10 lessons from a start-up entrepreneur

Make a difference – not money

As an entrepreneur, you don’t start a business to make money. At least, I didn’t. Of course, you have
to make money; if not, you don’t exist. But it’s not what drives you most. You want to make a
difference. You want to matter, to have impact. Change something for the better for your customer.
Offer solutions. Surprise the market. That’s what really creates value. Make a difference – and the
money will follow.
Affordable loss
When you want to start a business, you begin by writing a business plan. There is a line between
what you can gain (your turnover, profit) and what you can lose (your investment). The only thing
you can be certain of is what you can lose. No one knows for sure whether they will make one euro,
100,000 euros or a million, and in what timespan.
What you do know is what you can lose when things go wrong: your reputation, your self-image,
your full investment.
Now, what are you willing to lose? That is hard to answer and can be different for everybody. For
me, I was willing to risk my personal savings and one year of my time: no salary paid in the first year.
Had things gone wrong, I would have learned a lot during a year and that’s what it was worth to me.
What I was not prepared to risk was bankruptcy: having personal bank debts for another 15 years or
so, or taking a loan from my parents and then having to explain to them that the money was gone.
When we founded EcoNation, we found a bank that was willing to give us a loan. We did not give a
personal warranty, yet we promised to work one year for free – that was our investment. The
Belgian/Flemish government was willing to give a warranty to the bank to cover 75% of their risk – it
is a mechanism which runs through PMV (a government-based investment company) and is really a
great tool for start-ups.
Eventually, we made money and were profitable. Yet it’s just something you don’t know for sure
upfront. The question is not how much money you will make; the real question is what are you
willing to lose?
The pizza experience
In a start-up, everything is new, much is disruptive. Often you are inexperienced and surprises are
everywhere. It is crucial to get your team right. You will have so many tough decisions to make and
you don’t want to lose friends along the way.
Imagine it like this. You are working late (you will do this a lot in the first few years) and you want to
order pizza. If you want to order pizza for all the founders of your business, and you need to order
more than one pizza, then your start-up has too many founding members.
Two or three founders works great. Four or more often means misery, especially when it comes to
making crucial decisions.
Listen first – speak later
This is something I really had to learn. You want to go fast, because you want to grow big, but you
can’t grow before you learn. And you learn through listening. Listen to your team, your experts, your
board – but most of all, your customers. They are the ones who really drive and define your
business. Listen to them. Understand them. Learn from them. There is more than enough time to
speak later.
Cash is still king
Books always tell you that “cash is king”. Yeah, whatever, I thought, cash can never be more
important than profit. Well, it is. It always is.
In order to really understand it, just take this example: you set up a company to develop your idea
for a new product. You and the other founders contribute all your savings (let’s say 60,000 euros)
and a bank lends you another 60,000 euros. You also receive some turnover, another 60,000 euros.
That’s your cash coming in.
But you have some fixed costs. And in order to turn your idea into a prototype and then into a real
product, you need to invest a substantial amount in research and development. The result is a cash
shortage. And now your product is ready but your pockets are empty. You can’t pay next month’s
bills any more. There is a letter about tax on your doormat.
This is the moment when you really understand the difference between profit and cash. Cash is king,
and queen, and everything else. Never forget it.
You can sell a share only once
And you always sell too cheap, too soon. As a start-up, you are in need of money. So you look for
help from your friends, family members or business angels. The thing with business angels is: you
have to make sure they are angels and not devils in disguise. And you don’t know it up front.
If you sell your shares too soon, you lose control of your company. It’s that simple. Even if you think
you don’t have a choice, you always do.
If your idea is great, you will find the money without losing the shares. And if your business works
well, you will have to go through so many rounds of equity raising (and dilution), that you don’t want
to distribute your shares already on day one. Because once they are sold, forget ever getting them
back. It just doesn’t work like that.
Far too many entrepreneurs start a successful company and end up empty-handed. You need to
avoid business angels and talk to government agencies instead. It will make your life much easier.
People, people, people!
All good things come from people. They change the world, and companies. I had the privilege of
being able to work (first at EcoNation and now at EnergyVision) with some of the greatest people I
know.
As an entrepreneur, a team does not work for you. You work with them, you are part of the team
and you love it. It’s one of the differences between being a start-up entrepreneur and being a
manager in a big conglomerate.
If you can handle it, the start-up culture is a great thing to experience. You really become one,
united, a team with common goals and common values. You spend so much time together, have so
much fun, put yourself on the line, and get so much energy from one another.
Think big – spend small
Think big, for sure. We were very, very, very small when we signed Amsterdam Airport Schiphol as
our first customer and Scania as our fifth.
We wanted to conquer the world, to make a difference and we weren’t afraid to think big. At the
same time, we were conservative in terms of spending. I waited a long time before hiring extra
employees – probably too long. You can only spend what you have and, in our case, that was not
much. Yet that should never, ever prevent you from aiming big. Be naïve enough to take that leap of
faith, and smart enough to learn fast along the way.
Get some sleep
Start-up entrepreneurship is like going from one misery to the next and trying to manage in
between. You have to solve a lot of problems. You have to overcome all kinds of obstacles. It always
goes slower than you want and it always costs more than you expected.
Many of my classmates chose jobs in consultancy, investment banks and conglomerates. They were
sure of their salary and enjoyed a clear view on their career path for the years to come. They work
60 to 80 hours per week and have between three and six weeks holiday per year. In a start-up, you
work 24/7 and you don’t know how to spell “holiday”. If you don’t work, your company suffers.
There is no such thing as a work-life balance.
And yet it is the best job in the world, because you are living your dream. You get to create your own
company, work with great people, for great customers, on great projects. You are your own boss.
Your personal values are what define the company.
Indeed, you can look at your situation from different perspectives and all of them are equally true.
Whether you see it as a nightmare or a dream, just make sure you don’t forget to sleep. It is a long
road and a tough one, and you need to stay focused yet relaxed.
Sales fix everything
Never forget: when things go wrong, when your board is driving you mad, when your back office is
lagging behind, when media is reporting bad stories, when you can’t sleep, can’t breathe, can’t stop
thinking any more… sales fix everything. They really do. Your investors shut up, your cash position
improves, your team can smile again, you’ll find the tools and the resources to fix other problems.
Having sales means you exist.

