurs. Eric, indeed, said: “If you do not take risk, you will not be successful, […] but I always try to take calculated risk”. His point of view reveals that it is necessary to possess a moderate risk taking approach. Therefore, based on these findings it can be concluded that Eric Wilborts’ traits fully represent the model described above, since, in Zhao’s study, agreeableness is considered to be the least descriptive element in entrepreneurs’ mindset.
4.1 Motivation & Sacrifices
The motivation of an entrepreneur is regarded as the foundation of a start-up. This aspect is different for every entrepreneur, thus, we believed that knowing Eric Wilborts’ point of view would have been interesting. His words on this topic were: “I have to enjoy what I am doing. If you continue doing something you don’t like for the following twenty-five years, you will get crazy”. Therefore, he strongly highlights the importance of following one's interests and passions, as he did in the sports field. However, there are many obstacles people face in their willingness to follow their own path: the monetary support, and the full dedication to the business are a few to mention. Being an entrepreneur requires to cope with these sacrifices. Indeed, Eric’s main sacrifice was his lack of presence in his family, impeding him to see his children growing and losing a paternal connection with them. He mentioned the point where he realized his firm was prevailing over his family: “At one point I called my son, […] and he said: ‘Why are you calling me? You are never home so don’t call me’’.
5. Conclusion
Throughout this report we showed how personal traits and characteristics determine the success of an entrepreneur. We aimed to compare the concepts from the literature with the insights gained from the interview with Eric Wilborts. A close relationship can be deducted between the influences that affected Eric’s decisions and personality, his character traits, and the concepts found in the literature. Thus, he can be described as an open minded, conscientious, extraverted and not neurotic person. The characteristic of agreeableness, in turn, did not become apparent throughout the interview. However, as shown in the article by Zhao, agreeableness is not a necessary element that must be owned by successful entrepreneurs. Overall, as specified in the Burns’ book, it can be determined that personal characteristics determine to a great extent the success of an entrepreneur, and most of the desirable characteristics described in the literature can be related to real- life examples.
At the end of the interview, we asked Eric to provide key lessons he could provide to students aiming to follow a career path as an entrepreneur. First, Eric stressed the importance of researching the business idea. This notion reflects the literature, stating that it is essential for entrepreneurs to examine the market and competitors (Burns, 2016). Second, he argued that providing and obtaining finance, and people, is a prerequisite to starting your own business. Relating to the second guest lecture, we were keen to know his opinion about the relative importance of people. While in the second guest lecture, Erdem Yavuz argued that having the right people is the key path to success, Eric holds that people are important but do not specifically determine success.