Consulting, Developing and Writing
This business is a one man show, and I like it like that.
Kloos International BV is owned by:
Bram Kloos - Managing Director of Kloos International BV. Experienced Vessel Inspector and Marine Operations Manager.
In a previous life: AB, Rigger, Deputy OIM in subsea cable installation, project manager for a small survey company. Now worksmanager for offshore projects, mostly for a leading German TSO. Loves art, history, puzzles, engineering, developing, nature, boardgames. And boats. Of course boats.
All content on this page is mine or and if there does not reflect the view of any of my clients. Or at least, it is not intended to do so.
Consulting
This is my bread and butter. At a certain point I noticed I have become a specialist. I might at some point been a generalist, or at least aspired to be one, but I have been working in a specific part of a specific field for a long time now, and with time comes experience and age. Experience that I can only imagine everyone acquires at some point, in their specific field. I have been fortunate enough to have been involved with different large scale wet infrastructure projects. Where previously I would have different roles on different projects, as the projects grew, the role grew with it and became more specialized. In the last 8 years it has been managing Offshore activities, from the beach, shoreside, for the Offshore projects from a German TSO in the Baltic. Inspecting vessels, coordinating with stakeholders, aligning expectations and preparing operators on the clients internal permit requirements. Longlasting commitments to clients prove to me that all the energy we put in as a team to minimize the risk for the projects is acknowledged and valued.
I like it because of the scale, the abundance of moving parts, the excitement of being part of the future, of a new greener world. I strongly believe that the downsides of Offshore Wind Energy can be countered with technology, connectivity and engineering.
Colleagues and team
Over the years I have come to known a lot of talented people with all a very specific skillset, all of course, within the wet construction.
Since all of them are freelancers I will just list them here, with a link to their respective website or email and a short sales pitch for them from my side. If you want to book them through me, that is possible as well, I transparently charge 1% of the fee that we broker.
If you are interested we do and like to work together in and as a team, as we have in the past. So if you want the whole(some) package for your project, reach out and let's discuss the possibilities.
Developing
I had plenty of ideas for apps and platforms but never the right skillset, or at least I though I did not.
That all changed when AI came to the scene. Suddenly I had an in house programmer, for a couple of bucks a month. Projects where I would previously miss the starting capital became within reach. However, I am not a coder, although one day I want to be one.
I do however like creating solutions that were a problem for me before, or creating fun little things that have no use at all apart from being fun. Some of the projects can be used, others are far from being productive or something to look at. You can follow my work as well on Forgejo.
A general goal is to create and run these projects without American products or servers. This has proven to be a bit challenging and when it comes to the coding assistance for me not really achievable. I use Claude to help me code. I started with ChatGPT and tried Mistral and DeepSeek, and one day, one day, when I have trained myself to be a better coder, I will just run a LLM locally to support my coding adventures and I can move away from the US technology.
For the rest however, it's European or Open Source all the way. Thanks to Hetzner for hosting, Soverin for mail and Proton and Jottacloud for the drive, all is on the continent. Forgejo and Coolify I use for running the show.
Projects
Oskar is the umbrella under which I parked a lot of my ideas and developing projects. Oskar is as well the international maritime codeflag for a person overboard. And with some ideas I actually have gone overboard a bit. However not in an uncomfortable, cold north sea kind of way, but more in a tropical island cocktail with umbrella kind of way. Oskar is the person sitting in the lifering with his cocktail, dreaming up ideas and going where the wind blows him.
Oskar is home to projects that are in the same area. Vessel Inspections, Vessel brokerage, Document review. All area's that i encounter in my work and where I completely understand that I am on the left on the Dunning-Kruger curve, but nevertheless I am convinced I can improve things.
Sometimes I can actually and sometimes it is a bit too far fetched. Whenever I have to admit defeat to the universe and condemn a project to the 'tried and failed miserably' stack I will hate that and try and get it back on the pile of 'maybe one day'.. but even with the help of a programmer like AI there are only 24 hours in a day and I do like my 'day job' and my partner and family. But after a failed project, there is always the next one! The next project is always a bit like Schroedingers project for me, until I have tried it it can be dead or alive.
I like to imagine Baron von Munchhausen picking himself up when he has fallen into a muddy puddle by his own collar. It is after all, not about succeeding, but about creating. I keep telling myself that, although i have had the delusions of fast money with hardly any effort. They came and passed. I will not cling to them. Reality is much nicer without thriving to achieve material goals.
Well, on this page I will publish the projects that are completed. So the projects that either got the stamp of 'Nice, let's try it in the real world' or the ones that got the stamp 'Not worth more of my effort, I give up what a load of crap who came up with this idea anyway?'. Any ideas in between are on my forgejo page.