Marc Coppens

Marc Coppens's thinking centers on a handful of durable convictions about building companies through people, and across sources he keeps returning to the same core idea in different words: the ability to adapt quickly to change while serving the customer. As he put it plainly, the common thread running through the different companies he has worked with is "dat zij allemaal zo snel mogelijk en zo goed mogelijk hebben kunnen inspelen op verandering... en... zoveel mogelijk de klant trachten te dienen" . That combination, speed of adaptation plus customer focus, is less a slogan than a lens he applies to hiring, pricing, marketing and culture alike.

On people management, Coppens is explicit that founders default to a hiring mistake: they unconsciously recruit people who look and think like themselves, when what a company actually needs is complementary profiles ¹. His practical fix is to bring in Insights profiling early, even at just 5-10 employees, to deliberately map how a team's strengths offset each other rather than duplicate ¹. He also treats new hires as a perishable resource of outsider perspective. Every new Yuki employee, whatever their seniority, must present after three months what the company should start, stop and continue doing, because that fresh outside view fades fast if not captured ¹. This is paired with a weekly anonymous five-question survey with roughly 85% response, benchmarked against some 150 sister companies and 13,000 people, which he uses precisely because it surfaces problems managers would otherwise never hear ¹.

A second major theme is psychological safety, which Coppens frames not as an abstract value but as an operating discipline. He insists "dat mensen fouten mogen maken en dat ze niet bij iedere fout worden afgestraft" ¹, and he enacts this personally by asking, after every talk or event, what he could have done better, deliberately rewarding critical feedback so people keep giving it. His reasoning is blunt: punish honest feedback once and you stop getting it ¹. The same logic drives his approach to financial transparency: even before the company reached break-even, he shared quarterly numbers with all employees, including bad results, on the belief that transparency against budget is what builds trust and a shared sense of direction ¹.

Coppens also describes a real evolution in his own thinking about departures and turnover. Early in his career, he was furious when an employee left for competitor Belgacom; now he congratulates people who leave and treats roughly 10% annual turnover as healthy rather than alarming ¹. This shift mirrors his broader stance that trust and low-blame culture matter more than short-term control, an idea reinforced by his father's advice to work hard but still "geniet van het leven" ¹.

On strategy and positioning, two concrete points stand out. First, on acquisitions, he deliberately turned down buyers known for acquiring software companies and stripping marketing, development and sales to extract profit, warning that within two years such deals leave barely 20% of the original employees still there; he chose Visma instead because it promised to support Yuki rather than absorb it ¹. Second, on marketing and pricing, he shows the same customer-first instinct from the 2016 clip translated into concrete rules: for Yuki's first three years he banned the word "boekhouding" from marketing entirely, since entrepreneurs carry a negative association with bookkeeping, insisting instead that "probeer te denken om de klanten van uw klant, want dan ze de eigenlijk probleem van hun eigen klanten oplossen" ¹. On pricing, he warns against cost-plus thinking, where founders tack on a simple margin and forget overhead, marketing spend, non-paying customers and the need for reinvestment, arguing for market-based pricing instead ¹.

Taken together, the throughline across both the 2016 and 2021 sources is remarkably consistent: adapt to change, serve the customer's real problem, and build the internal systems, surveys, transparency rituals, onboarding reflections, that force a growing organization to keep hearing uncomfortable truths rather than losing them to hierarchy or habit. His own summary of the underlying grit required to sustain this over decades is characteristically terse: "Blijven gaan, blijven gaan, blijven doorzetten" ¹.