Meet Lionel
Founder, Leaders Performance
Strategic Transformation Partner to founders and founder-led companies.
A career shaped by professional football, nearly three decades of entrepreneurship, and one continuing question: what enables people and organisations to perform when the stakes are highest?
The story behind the work
Lionel’s perspective was first shaped in professional football, where preparation was visible and results were immediate. It was then tested as a founder — building businesses, leading teams and carrying responsibility for performance beyond himself.
Professional sports
Where performance was learned first
Professional football made performance measurable. Preparation, discipline, recovery, decision-making and results were visible every week. There was nowhere to hide behind intention. That experience became the foundation for how Lionel now reads founders, leadership teams and organisations under pressure.
Performance measured honestly.
Preparation shows, or it does not.
The moment that decides whether it holds.
The habits performance actually rests on.
The same conditions, with more people involved.
Experience
performance since
1987
From professional football at Sparta Rotterdam, Excelsior and Raith Rovers to founding and building businesses across financial services, health and performance, Lionel has experienced pressure through direct responsibility as an athlete, founder and leader.
01
Sparta Rotterdam, Excelsior Rotterdam and Raith Rovers.
02
Beginning as co-founder of Evercare Insurance.
03
Expanded across Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam South and Schiphol.
04
Working with founders, leaders and founder-led organisations, now from Dubai across international markets.
The RESET Blueprint series
Author of Reset by Discipline, the first volume in the RESET Blueprint series.
A practical workbook built around eleven recalibrations for strengthening self-leadership, disciplined action and performance under pressure.
Author · Lionel Eersteling
From performance to entrepreneurship
Founding and building businesses turned performance from an individual responsibility into an organisational one. Decisions affected employees, clients, capital and continuity. Lionel learned that a founder’s personal standard creates value only when leadership and the organisation can carry it.
Entrepreneurial journey
Across ventures in insurance, health, performance and other sectors, Lionel has built teams and made decisions with people, capital and reputation at stake. That operator’s perspective shapes how he works with founders today.
Holding your own standard under pressure.
Turning judgement into clarity, ownership and execution.
Creating standards and decision-making that the organisation can repeat.
Performance under pressure
His philosophy
This is why Lionel looks beneath the visible problem — to the founder’s decisions, leadership behaviour and operating standards that shape what the organisation repeats.
Personal · Leadership ·
Organisational
One continuous line
Not three separate services. How the founder performs reaches leadership, and leadership reaches the organisation.
01
How the founder performs
becomes
02
How that reaches other people
shapes
03
How the organisation performs
Principles, not a framework
Observations from the work
These principles come from repeated experience across professional sport, entrepreneurship and organisational change. They guide the work without turning this page into a methodology.
Standards gain meaning when they show up in behaviour, decisions and daily execution — especially under pressure.
A decision gains value when ownership, follow-through and consequences are clear to the people carrying it.
Improvement becomes durable when the organisation learns to decide, execute and adjust differently.
How Lionel works
Lionel observes how performance appears in decisions, behaviour and execution. He identifies the assumptions reducing clarity, makes standards explicit and helps leadership convert insight into accountable action.
How he works
What remains with leadership
A note on the work
A meaningful conversation begins with the question in front of you now.
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