The Accidental Entrepreneur

Henk van Ess, a Dutch consultant and speaker who trains media professionals in the use of technology, says he wasn’t looking to start a business when he sent out a note to a few groups on LinkedIn trying to find a way of extending the battery life of his new iPhone. A representative of a Chinese manufacturer answered his query with information about its battery and he bought one. He was immediately pleased with the results.

Mr. van Ess told me, by phone and e-mail, about how he went from being a satisfied customer to a distributor of this battery. It all started, he said, when he went back to LinkedIn and posted what he calls a “teasing” message” using the site’s “what am I doing” feature. “I wrote something like: ‘You hate the battery life of your iPhone too? Perhaps I have the cure.’” he said. Before long, he started receiving orders from people in his network asking him to order a battery for them. “I didn’t want to do all this paperwork so I set up a little Web shop, and then the company asked me to be one of its distributors.” He says that in his first day of online sales, he took orders from 1,200 customers.

Mr. van Ess says that he wasn’t interested in becoming an entrepreneur at that moment. “I was sitting with my pregnant wife at the kitchen table and trying to figure out whether a guy like me should go into business,” he told me. “But there is a back story. I had, in my opinion, two ideas before the battery. And both were done by other people. So I had made a promise to myself that next time I would go forward.”

Mr. van Ess says the battery sales company is just a side gig, and that he won’t be promoting his battery business when talking to clients. Still, that doesn’t seemed to have dampened his enthusiasm for spreading the word about his product. One of the first moves Mr. van Ess made after starting to sell the battery was to contact the president of LinkedIn to let him know that a business had sprouted using its service. Next, he teamed up with LinkedIn’s publicist to spread the word about how the social networking site was instrumental to his business. Given Mr. van Ess’s primary vocation as a technology expert, his side business will probably not create a problem when it comes to his personal brand.

And he has already taken the business to the next stage. Working with the Chinese manufacturer he met on Linkedin, he has developed a new version of the battery, the 3GJuice, that he says is superior to the original battery. He is now taking orders for that product and says he will provide refunds to anyone who ordered the first battery and places an order for the new one. (Mr. van Ess now uses Amazon.com to fulfill orders from American customers.)

All this unfolded while his wife was moments away from having their second child. In between my first phone call with Mr. van Ess and the follow up e-mails, his son was born. With both the birth of a child and the birth of a new business, it sounds like a busy time in the van Ess household.

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