When I first walked into Riwal's headquarters in Dordrecht, Netherlands, I was told CEO Dick Schalekamp was in a meeting. I'll be glad to wait, I said. As we walked by the meeting room, Schalekamp, dressed casually in jeans, t-shirt, casual sport coat and boots, whirled around, stood up and walked towards me with his hand extended.

“Hi,” he said. “My name is Dick.”

Schalekamp's casual friendliness, I soon found out, was one of the keys to what makes Riwal, a €130 million (U.S. $193 million) company, tick.

If you look at a map, you might wonder what kind of plan a company has with headquarters in the Netherlands, and operations in France, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Spain, Kazakhstan, Dubai and Brazil, with rental customers and business activities in the Middle East, Germany and others. It has plans on the drawing board to expand into Russia. But Riwal, the aerial rental company that is the largest JLG dealer in the world outside the United States, tends to defy expectations and doesn't do things the conventional way. And its insistence in following its own vision is probably the source of its strength and the reason it is one of the fastest-growing rental companies in the world.

Riwal's recipe for expansion is not based on strategies developed sitting in a boardroom and saying, “We have to be in this country and that country next.” For Riwal, a family-owned company celebrating 40 years in business, it's all about people.

“It's only about people,” says the personable and charismatic Schalekamp. “Machines you can buy everywhere, but our growth depends on people. We weren't looking to start in Brazil, we didn't say ‘We must be in Kazakhstan,’ we weren't looking to start in Spain or France. It just developed from the people we had. That's who makes the business. Someone works with us and wants to start a company in his country and get an ownership share — about 15 percent — they can do it. Otherwise it doesn't work.”