Arno Gesink: 'I'm glad it turned out this way'

Although that 'last look back' should be taken with a grain of salt... after Rabelink's New Year's reception last month on Saturday 7 January was already partly dedicated to Arno and his wife Trudi's farewell, another meeting with the 'Gesink group' will take place next month. "I said: we'll never get rid of each other like this," Arno says, laughing. "But it's great fun, of course." That's also how positive they look back on that Saturday afternoon at Streeckgenoot in Doetinchem. "It was wonderful, we really enjoyed it," Arno clarifies. And what it was above all: "More than what we expected from it." Because beforehand, there was some doubt, admits the former owner of the Zelhem transport company. "I thought: does it have to be? I was a bit worried that there would be almost only Rabelink people and only a few from Gesink. That wouldn't be a goodbye for me." 

But luckily, Arno now says, he agreed anyway. "A lot of colleagues were there especially for me. They never came to company parties, but were there now anyway. I appreciated that enormously. And I was addressed by a lot of Rabelink employees. That appreciation was very nice, even for Trudi. After all, she has sacrificed everything for the company and for me. So I'm glad it turned out this way." The many reactions were not least due to Arno's speech, which got the whole room quiet. There was room for a joke left and right, but it also reflected on the two Gesink colleagues who died during his time as managing director. "The impact that that had back then came back to the surface. It was silent from beginning to end, which I liked." 

Equally satisfied, Arno looks back on the past few years, on how the takeover came about and the integration went subsequently. Talks with Alwin Schweckhorst were pleasant from the start. "That while Rabelink and Gesink were rock-hard competitors in the past. It often happened that I visited a potential customer and then there was another offer from Rabelink. It was occasionally water and fire. But even then I personally got on very well with Alwin. In retrospect, I couldn't have thought of a better partner; we had the same mentality, the same attitude and the same goal." That was and is fortunately also true for most of the 'Zelhem' colleagues. "Almost all the office staff stayed, I am very happy about that," says Arno. "Also for myself; the prospect was for me to stay in office for another three years anyway, it was most enjoyable to do that with the familiar group. And it also made the process easier. 

You can say in retrospect that it all worked out well." For that, Arno did his best - perhaps a little too much at first. "The first year I did go a bit too crazy, especially the first six months. You want to make something of it, and I absolutely did not want to give the impression that Rabelink had bought a pig in a poke, so I ran things as if it were still my own company. But I did demand a bit too much of myself back then, and I suffered from that for the rest of that year." That did have one advantage, Arno found: "Everything went on as usual, we had good people to whom I could leave the work with peace of mind. Mick Regelink and Rianne Gesink were actually managing the business anyway, it was good to find that this was possible." It also enabled Arno to focus on the less operational matters. "In the second year, I mainly dealt with the customers. At first still in terms of content, later mainly to say goodbye. I was allowed that time, which was very pleasant." Consequently, they were mostly long-term relationships, built up over the years. "Oldenboom has even been a customer for more than eighty years. But we have also worked with other companies for decades. That bonding is great." 

This was also evident from the fact that most of the partners did not let Arno's farewell go unnoticed either. "I got the chance to visit the 50 biggest customers," he says. "From addresses in the region to Meer in Belgium, from Bremen and the Ruhr region to Ulm in Bavaria. I was honoured, there were farewell dinners, I was given a presentation on 40 years of cooperation. And with one customer I was supposed to be picked up by his Rolls-Royce. Only it had just left that day due to maintenance. Then he came with his Maserati, which was not a bad alternative," notes car enthusiast Arno glowingly. "So it has been a nice farewell tour over the past few months. Fortunately, even in the first year we proved that we can make money together, because 2022 was a top year." The 'Gesink side' made a substantial contribution to this, for example through the tremendous growth of 247TailorSteel. "That was already our main customer and they just get bigger and bigger. So I didn't sell an empty shell, fortunately. We do all their Germany shipments from Varsseveld. They also have branches in Oyten in northern Germany, Hilden near Düsseldorf and Langenau in the south, we do all the transport for those." Then he catches himself still talking about 'we'. Laughs: "Yes, that takes some getting used to."