The story behind the merger of Webba and dotsolutions.

Webba, the largest web agency in Drenthe

“By joining forces, we’ve created the internet agency of Drenthe.” (J. Leijssenaar, E. Gels, 2021)

Since 1 January 2021, it’s a fact: the new Webba. Born from the merger between Hoogeveen-based dotsolutions and Emmen-based Webba. How do the main players look back? How did the merger come about, who are the men now at the helm and what are their grand company-wide plans?

Ever since his studies and younger years, it’s been Edwin Gels’s ambition to bring technology, marketing and people together. By making technology understandable, common and profitable. With a great passion for (online) business processes, he tries to make companies work smarter. He gets enthusiastic when end users work with pleasure with his systems or products. He recently completed a study into the use of artificial intelligence and chatbots, a next phase in further automating business processes. Continuously staying ahead, also in terms of knowledge and applications, is according to Edwin part of their field.

Jan Leijssenaar: “young entrepreneurs are going to digitalise”

After a number of years in the sports and cinema industry, Jan Leijssenaar started specialising in marketing and says the following: “Everyone claims that digitalisation is already far advanced, but that’s not true at all; we’re only just beginning and especially SMEs still have many strides to make.” Jan is convinced that it’s mainly the younger entrepreneurs who will be the first to jump on this and really digitalise their businesses. If you want to make progress, you have to digitalise your business, and you need the right people for that, but it starts with the entrepreneur themself.

Driven by an intrinsic motivation to always collaborate as much as possible, Jan and Edwin always think from opportunities and possibilities and never in terms of competition. For example, dotsolutions and Webba collaborated at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 by jointly giving a workshop on international e-commerce to a group of companies in Emmen and Hoogeveen. This collaboration went so well that it left them wanting more. By continuing to talk about their shared ambitions, the men soon reached the conclusion to join forces into one strong regional player.

Edwin Gels: “Full service agencies are the future”

According to Edwin and Jan, Webba’s strength lies in the expertise of its people. Each one a professional in one of the three fields: design, technology and online marketing. For customers, this usually means a single point of contact for all these services and an agency that has the knowledge in-house to offer suitable solutions as a professional conversation partner.

We never run out of things to say when it comes to the company’s goals. Jan and Edwin talk enthusiastically about their plans: “We’ve already built a great company, now it’s time to develop it further; customers should choose us because they want to grow digitally and on the web.”

The men want to be an attractive employer for their colleagues, interns and new employees. This way, they hope that more young talent will keep working in the region and won’t have to move to, for example, Groningen or the west of the Netherlands as quickly for a suitable job. By being an innovative, professional and growing organisation, they want to create more employment in Drenthe.

Future plans in Drenthe

There are also plenty of plans for the future: Edwin Gels and Jan Leijssenaar want to grow not just in size, but especially in quality. Digitalisation will only become more important, and only professional agencies can keep up with that, since technical innovation and developments will always need fine-tuning. Security is also becoming increasingly important, and that’s a daily task to work on.