Who I am

I believe quality of life is the new success.

After decades in business and life, I became less interested in looking successful and more interested in one honest question:

is life actually good to live?

Most people ask that quietly and move on. I decided to make it my life’s work..

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How I got here

I’m Hans. Sixty-six, Dutch by origin, living on Ibiza and often somewhere on the road.

I started my first two companies in Aruba (Caribbean) where I lived for nearly eight years. That’s where the questions started. Not the business questions, but the deeper one underneath:

What is the meaning of all this?

What followed was a full life, in every sense. I moved a lot. I built companies and jobs that worked and didn’t. I had a heart attack. I’ve had relationships that lasted and ones that broke. Work, health, the people around me – I’ve been through most of it.

It taught me one thing: a setback leaves you two ways to go. You can lean on it, or you can make a decision and act. Most of what I do now came from choosing the second one – eventually.

So I changed my own question, from “how do you grow?” to “how do you actually live?”

And then someone called me a business hippie years ago – I was working from the road long before anyone called it being a digital nomad, and the name stuck.

But the hippie part was never just about how I worked. It was a way of looking at business and life, and refusing to take either as a given fact. Asking the questions most people skip: is this actually the right way to live, to work, to act? Living well and doing well, without having to pick one.

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Before the tour had a name

It started before I ever called it a QOL Tour. In 2018 I ran a survey – 139 entrepreneurs, asking what comes first happiness or success? Based on this initial question people answered the survey about all the factors that influenced it in their working life’s. That research gave me a direction. happiness & success survey

Then in 2023 I got on a bike and cycled through the Netherlands for two months – the Utopia Challenge – talking to people about what a better society could look like. That gave me a method. The survey asked the question. The bike ride showed me what the answer looks like when you go and find it yourself. see: utopia challenge – on tour

The QOL Tour grew out of both.

Out in the field

Now I travel through European cities – walking, listening, watching how daily life actually works where people are. Not the brochure version. The lived one. It’s part of the quality of life tour.

Most of it happens over coffee. I call them coffeetalks, and they’re the basics of the research and the raw material for creating QOL publications like the QOL reports or Atlas

After enough cities, the same things keep coming up. The 17 Living Goals are what I distilled them into – a plain map of what quality of life is actually made of.

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Work with Hans

I speak, advise, and collaborate with people and organisations who suspect there might be a better way to do things.

Guidance — private advisory for founders, leaders, and organisations at a crossroads. A thinking partner with decades of lived experience and a clear lens: QOL Guidance page

Speaking — keynotes, panels, roundtables, and conversations on quality of life, modern success, conscious leadership, and livable cities.

Sponsorship and collaboration — for brands, cities, and initiatives that want quality of life to play a more serious and impactful role in what they do and how they tell their story: Partnership page

let’s start a conversation