The importance of soft skills in financial services

Cultivating soft skills can help FS firms overcome internal and external challenges to win in today’s
changing market.

Soft skills are becoming increasingly critical for employees in any profession and industry, but they
are becoming particularly important in the fast-changing financial services (FS) sector.

Financial services firms are experiencing a whirlwind of rapidly changing market forces. Firms are
being bombarded by new technologies like blockchain, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
They’re also having to contend with disruptive new business models from non-traditional
competitors including Google, Amazon and even Apple, as well as a number of innovative self-serve
fintech startups that are flooding the market (think companies like Wealthsimple). On top of
traditional FS firms having to develop new hybridized skill sets to accommodate all the
technologically-driven change and unconventional competitors, superior customer service is quickly
becoming an increasingly important competitive differentiator in the financial services field.

Internally, financial services organizations are also dealing with generational turnover and new
employee mindsets when it comes to workplace learning and development. There are widening
knowledge and leadership gaps being left behind by retiring boomers, and FS firms are increasingly
having to find more effective ways of developing their leadership pipelines so they can train the
leaders of tomorrow today and navigate unprecedented market upheaval while continuing to deliver
desirable business outcomes. These future leaders have different learning expectations compared to
their predecessors, exhibiting a desire for more modern learning experiences and next-generation
learning tools.

In the face of this unprecedented change in the FS marketplace, using modern workplace learning
experiences to effectively cultivate key employee soft skills can help traditional FS organizations
better overcome these internal barriers and external forces to fuel growth and innovation, and win
in today’s consumer market.

What exactly are these so-called “soft skills?”

Soft skills are essentially personal characteristics and interpersonal or people skills. They comprise
desirable personality traits and individual qualities that help people interact and relate to others in
the workplace. These soft skills can include:

 the ability to communicate effectively

 relationship development and management
 emotional intelligence
 empathy
 creative thinking and problem solving
 teamwork/collaboration
 decision making
 storytelling
 critical thinking
 time management
 and motivation.

Soft skills help leaders motivate, engage and inspire teams

Cultivating soft skills is especially key when it comes to leadership development. Financial services
organizations can overcome many of the barriers and obstacles limiting their growth and innovation
by cultivating leaders with a strong aptitude for key soft skills that can help them mobilize and
engage workers in digital transformation initiatives and rapid innovation. These are necessary “big
shifts” financial services need to navigate if they expect to compete and win in the consumer market
of today AND tomorrow, and stable leadership is needed to provide a steady hand on the steering
wheel as they do.

