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Tom: "Together towards success"

Elsje van Vuuren

03 October 2024

4 min

Royal Jaarbeurs: the friendly, sustainable and innovative host for all of the Netherlands. A place where you meet, inspire, learn and grow. We'd love to tell you what's going on at Royal Jaarbeurs and how we do things. How? By getting to know our most valuable asset: our people. Tom van der Zwaag is exhibition manager Construction & Installation and responsible for operational execution within Jaarbeurs's construction and installation sector.

Tom is a familiar face within Jaarbeurs. He started as a junior account manager in a sales role. A position with, for him, the best of both worlds: 'As a student, I already had two interests: thinking about commercial issues - i.e. sales - and marketing activities. When I started working, I found out that at Jaarbeurs I could combine these two aspects in a sales role. After all, you sell marketing tools that help your customer to achieve the objective. I thought that was a cool combination.'

Getting and experiencing autonomy, Tom finds a big advantage of working at Jaarbeurs: 'You get a lot of freedom here. If you think you need to call a customer, you can call them. And if you think it would be good to visit, you can do that too. There is no streamlined way of selling, you get to interpret that yourself. I like that.' After several years working as a junior account manager, Tom grew into a sales manager. A development that he also finds typical for Jaarbeurs: 'If you have ambition and want to grow in responsibilities and in a role, that opportunity is there.'

After his position as sales manager, Tom went to work elsewhere temporarily. But now he is back, in the role of exhibition manager. Because, he tells himself: 'When event blood runs through your veins, you don't let it go. This is a world where people work with passion. Where we go for the end result together full of energy. That is such a unique vibe.'

Remeha stand VSK trade fair

One of the most important aspects of his job at Jaarbeurs, Tom finds, is working as part of a team. He calls himself a kind of project manager who is responsible for all the execution aspects involved in a trade fair. In doing so, he manages various departments needed to run a trade fair production. Tom: 'As exhibition manager, I spar with different teams every day to see how we can make it a success. At Jaarbeurs, we work as much as possible in fixed teams per market segment. You build together for months towards the moment the doors open. You feel the tension building in the team and notice that you are getting closer together. Then there is the 'explosion' - the doors open. And then there are thousands of visitors literally standing in front of you to experience that fair. That vibe, that feeling... I find that super cool! Every time again.'

For Tom, the week of a fair feels like a big week of celebration: 'It's hard work and lots of hours. That's definitely part of it. But then when the time comes and you see all your 300 to 500 customers together in the halls, you go from drink to drink. There are celebrations on stands and you talk to everyone. This is what you do it all for! If everything is well organised in advance, you're basically just in a week of festivities together. That's what I like best about working at Jaarbeurs. And of course, as an employer, Jaarbeurs itself is also good at organising parties. The monthly drinks, the ample budgets to undertake fun things ... it really is an environment where there is a lot of fun.'