By Ilse
How two Dutch builders met in the desert
Jasmijn and I met when I was looking for a Notion expert. I was working as a freelance COO and needed someone who could build a proper Notion workspace for a client. We quickly realised that, besides both being Dutch and living in Dubai, we had a shared passion for Notion and structure. What are the chances?
If you have ever worked with founders and fast-growing teams, you know that the word structure can be slightly loaded. For some people, structure sounds like rules and control. A 48-page handbook nobody reads. The end of creativity. The start of “please fill in this form before having an idea”. We see it differently.
Structure is not there to slow you down. Good structure gives you space. It creates clarity. It helps people know what’s important, who owns what, where things live and how decisions get made. In other words: it gives people freedom and autonomy.
That is where our thinking clicked. I look at companies from a COO perspective: how the business runs, where things get stuck, what is missing, what needs to be clearer, and how a team can operate without everything depending on one person.
Jasmijn turns that thinking into something tangible: processes, workflows and a shared workspace people can actually use. Nothing complicated that only works in theory. An actual operating base for the team.
We both like building and improving. Letting things make sense. There is nothing better than seeing an efficient meeting where notes get taken by AI and decisions are stored in a dedicated database. Or a team that suddenly knows what to do, where to find things and how to move forward. Our favorite? The founder that stops being the bottleneck.
That shared obsession became RunOps Studio. A studio for growing companies, often startups, of around 3 to 35 people, that feel the cracks in their way of working. The team is growing, the ambition is there, but the basics of the operation are not quite keeping up.
So we help put that foundation in place. We build a clear operational structure based on six pillars:
Focus → one goal shared by everyone, at every level. So the team knows what matters now, what can wait, and what to say no to.
Ownership → who actually does what. Because “we are all responsible” usually means nobody is.
Decisions → who decides, and how. So decisions get made at the right level, without everything ending up back on the founder’s plate.
Execution → from ideas to done. Clear projects, tasks, owners and deadlines, all in one place.
Rhythm → a meeting rhythm that actually moves things forward. Not meetings for the sake of meetings, but useful moments where alignment happens and decisions are captured.
Knowledge → one source of truth. A place where processes, decisions and important context live, so the company does not depend on what happens to be in someone’s head or inbox.
These pillars are not there to make a company more complicated. They are there to make it easier to run.
When they are in place, people know where to look, what to do, who owns what and how to move forward. That is when structure stops feeling like control and starts feeling like freedom.
And yes, we build that structure in Notion. But we do not sell Notion. We sell a way of thinking. A way of running your company with more clarity and less noise. A way to give your team more autonomy without losing direction. A way to create structure that supports growth instead of suffocating it.
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