Leaders who can inspire, listen and engage in compelling storytelling also have the ability to
transform culture. They can play a role in building an organization for the future that is more relaxed
and flexible (a must-have for millennials), receptive to change, and open to continuous learning.

Soft skills can improve customer interactions

Leaders with exceptional soft skills can motivate and inspire their employees. This can directly
translate to improved customer service and securing customer loyalty in an age of multiplying
financial services options—a happy employee is an engaged employee and an engaged employee
will typically offer better customer service than one who’s not.

Not only that, but soft skills development is key for those frontline employees who deal with
customer interactions on a daily basis. They are an organization’s primary brand ambassadors and
are largely responsible for managing and setting customers’ expectations around service and
support. The development of soft skills such as empathy, emotional intelligence, motivation and
effective communication can help employees elevate customer interactions and the customer
experience overall. Check out this video on four key skills new managers need to succeed.

How can a modern learning strategy help?

The key is to build a modern learning ecosystem that goes beyond training around hard skills (i.e.
technical prowess and core business knowledge) to incorporate soft skills, and that delivers training
in a way that’s engaging and “just in time.” Modern workplace learning methods like video-based
learning, social assessment, and brain science strategies like situational learning, can effectively
encourage the development and practice of soft skills. This approach creates a more balanced and
holistic learning model, that also prepares the organization to dynamically adapt to new learning
demands and changing market conditions.

3 things to know about tomorrow’s business leaders

Today’s young business leaders are poised to outperform their more established counterparts – and
that’s not just the usual energy and naivety of youth talking.

Today’s young leaders are emerging at a time when forces have converged to broaden people’s
expectations of business. This generation contains some of the savviest and most connected
consumers in history. Many of them have seen their parents work in, and potentially be let go from,
uninspiring business environments. They’ve grown up in an era when corporate scandal was
frequent and corporate responsibility became a department.

On the other hand, they’ve also seen the extraordinary rise of social enterprises and start-ups that
answer the question: “What problem are we trying to solve?” long before they ask: “What’s the next
big money maker?”

And now they’re setting the bar higher.

Don’t get me wrong. Up-and-coming leaders need and love profitability just as much as their
predecessors, but they’re savvy enough to see profit as the end, not the means. The big
differentiator will be that successful leaders of the future will tap into the extraordinary value and
competitive advantage that comes when their companies’ missions – their core reasons for being –
draw others in. They will hard-wire their operations to work effectively with others across society to
deliver those missions and leverage resources in entirely new ways – and outperform the market as
a result.

Here’s what the new generation of CEOs will do differently.

Young leaders know why they’re in business in the first place

For the next generation of game-changers, the payday (and what a payday it will be) grows out of
setting ambitious missions that people actually care about. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? After all,
a mission statement is your most important declaration to the world about why your business even
exists. But take a look at most company missions and you’ll find things like relevance and purpose
woefully lacking.

Here are three red flags to look out for:

 Uninspired mission statements are chronically narcissistic. This business of “we’re going to
be the #1” or “the industry leader” raises exactly one question: besides shareholders, who
cares? Many up-and-coming leaders are starting to better understand that if consumers,
 employees, communities and even governments don’t care about their company’s mission,
they’ll be in dire straits fairly quickly.
 Uninspired mission statements focus on the business model. A business model is not a
mission and it never will be. Worse yet, elevating the business model to the level of mission
makes a company far less capable of pivoting when market changes demand that their
model evolves. Our future CEOs have grown up in an environment where the most agile
businesses have been best at weathering storms.
 Uninspired mission statements talk about how a company will behave. I’m reminded of a
retail chain that seeks to “please customers and treat employees well”. Since when did the
bare minimum of behaviour constitute a mission?

Successful leaders of the future will understand the bigger picture. They will recognize the interplay
between society’s most pressing issues and the ability of their industries and companies to
simultaneously solve those issues and thrive. They will recognize that major problems, left
unchecked, will eventually block their business objectives.

Think about it. Nike won’t survive if the world continues to become less physically active. Neither
will ESPN. Banks lose relevance if the majority of a population can barely afford everyday expenses.
An energy company doesn’t stand a chance if it runs out of product. The theory holds true for pretty
much any company of any size in any industry.

