CEO Frank van Gool and vice-CEO Karolina Swoboda are leaving employment agency OTTO Work Force. They announced this on Friday evening during the annual Christmas dinner for employees. Van Gool says he thinks this is a good time to stop now that, according to him, the company is in better shape “than ever”.
Founder Van Gool sold OTTO Work Force to the Japanese employment group OSI for more than 66 million euros in 2018. He then agreed to stay on as top director for at least five years. The company’s new director is likely to be announced in the first quarter of next year. Van Gool says he is leaving on his own initiative. OSI wishes he had stayed “five more years,” he says.
OTTO Work Force is the largest European employment agency for migrant workers. The company has more than fifty offices in Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine, among others. In total, OTTO has 1,000 staff members and around 25,000 flex workers work through the company. Next year the company says it will achieve a turnover of 1 billion. Today, OTTO is indirectly owned by private equity investors. This summer, the American Bain Capital took a stake in the listed OSI.
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As shareholders, Swoboda and Van Gool will now spend more time on their jointly founded company KaFra Housing, which builds temporary housing for migrant workers. They say that in this way they ‘fortunately’ remain involved in ‘labor migration in our country’. Moreover, they will continue to intervene in the debate on labor migration, according to Van Gool. “And we’re just going to take it a bit easier. It has been very busy lately.” Swoboda and Van Gool are former lovers. After their breakup, they remained connected professionally.
Van Gool is considered the entrepreneur who made labor migration popular in the Netherlands. The Netherlands now has about a million migrant workers. Since its founding, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have worked through OTTO in the Netherlands. OTTO mainly supplies temporary workers to companies in the logistics sector, such as Jumbo, DHL and Albert Heijn.