Inge Geerdens

Inge Geerdens's thinking is built on a handful of crises she survived and then turned into doctrine. She was fired for believing in the internet before her employer did — "Ik had een plan gemaakt en toen stond ik op straat, want mijn baas die geloofde niet in het internet" ⁵ — and she says now, without bitterness, "Eigenlijk ben ik mijn bazin voor altijd dankbaar" ⁵. That origin story sets the tone for everything else: setbacks are data, not verdicts. When she sold her Executive Research business the week before Lehman Brothers collapsed, she calls it proof that "timing is everything" ², and the near-death experience that followed at CVWarehouse became her core operating principle — "Als je niks meer te verliezen hebt word je terug helder. Al de rest verlamt je" ¹. She is explicit that stress is not a motivator but a cognitive cost: "Stress kills the brain" ¹, and she rejects the popular advice to "let go" when things go financially wrong, calling it "de grootste zever die er is" ¹.

On financing, her position hardened from experience, not theory. She raised €1M from a VC in 2007, then bought herself back out during the 2008 crisis, and the lesson she draws is almost visceral: giving up equity is "Ik geef toch ook de helft van mijn huis niet weg zomaar aan iemand die ik niet ken" ¹. She names the structural problem directly — "De agenda van een ondernemer is volledig anders dan de agenda van een investeerder... hun agenda is rendement op zoveel jaar, uw agenda is dat bedrijf verder brengen" ¹ — and nobody makes that conflict explicit before signing ¹. Independent board members, she found, are rarely independent when they sit on other boards tied to the same investor ¹. Her practical answer was to stay debt-free and self-financed: after the crisis, investors weren't willing to reinvest, and by the time they circled back she no longer needed the money, so she stayed sole owner deliberately, to protect her freedom and her family from external pressure ²⁵. Raising money, she argues, gets celebrated as an achievement when it's really just the groceries — "the cooking still has to happen" ⁵.

Her financial rule of thumb is repeated across appearances as near-scripture: subtract 30% from projected revenue, add 30% to projected costs, and only start if the plan still holds — "Reken er altijd 30 procent bij wat dat je nodig hebt en tel altijd 30 procent bij de kost die je gaat maken" ¹²⁵. This isn't abstract caution; it comes from watching founders (including herself) consistently overestimate income and underestimate expenses ⁵, and from living through a service business (no revenue, no cost) becoming a product business where costs keep running even when "Ik had geen markt niet meer, ik had alleen maar kosten" ². The same hard-nosed realism drove her insistence on cash over invoiced revenue as the only true measure of solvency, a lesson she says she learned after 9/11 and relearned during COVID, when unpaid invoices sit falsely in turnover ⁵.

Crisis, in her telling, is also where innovation happens. A customer's suggestion during the 2008 downturn — fixed pricing in a strong economy, variable credit-based pricing in a weak one — became the pivot that brought CVWarehouse to break-even ¹. GDPR nearly destroyed her small company, forcing a layoff and eating up to 20% of revenue in legal costs, sales dropping to zero for a year ¹⁵, yet by fully automating compliance she converted it into a unique selling point with enterprise clients ¹⁵. Losing half her IT team on Christmas Eve 2013 forced insourcing she "couldn't see while stuck in the business," and the company was cash-flow positive within weeks ⁵. She treats these forced contractions as lessons in speed and responsibility: cutting two roles to save ten is not cruelty but arithmetic, and an entrepreneur who hesitates risks everyone going down together ⁵.

On hiring and recruitment, she is bluntly contrarian. She built her executive search pricing on man-days instead of commission, because percentage-of-salary models incentivize inflating offers and pressuring candidates ⁵. Her signature keynote question is aimed at exposing a blind spot in nearly every company: "Hoe lang is het geleden dat je uw eigen website hebt bezocht en gesolliciteerd via uw eigen website?" ² — because "Niemand solliciteert ooit bij zijn eigen bedrijf en dan kunt je de customer journey niet kennen" ². She sees a structural contradiction in how companies talk about talent: they call people their most important asset, then hand the first interview to the most junior recruiter, guaranteeing a CV-and-diploma filter that can never spot personality or attitude ⁵. Her fix for employer branding is not budget but authenticity — an iPhone video shot by a young employee, and her longest-serving person facing candidates instead of someone three months in the door, because "bringing a candidate in is selling" ².

Two other recurring threads round out her worldview. She insists founders should build their support network from entrepreneurs, not generic outsiders, because advice requires shared pain: "Zorg dat je mensen hebt die gelijk gestemd zijn... omdat je dezelfde issues en pijn moet voelen om een goede advies te kunnen geven" ³⁵, and an advisory board should be full of people "die niet zweven, die met de voetjes op de grond staan" . And she treats pitching as a craft to be taught, not a talent to be born with: after a public humiliation at a Luxembourg pitch contest she taught herself to slow down and control every word and intonation, later winning a European competition and immediately drawing multiple €1M offers with nothing else about the company changed ¹².

Underlying all of it is a philosophy of composure under pressure and quiet resolve rather than combativeness. "Faillissement gaan is geen optie" ¹ is not a slogan but a description of how she has actually operated — buying herself out of a VC deal, going to zero salary, calling churned clients back during the worst of the crisis simply because clarity returns once there's nothing left to lose ¹. Her closing instinct, when asked about vindication after being fired or sidelined, is characteristically restrained: "Je hoeft zelf geen wraak te nemen, succes is de beste wraak" ². The throughline across a decade of talks is consistent: distrust easy money, build in margin for disaster, treat every forced crisis as a design problem, and surround yourself only with people who have actually felt the same fear.