Katrien Pauwels

Katrien Pauwels's thinking centers on one deceptively simple idea: passion alone is not a business plan, and the discipline to quantify what you feel is what separates founders who survive from those who don't. She learned this the hard way, six months into running her first coffee bar, when the rented building she had renovated was suddenly sold at public auction. Rather than fold, she and her husband Tom exercised their right of first refusal against a professional property investor and sold their own house in Ghent to cover it. Looking back, she's blunt about what that moment demanded: "We hebben geen andere keus, we gaan het gewoon doen" ². That phrase captures a recurring pattern in how she talks about crisis: not bravado, just the recognition that once you've committed, retreat isn't actually an option worth entertaining.

That near-loss also reshaped how she thinks about numbers. She's explicit that a business plan is "not something you make because the bank asks for it," but something you need for yourself ². Rather than accept vague uncertainty, she flew to New York to sit down with the CEO of Le Pain Quotidien and interrogate him about cashflow and hard numbers, calling it one of the most instructive moments of her life ². What strikes her most in retelling this isn't just what she learned but how easy it was to get the meeting: a simple email was enough, and she now argues that "passionate, successful people are far more accessible than you assume" ². This belief that expertise is reachable if you just ask shows up again in her view of Flemish entrepreneurial culture more broadly, which she thinks systematically inverts confidence in the wrong direction: people "overestimate others and underestimate themselves," when in fact everyone admired from outside has quietly struggled through the same bottlenecks ².

Her approach to validating a business idea is characteristically literal rather than intuitive. Before opening her first coffee bar, she didn't trust gut feeling alone: she stood outside candidate locations at different days and times, counting foot traffic on each side of the street, turning passion into something measurable before risking money on it ². This same instinct for objectifying belief reappears in how she talks about goals: she considers public declaration a genuine mechanism, not just motivational talk, arguing that a goal spoken aloud gets you pushed and held accountable by others, whereas a plan kept private simply stalls in your head ². Underneath both habits is the same logic that runs through the New York trip and the auction fight: conviction has to be tested against something outside your own head, whether that's foot traffic, an accountability structure, or someone else's hard-won cashflow expertise.

That external check-and-balance thinking is also why she values a structured advisory board, but she's careful to specify how it actually functions rather than just endorsing it as a concept. Sessions only work, she says, if you walk in with concrete questions and a clear agenda; the two-monthly rhythm itself creates discipline because you're forced to report back on what you promised to do ². This lines up with a broader lesson she distilled for a compilation of entrepreneur advice: founders driven purely by passion tend to use the bank account as their only compass, and only a real financial plan plus outside advisors can expose blind spots invisible from inside your own bubble ¹. Across both sources, the throughline is the same: enthusiasm is necessary but insufficient, and the antidote to self-deception is inviting outside scrutiny early and often.

On customer relationships, she's equally pragmatic. She trained her baristas around a specific reframe: a complaint is a gift, because the customer who complains is handing you information that everyone else silently withholds, so you shouldn't take it personally ². This is consistent with her broader instinct to treat friction, whether from customers, crises, or property investors, as data rather than as personal failure. She applies the same lens to her most consequential business decision: selling all four coffee bars in November 2019, before the pandemic hit, because running a roastery, retail bars, and green coffee import simultaneously had spread the company across too many fronts. She frames this explicitly as choosing depth over breadth, a return to core competency rather than a retreat ². In hindsight she connects this directly to resilience, noting that when COVID crushed horeca demand and sales fell to 8-10% of normal, the earlier decision to refocus was likely what let them survive at all, adding candidly that they wouldn't have survived such a shock ten years earlier ².

Her account of the coffee bar's founding also carries a clear communication philosophy: pitching the concept to enough people taught her that clarity is a competitive requirement, since "if you need five minutes to explain what your business does, your customers are long gone" ². The scale logic behind Cup-A-Lot follows the same efficiency instinct applied to sourcing: filling a shipping container is far easier with 120 roasteries as clients than with one, which is what makes buying directly from farmers viable for small specialty roasters who could never do it alone ². Finally, her account of running the company alongside her husband Tom reveals a working philosophy of complementary friction rather than aligned agreement: she describes herself as the restless, fast-moving partner and Tom as the deliberate brake, insisting that keeping separate daily domains, rather than merging into shared tasks, is precisely what keeps both the marriage and the business functional ². Across all of it, her voice returns again and again to the same conviction, stated flatly about the coffee bar's uncertain beginning: "Ik kan niet verliezen" ².