Eric van Velzen, founder and Chief Expert Officer of Esperto Assessments
About the author

Eric van Velzen

Founder and Chief Expert Officer, Esperto Assessments

I am Eric van Velzen, the founder and Chief Expert Officer of Esperto Assessments, an online assessment platform based in the Netherlands. I started Esperto to do two things at once: give experts a partner that turns their methodology, framework or book into a professional online assessment while they keep full ownership of their IP, and give coaches and consultants one place to find those assessments and deploy them with their clients under their own brand. I am the builder and facilitator behind the platform, not the author of the models that run on it. The methodologies belong to the experts I partner with, including Verne Harnish (Scaling Up), Bill Isaacs (Pathfinder), Brendan Foley (The 5 States of Success) and Will Scott (Cultureful).

Book a call with me See the assessments
The story

Who is behind Esperto Assessments?

Esperto Assessments was founded and is led by me, Eric van Velzen. I am a serial entrepreneur from the Netherlands with more than thirty years of building companies, and since selling my first company in 2021 I have been fully focused on Esperto and its sister venture Perito.

Esperto started with a phone call. In 2018, Brendan Foley, author of The 5 States of Success, called me with a problem: he had been searching for a tool to prepare his coaching sessions, had tried the generic survey builders, and nothing could generate a personalised report or manage the process of inviting his clients' teams. So we built it together. That first assessment became the start of the platform, and the way we built it became the way Esperto still works today: the expert brings the model, we bring the technology, and we build together.

The conviction underneath Esperto is simple: valuable expertise should flourish. Most of the world's best models for leadership, culture and growth live in books, workshops and the heads of their authors. Turning them into assessments gives them reach, gives coaches better instruments, and gives the experts a business that scales beyond their own calendar. That journey is what we call going from Expert to Authority to Legend.

Build Together. Grow Together. Everything at Esperto is co-creation, and the expert always keeps ownership of the model, the brand and the client relationship.

The way we take an expert from methodology to a live assessment is a named three-stage process: Discover, Develop, Deliver. It is described in full on the Discover, Develop, Deliver page, and the practical questions around hosting and IP are answered on Host your assessment.

My role

What is my role in Esperto's partner model?

My role is facilitator and builder. I am not the expert on culture, leadership or scaling companies; Will Scott, Bill Isaacs and Verne Harnish are. My job, and Esperto's job, is to make their models work as world-class online assessments and to get those assessments into the hands of the coaches and consultants who use them. The division of work is deliberately clean.

The expert brings the model.

The methodology, the questionnaire content, the scoring logic and the report narrative come from the expert. That is their IP, it stays their IP, and their name and brand stay on the work.

Esperto brings the engine.

Questionnaire engineering, the scoring and report engine, multi-language delivery, EU hosting, billing, support and distribution to coaches. Everything an assessment business needs, run as one platform.

I connect the two.

I find the experts, shape the partnerships, co-design the assessment with them and stay their first point of contact. Co-creation is not a phase of the project; it is the whole model.

Alongside Esperto, I am the commercial lead of Perito, a SaaS platform for hospitals and physicians with scientifically validated evaluation instruments, developed in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Kiki Lombarts of Amsterdam UMC. Same principle, different world: the science stays with the scientist, the platform work stays with us.

Writing

Articles and publications

I write about the same thing I build: how expert models become products that scale. My current writing lives on Substack, and my earlier articles and the Expert in the Spotlight interview series are on LinkedIn.

Models That Scale

My weekly Substack on turning methodologies, frameworks and books into scalable products, for experts, authors and the coaches who work with their models. Read and subscribe at ericvanvelzen.substack.com.

Expert in the Spotlight

A LinkedIn newsletter series profiling the experts behind the assessments on Esperto.

Earlier articles

The early Esperto story, as it happened.

Get in touch

Let's talk about your model, or your clients

If you own a methodology, a framework or a book that deserves a bigger stage, or if you are a coach looking for the right assessment for a client, the fastest route is a short call. I answer my own email, quickly.

Book a call with me

Or email me at eric.vanvelzen@esperto.one, connect on LinkedIn, or read Models That Scale.
Esperto B.V., the Netherlands.