Conny Vandendriessche

Conny Vandendriessche's thinking centers on language, culture, and control as the levers that turn a small staffing office into a European group. At Accent's founding she insisted on building what she calls a positive dictionary, swapping out negative words for constructive ones: 'problem' became 'challenge', 'personnel' became 'medewerkers' ². Her reasoning is almost operational rather than sentimental: with hundreds of employees, if everyone comes home each evening reporting a problem, the whole organization sinks into gloom. As she puts it, "Als je één medewerker hebt die zegt probleem... en je hebt 100 medewerkers of 500 en die zeggen allemaal 'Ik heb een probleem', 's avonds ja dan ben je echt depri. Wij wensen dat niet, wij hadden een uitdaging." ² This is not branding for its own sake but a deliberate attempt to manage collective energy at scale.

That same instinct for shaping culture from scratch runs through her hiring philosophy. Accent hired half its people straight out of school and avoided veterans of other staffing firms, on the theory that people already molded by a competitor's culture are hard to reshape into Accent's own DNA ². Training was treated the same way: every employee went through two days a month of instruction, from soft skills to elevator pitches, so that nothing was left to chance and offices could be replicated one after another ². She describes the growth that resulted almost matter-of-factly: "Wij verdubbelden onze omzet om de twee jaar." ² Growth, in her account, wasn't chased through headquarters or infrastructure. Accent built no headquarters in its first ten years, funneling every euro into opening new offices region by region, expanding what she calls 'olievlek-gewijs', with the whole team moving along ².

On finance, her positions are blunt and principled. She never signed a personal guarantee for bank financing, treating it as a line she would not cross even though banks had asked for it as standard practice for thirty years ². Her practical advice to entrepreneurs is to open a credit line when business is good, even if it isn't needed, pay the reservation fee for peace of mind, and repay drawn amounts so the bank always sees headroom ². Behind this sits a broader skepticism about how comfortable Belgian entrepreneurship has become: "We zijn hier super verwend. Hier heb je Vlaio, je hebt imec, je krijgt bijna het geld langs je oren gesmeten. Ik denk dat we te weinig honger hebben om grote bedrijven te bouwen." ² She extends the same critique to sales culture, arguing that since covid, salespeople have drifted from hunters to farmers and that cold calling has all but disappeared: "Sedert covid zijn we die hunting mentaliteit kwijt geraakt. We zijn precies allemaal farmers." ² For her, the thrill of the deal is explicitly in the resistance: "Het is echt leuk als een klant begint te zeggen met neen. Dat is de uitdaging om die om te turnen naar ja." ² That appetite for pushback also shaped how the company was perceived. "Mensen noemden ons, in plaats van assertief, soms agressief commercieel." ²

Her relationship to authority and doubt recurs as a personal thread. She frames repeated moments of being told she would fail as formative: "Voor de tweede keer in mijn leven hoor ik een man zeggen van: het gaat helemaal mislukken met jou. Eerst mijn papa die zei: ik geloof niet in u." ² And she is careful to give credit for the vision behind Accent to someone else while claiming the execution as her own: "Ik zeg altijd: hij droomde het en ik deed het." ² This division between dreaming and doing seems to be how she understands her own role throughout the company's growth.

On governance and ownership, she pushed structural change rather than symbolic gestures. Under Naxicap she built an employee-ownership scheme where one in ten employees became shareholders through a separate vehicle, and required management at every acquired company to buy into 30% of their own business so they had real skin in the game ². The founders themselves sought a private equity partner not primarily for capital but for discipline, needing what she calls a referee to keep two founders in balance ². As an investor now, she is explicit about setting expectations downward, telling founders directly what not to expect from her, because she sees the recurring disappointment with business angels stemming from inflated hopes about their network: "Geld is er genoeg in de wereld. Het is vooral advies." ²

Letting go is where her thinking is most reflective. She describes physically moving to an office two kilometers away after handing over to an external CEO, and refusing to intervene when employees called to complain, redirecting them to the new CEO instead, because otherwise you undermine your successor ². Her stated golden tip distills the whole philosophy: "De beste golden tip is loslaten, echt loslaten, en volledig vertrouwen." ² She connects this directly to self-knowledge about timing, warning that founders who stay past 60 or 65 without building a second life outside the company find the eventual letting-go far more dramatic, and that recognizing when a company needs managers rather than entrepreneurs is a crucial, underrated skill ².

Looking outward, she treats AI as a genuine break from prior waves of automation. Decades of optimization hit blue-collar work; now, for the first time, white-collar roles are exposed, and she expects the disruption to arrive faster than people expect: "Met artificiële intelligentie wordt voor de eerste keer de white collars aangevallen, de bediende. We gaan echt verschieten wat dat er op ons afkomt en het gaat zeer vlug." ² House of HR's own internal chatbot, already replacing part of a twenty-person support desk, is offered as early evidence that this displacement, while slower than feared, has begun ². She pairs this with an observation from her later investing work at We Are Jane, where sourcing female-run companies above one million euros in EBITDA proved harder than expected, screening around 150 companies a year for only one or two that reach deep due diligence ² — a data point she treats as a structural gap rather than a talent gap.