Calvi Heroes: Emiel Theloosen

About Emiel:

“I have a wife and two kids, who are incredibly important to me. The number of hobbies I have is insane; I literally have too many to count and keep track of. My top 3 consists of playing sports, watching/attending sports events, and traveling. I’m absolutely crazy about Italy: the atmosphere, the Italian passion, the way they even cut someone off while driving with that same passion and feisty hand gestures is incredible. I wish Dutch people were a bit more like the Italians.”

What do you do at Calvi?

“16 years ago, I did my graduation internship for my Bachelor of Science (IT) degree at Calvi. For my graduation project, I made the first-ever Report Manager on the web. After graduating, I worked as a developer for a couple of years before becoming a consultant and eventually became the team leader for the Quality Assurance (QA) department, which I still am today. Right now, I am also the team leader for the support department. Within the QA team, I am working alongside the other team members, whereas my role within the support team is solely focused on management. As the team leader for these two teams, I also focus on the way people interact and work together.”

What are you like as a manager?

“I’m a real people-person, I’m very open-minded. What I don’t like is having a fixed structure, I prefer to go with my gut on a lot of things. People should be treated with respect, and they should enjoy their work. My most important goal is to help people grow and to stimulate them to grow by lending them a helping hand. I like seeing how people grow over the years, and it also gives them freedom in their work.”

What has been your best experience while working at Calvi?

“Well, this is not really a work-related experience, but we spent 3 days on a boat with the whole organization once.”

 “Of course this was a lot of fun for obvious reasons,
and we had a great weekend.” 

What has been your biggest challenge?

“For me personally it was improving the quality and getting said quality under control. We’re not 100% there yet, but we’re really close. As an organization, it was the move we made from serving large companies to serving CSPs. That was a really big move and taught us a great deal. I always compare it to soccer: we made it from the Jupiler League (red: Dutch soccer league) to the Champions League. All of us are incredibly proud of what we accomplished.”

What was your most exciting project so far?

“The most exciting project I was part of, was the implementation at our first international CSP. I was in the lead for the entire duration of this amazing project. During the implementation, I learned a lot from it! As team leader of the QA team, I was responsible for building a completely new test strategy with my team. This is the first release in which we used our new strategy, and we’ve seen a decrease in mistakes of 70-80%.”

 “I love it when a plan comes together”

Where will Calvi be in 5 years?

“I hope that we will have built a global network of partners and clients, with offices spread all over the globe.”

Could you describe Calvi in a few words?

“Ambitious and human. The way people are treated at Calvi is great, and the combination of ambition and people is even better.”

What’s your personal motto?

 “Good busy”

Allow me to tell you the story behind it. I just passed my Cambridge Advanced English exams, when I yelled out (on purpose) ‘good busy!’ during a meeting. Everyone looked at me as if I had gone crazy because I just got everyone cake for getting my CAE certificate and literally 5 minutes later I was yelling out the literal Dutch translation of ‘good work!’. That was a memorable day, and it’s become something that everyone at Calvi says.”

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