Pieter Janssens

Pieter Janssens's throughline is restlessness treated as a management principle rather than a personality quirk. "Stilstaand water begint te stinken" is the phrase he returns to, and it explains almost everything else he does: the acquisitions, the AI push, the refusal to let iO settle into a comfortable shape ¹. He is explicit that this is deliberate self-engineering, not accident: "Ik hou ervan om mezelf zo net op de rand van de afgrond te zetten" ¹. Early on that meant hiring ahead of a full pipeline so he'd be forced to go hunt for new business; later it became the logic behind building a €220M, five-country agency out of 34 acquisitions with Waterland ¹. The common thread is that Janssens distrusts stability as a sign of health. He says it outright about leadership itself: the day the list of things still to fix gets shorter than the list of things going well is "de dag dat ik denk dat ik blind geworden ben voor onze eigen gebreken" - and at that point, he suggests, a CEO should be walked out the back door ².

On AI his position is sharper and more contrarian than the industry default. He rejects the idea that rolling out Copilot or ChatGPT across an organization counts as being AI-native - done that way it just creates shadow AI and no real data ownership. His definition is structural, not tool-based: "AI is geen tool hè. AI is het herdefiniëren van je proces heel vaak" ¹. He frames the market as moving through waves - first the large-language-model wave, then the compute and chips wave - with the real value now shifting to actual business applications, a phase he thinks most companies are stuck short of, still running failing experiments ¹. His advice to nervous entrepreneurs is blunt and repeated almost verbatim in two forms: "Stop chasing the hype. Het is echt niet omdat er een nieuw lkt dat je dat moet gaan exploreren" ¹. He tells them to stop chasing every new model, translate AI into their own business context, and lean on an implementation partner rather than build in-house, since home-grown fixes are, in his account, why many AI projects fail ¹. Crucially, he ties this back to expertise rather than tooling: "Ten tijden van AI moet je als agency meer dan ooit de business van uw klant kennen" ¹ - agencies that approach AI from fear just bolt tools onto existing services and hit a revenue wall, whereas his edge is pairing that business knowledge with a genuine technology mindset in software architecture and AI orchestration ¹.

His M&A philosophy is where the abstractions turn into something like a checklist. He is openly critical of how most buy-and-build rollups work, where a holding company centralizes shared services while every acquired label keeps operating as its own fiefdom. iO chose the harder path deliberately: one brand, one set of propositions, one P&L, one backbone from lead to invoice ¹. That ambition requires a specific kind of ego management from the people running it, which he names directly: "Je moet over uw eigen schaduw kunnen stappen, want we gaan echt wel alles oprollen naar één" ¹. He also insists that valuation multiples are a shallow filter; real diligence has to go a level deeper into client concentration risk, recurring revenue, whether middle management has real depth, whether pay is fair enough to keep people loyal, and whether organic growth is keeping pace with the market ¹. And he's adamant that alignment on the long-term plan has to happen in the very first conversation with a seller, not after signing - springing the post-acquisition transformation on a founder later, in his account, just causes misery ¹.

Underneath the M&A machinery he keeps insisting organic growth is the real engine and acquisitions only the accelerator - if all your growth is coming from deals, something is wrong with either your proposition or your culture ¹. He's candid that iO's own organic story has changed: the famous run of 30% yearly organic growth from 2005 to 2020 is gone, and since the geopolitical turbulence of 2022 the company has only been slightly positive organically as client budgets tighten ¹. That candor extends to how he talks about the Waterland deal itself: the 50-50 equity split was structured deliberately non-traditionally so the founders would never feel they'd "sold" the company or handed over the keys, which he presents as the thing that preserved their autonomy for the next growth phase ¹. On team-building he's equally direct about wanting people who outclass him rather than merely complement him: "Je moet ook proberen te zoeken naar mensen die niet alleen complementair zijn maar in een bepaald domein gewoon 10 keer beter zijn dan ikzelf" ¹, and he frames the whole growth logic in a line that reads almost like a personal motto: "Je hebt misschien beter inderdaad een kleiner deel van een groter geheel dan een groter deel van een kleiner geheel" ¹.

Two more things round out how he thinks about pace. He deliberately runs two time horizons in parallel - a long-term view and a short-term one - and pushes the whole organization to focus on the next quarter specifically "om vooral die actie mindset in het bedrijf te hebben" ¹. And he states his aversion to stasis almost as a personal credo: "Als ik tegen één ding niet tegen kan, dat is dat de dingen blijven zoals ze zijn. Want in mijn beleving gaan ze dan eigenlijk achteruit" ¹. Set against the boundary-setting he describes elsewhere - no weekend work, laptop closed by Friday 4pm, a fixed minimum of family dinners each week ² - the picture that emerges is of someone who treats both business momentum and personal limits as things you have to engineer on purpose, because left alone, in his view, they drift the wrong way.