When I was 18, I watched a baker scream at a boy for stealing bread.

The boy didn’t cry. He just looked at the man and said, “You have shelves. I have hunger.”

The baker replied, “And I have rules.”

I stood there, frozen. I didn't know whom to admire, or whom to fear.

Only later did I understand: both were ethical. Only one was structured.

THE WHY

As a micro or small business owner in the Netherlands, you already live in a state of ethical overload: staff issues, tax stress, vendor pressure.

You try to “do the right thing”, but what is the right thing when time, money, and energy are finite?

Here’s the trap:

We confuse ethics with personality traits—being nice, fair, patient, transparent.

But personality doesn’t scale. Structure does.

If your company’s ethics depend on how rested, angry, or hopeful you feel today, it’s not ethics, it’s mood management.

Governance is not a corporate luxury. It is how ethics become usable.

THE NUMBERS

Let’s be brutally specific:

• €8,000 in fines: for a single overlooked employee data error under AVG (GDPR).
• €1,200/month: the average hidden cost of “informal decision-making” in 10-person teams (delays, misunderstandings, rework).
• 38% of small business bankruptcies involve internal mismanagement, not fraud, just unstructured trust.

And yet most small business owners have zero written protocols for conflict of interest, dual roles, or data access.

They rely on “common sense.” But common sense is just your sense.

WHAT NO ONE TELLS YOU

In Dutch entrepreneurial culture, there’s a fetish for informality.

“Lekker pragmatisch,” they say.

“Geen gedoe.”

But the result?

Your business becomes a cult of personality, your personality.

You think your employees trust “the company,” but they’re just trusting you.

And the moment you burn out, leave, or make a bad call… trust collapses.

You didn’t build a company. You built a dependency.

Structure doesn’t kill spontaneity.

It preserves it, protects it, and ensures it survives beyond you.

DECISION COMPASS

Ask yourself, this week, not next:

1. Can someone in my team say “no” to me, safely?
2. Are our ethical decisions repeatable, regardless of who’s on duty?
3. Do we have a protocol for handling gray zones (gifts, dual roles, client bias)?
4. If I were gone for 3 months, would my company still act “ethically”?
5. Where are we using niceness as a substitute for policy?

FINAL REFLECTION

Ethics isn’t a mood. It’s not charisma, kindness, or leadership style.

It is a choice to design clarity where ambiguity tempts power.

It is the dignity of limits.

Without structure, your ethics are just your personality on a good day.

With structure, they become a system others can trust, even when you're not in the room.

And that, my fellow entrepreneur, is where real freedom begins.