Lantack is based in Halsteren, a small town in North Brabant in the south of the Netherlands. It’s served the local business community for 18 years, supporting the kind of businesses that keep the Dutch economy running: professional services firms, manufacturers, logistics and maritime companies, wholesalers and other B2B organisations.
Some of these businesses aren’t just Dutch, though. Some have offices and users spread across Europe, the United States and Asia. Lantack manages those environments too, from Microsoft 365 and Azure to cybersecurity, networking, backup and phone systems.
An impressive service list is something Cliff’s proud of, but he points to Lantack growing from a local IT provider into a mature MSP without losing the personal side along the way as one of his team’s main achievements. Customers have built personal relationships with the team, getting white-glove service alongside the technology and service tickets.
Inside Lantack, Cliff and his team created Carefree ICT (pardon the pun) with a lot of care. It began as a practical approach to managing IT: standardising environments, managing them proactively and keeping processes clear. Over time it turned into something more like a cultural thesis for Cliff and his team.
The reason Cliff and his team are so passionate about Carefree ICT is simple: IT is about technology, but it’s also about connecting with the people you work with and serve.
For customers, that means engineers who don’t just fix their tech, but understand their business. For engineers, it means sharing knowledge, taking ownership and working in well-run environments instead of firefighting. Think of an everyday tech problem, and how nice it is when you don’t have to think about it because someone just fixes it. When both sides know each other, technology stops being something to worry about and starts supporting the business and its people.
“For us, IT has never just been about connecting technology. It is about connecting people with technology and, just as importantly, connecting people with each other.” — Cliff Lagendijk, Founder & CEO, Lantack
As Evergreen looked to expand into the Dutch market, Cliff was transparent about what needed to stay true in his business. In the Dutch IT market, acquisitions can often feel sour. Local businesses lose what makes them special: the service, the familiar faces, and the company people trusted turns into a different business. Cliff cared too much about his customers and employees to let a larger investment firm take that away.
He’d spent nearly two decades earning his customers’ trust, and he wasn’t willing to put that at risk. So when Evergreen approached him, he asked a simple question: why are you different?
Luckily for us, we knew the answer right away. Evergreen’s thesis has always been about preserving what made a business great. Stripping away customer relationships and gutting a business into something different never made sense to us. We hold businesses forever, and we buy them because they’re good businesses. With Evergreen, Cliff keeps his brand, his employees and the legacy he built in the Dutch IT market, and gains a community of leaders and fellow MSPs to help him grow for the long term. We like to call it independence without isolation.
When Cliff first heard of Evergreen, he wasn’t sure how at home he’d feel. Lyra is a group of more than 140 IT companies across 7 countries, and he’d assumed something that size would feel corporate. Instead, he kept recognising his own values, both in the businesses that had chosen to partner with Evergreen and in the people he would work with: an entrepreneurial mindset, a real focus on people, a willingness to share what works, and respect for what makes each company different.
“I did not want Lantack simply to become part of something bigger. I wanted us to become part of something that could make us stronger without changing the DNA that made Lantack successful in the first place.” — Cliff Lagendijk
For Lantack’s customers and employees, things stay the same. Same name, same team, same engineers who know their systems, and Cliff is still CEO.
What’s new sits mostly behind the scenes. Lantack is a team of 10, and it now has a much bigger bench of peers who’ve already solved the problems it will face next. Cliff describes it as enterprise power behind local IT heroes. Evergreen partners with local IT companies to keep what makes them special, while giving them more leverage on things like purchasing power, talent and resources.
“For our customers, this means that the personal approach and the people they know remain close to them, while Lantack gains an incredible amount of knowledge and capability behind the scenes.” — Cliff Lagendijk
Cliff’s vision for Lantack and Carefree ICT was never to build a centralised IT factory. For him, growth was always about getting better, which is exactly Evergreen’s thesis too. Growth means more knowledge, more capability and more professionalism, without losing the people and relationships that got Lantack here.
He sees the same thing happening at a larger scale with Evergreen: a group of strong local IT companies across the Benelux, each close to its own customers and each backed by the strength of a wider community.
“Imagine a community of local IT heroes across the Benelux, each keeping its own identity. That’s a future I’d be proud to help build.” — Cliff Lagendijk
Evergreen is proud to partner with Cliff in that vision: one where people stay at the forefront of innovation, and each company remains a local partner to the customers it has always served, in a community it’s proud to be part of.