Put simply, future leaders will embrace missions that are visionary and describe what their
companies will deliver to the world. And those missions will matter to a much larger group than just
shareholders.

Young leaders see untapped value that’s there for the taking

By now our new mainstream corporate heroes are solving massive problems during the course of
daily business. This has huge implications.

First, they’ll need to learn how to play really well with others. Corporations are famous for creating
and then operating inside safe and controlled corporate bubbles. The new vanguard is about to
burst that bubble. Truly ambitious missions require other people’s participation – governments, non-
profits, academics, to name just a few. Future leaders will need to define new ways to work with
these groups more authentically and systemically than typical efforts seen today. If they get this
right, our young leaders will start to experience a level of broad-based support from unlikely actors
who actually want their companies to win. It will create a tailwind experienced by very few in the
corporate sector so far, and illuminate the ridiculous amount of untapped value being left on the
table today.

When a more broadly supported corporate mission is delivered authentically and consistently,
companies can realize surprising cost savings and fewer barriers to business. The PR crises, risk-
mitigation headaches, employee-retention or productivity issues that drain valuable dollars – they
can all dissipate dramatically, freeing up resources for innovation and more strategic reinvestment.
Imagine an employee base so proud of what they are working towards that they consistently over-
deliver with great products, services and efficiency savings. If your own employees or others want
you to win because you stand for something worth fighting for, they’ll do whatever they can to help
you.

Finally, missions that create shared purpose expand available market opportunity. Driving towards a
mission that means something (and delivering on it) inherently expands the size of the pie versus an
exhaustive and expensive effort to expand the size of an arbitrary slice. Because these companies
are fundamentally solving a bigger problem, there’s a bigger portion of the population to innovate
for and a broader base of business opportunities to expand into legitimately over time.

There are some established companies we can look to for inspiration. Take Google, for example. Its
mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Democratizing access to information everywhere? That’s world-changing. And it shows up in a ton of
different ways, from emergency alerts that are the product of government partnerships to a re-
imagined ISP experience (currently being tested in a few US cities) that provides connection speeds
that are faster, cheaper and more reliable than anything people have experienced before. In an
industry fraught with political challenges and sensitivities, Google is finding new ways to work across
sectors. The result is expanded market opportunity and a roster of essential and valuable new
supporters.

Indeed, those who lead the way will have big challenges pioneering how to get things done across
the traditionally well-defined tri-sector territories. But they’ll also be poised to extract significant
business value (and profitability) that has been left on the table for a very long time.

Young leaders will stay off the Titanic

The vast majority of businesses currently operate within a system that puts shareholders first and
incentivizes quarterly returns over sustainable growth. You could argue that deeply embedded
corporate norms and a very powerful establishment will continue to stand in the way of progress,
but I don’t buy it. We’re now talking about a century-old corporate financing legacy system whose
time has come and gone. Young leaders don’t have to put up with that, and many of the world’s
bravest CEOs today are already showing the way.

As an example, take a look at Tesla’s eight-year, infinite-mile warranty. This was a bold move in a
world where three-year, 36,000-mile warranties have long been the norm. Then Tesla did the
unthinkable and extended its warranty to existing owners as well. CEO Elon Musk addressed
investors and acknowledged the likely negative impact on short-term earnings. And then he went
ahead and extended the warranties anyway. That’s a clear signal that Tesla puts the interests of its
customers and faith in its product ahead of any arbitrary, short-term KPI. It bucks the system in a big
way, and it will also pay off far more in the long run.

Today, however, we’re seeing new leaders buck the system entirely. They’re finding alternate forms
of capital, demanding new structures and resisting arbitrary corporate norms that have existed for
decades.

I can’t wait to see the group of revolutionaries who have the courage to go after missions that are
bigger than themselves in the mainstream corporate world. And really, while the next generation
may be pre-wired for this, real shifts will occur as the most established leaders of today make this
seismic shift. These leaders will chart new territory for sure: resisting the creation of internal
corporate bubbles and rewiring organizations for authentic multisector relationships – possible
because they will lead business missions that unite, rather than separate.

From what I’ve seen so far, plenty of young people (and even a few current CEOs) have the guts to
take this on. And if that’s the sense of entitlement this generation is supposed to have, then I say
bring it on.