Wiet Vande Velde

Across both conversations, Wiet Vande Velde returns again and again to a single conviction forged in failure: the product is never the reason a business wins or loses. The cardboard pallet venture, Palletkraft, still occupies the center of his thinking. He describes it as the strongest, lightest, most recyclable pallet on the market, built with real engineering behind it, and it still went bankrupt because sales came in far too late for a market with brutally long cycles in airlines, pharma and logistics ¹². Out of that collapse came the operating principle he now applies to everything: "Eerst sales en dan engineering" ². He generalizes it into a broader law of business: "Bedrijven met matige producten die zeer goed verkopen zijn veel succesvoller dan bedrijven met fantastische producten die niet verkopen" ², and he restates it with the McDonald's example, nobody thinks it makes the best hamburger, yet it sells the most, which he treats as proof that sales and marketing, not product quality, are the foundation of any healthy company ¹. The line that ties it together is blunt: "Het idee dat een goed product verkoopt zijn eigen niet. Sales en marketing moet altijd on point staan" ¹.

That same failure also reshaped how he thinks about focus. Before Palletkraft he was running four or five things at once, pallets, a restaurant, solar, work at heights, and he now frames that period as doing everything and nothing well ¹. The correction was total: ten years of self-funded, single-minded work on EnergyKing, with every euro reinvested rather than pulled out personally. He is explicit that this is a choice made early, often without realizing it, in conversation with your accountant: "Wilde een rijk een ondernemer of wilden rijk bedrijf" ¹. His answer was to build the rich company, not the rich founder, on the logic that "een euro left in the business can be turned into two euros because you invest it; a euro taken privately is gone tomorrow" ¹. He is equally clear-eyed that revenue numbers flatter nothing: a million in turnover mostly disappears into working capital, stock and VAT pre-financing, so that privately "you see none of it" ¹.

Partnership is the other pillar he keeps circling back to. He compares finding a good business partner to finding a spouse, calling it "mogelijks misschien nog moeilijker dan een goede vrouw of man" ², and credits the constant, several-times-a-day alignment with a partner for giving him speed and for sparing him the isolation solo founders face, something external advisors cannot replace ². That same instinct for shared ownership of ideas shows up later in how he structured governance with partners and private equity: "Het gaat over het beste idee moet winnen" ¹. He says he is happiest precisely when his own idea loses to a better one, because it proves the people around the table are strong: "En dan denk ik ja maar niet zonder mij hè" ¹, and in the earlier interview he frames the same instinct as self-awareness about his own persuasiveness, a strength that could talk people into a bad idea just as easily as a good one, which is why being proven wrong now reads to him as a healthy sign rather than a threat: "Ik ben blij als ik ongelijk heb, want dat is teken dat er iemand verweer heeft gegeven" ².

His account of taking EnergyKing to private equity is presented as a defensive, strategic move rather than an exit. Watching large consolidators emerge in Germany, the UK and the Netherlands, he decided to build the Belgian consolidation story himself before those players could buy up the fragmented local market piece by piece: "Als die mannen hier morgen binnenrollen dan kopen ze ons één voor één uit tegen elkaar en ik w een Belgisch eh een Belgisch verhaal" ¹. When picking a partner, he chose fair price and best team over the highest possible valuation, treating the deal as a new beginning rather than a cash-out, and he explicitly rejects the old image of private equity as predatory, arguing the market has become too competitive and capital too abundant for that caricature to hold ¹.

On people and selling, his view is not that sales talent is rare and must be hunted down, but that most people are average sellers and systems have to be built around that fact. He estimates only about ten percent of people are natural top sellers, so rather than chase unicorns he builds tools, structure and weekly training so the remaining eighty percent can still sell well, a hiring and management approach designed to scale ². He backs this with a concrete example from his own restaurant, where waiters who actively sold nearly doubled the average ticket per table compared to order-takers working the identical menu in the identical room, which he treats as evidence that outcomes are driven by approach rather than by the product on offer ². He frames the customer side of this transaction warmly rather than cynically: "Mensen willen verkocht worden, mensen willen enthousiast worden" ², insisting that good salespeople are liked and only pushy, bad ones are resented. Internally, his rule for his own reps strips away forecasting and promises entirely: "Wij zeggen hier niet wat je gaat doen, we zeggen eigenlijk alleen wat je gedaan hebt" ².

Underneath the tactics sits a stated view of what a company is actually for. He rejects profit as the organizing purpose outright: "Het idee of de doel van een bedrijf is nooit geld verdienen. Dat is altijd iets naar de wereld brengen dat de wereld een betere plek maakt" ¹, and echoes it in more collective terms elsewhere, describing a company as nothing more than "een groep mensen die samen iets waardevol voor andere mensen proberen te doen" ², paired with a broader claim that mutual care beats self-interest: "Als iedereen voor zichzelf zorgt, dan kunnen we veel beter voor elkaar zorgen" ². He locates his own role inside that structure precisely, describing himself not as an operator but as the person who has to run a year ahead of the business with ideas, strategy and vision: "Ik ben een ondernemer, ik ben een business developer. Ik moet met de ideeën, met de strategie, met de visie kunnen komen. Ik moet liefst een jaar voor het bedrijf lopen" ¹.

Failure itself is treated as instructive rather than shameful, and this is where his personal history and his business philosophy meet most directly. He links his early hunger for fast money to watching his mother struggle after his father left, and later recognized that motivation as flawed because it pushed him to skip over fundamentals in the rush to earn ². His prescribed response to any collapse, financial or otherwise, is procedural rather than emotional: "Als het mislukt: de lessen leren en opnieuw proberen, en niet met een kop toe laten h