Inge Geerdens

The through-line

Everything Inge Geerdens says circles back to one hard-won conviction: an entrepreneur's freedom is a function of cash and ownership, and both are usually surrendered by people who do not yet understand what they are trading away. She raised €1M from a VC for 30% in 2007, ended up in conflict with a heavy board she did not know how to manage, bought herself back out with the proceeds of selling her services firm, and rebuilt a debt-free, profitable company on her own money [1][5]. The lesson she drew was not that investment is bad but that nobody makes the mismatch explicit before signing: "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]. Having regained 100% ownership, she could cut deep and put herself on zero salary during the post-Lehman collapse, something the investor-approved plan would never have allowed [2]. When investors were finally willing to come back, she no longer needed them, and she deliberately stayed sole owner [2][5].

The second thread is that every near-death event in the business later turned into an asset, and she says so without romanticising the pain. GDPR cost her legal fees of up to 20% of revenue and a layoff, then became a unique selling proposition toward enterprise clients [1][5]. Losing half her IT team on Christmas Eve 2013 removed the payroll cost and forced insourcing solutions she could not see while stuck inside the business, and by January the company was cash-flow positive [5]. A remote office in Lisbon that looked like a disadvantage meant the company was already set up for online collaboration when corona hit [5]. Her summary of the whole sequence: "Door dat alles heb ik een pareltje van een bedrijf gecreëerd" [1].

On what investors actually cost you

Her objection to venture capital is structural, not emotional. The founder's agenda is building the company and caring for the people in it; the investor's agenda is return within a fixed number of years, and that difference is never put on the table before signature [1]. Running a company with external shareholders is a fundamentally different and more rigid way of doing business, and she is scathing about the culture that treats a raise as an achievement in itself: being celebrated for raising money is like being cheered for buying groceries at the market, because the cooking still has to happen [5]. She also warns that investors will not carry the risk alone: "Investeerders komen er niet in als gij niet meedoet" [2].

The practical advice is procedural and specific. From the moment term sheet negotiations begin, the founder should step back and let a trusted advisor negotiate, because the founder is too emotional and answers wrongly against professionals who do this twice a day [1]. Before any investor arrives, sign a management agreement with your own company including dismissal terms; hers later proved she had worked months for free, which counted as a financial contribution in the negotiations [1]. And treat the word "independent" with suspicion: her independent director also sat on other boards with the same investor, so other interests sometimes outweighed her company's [1]. The same scepticism applies to co-founders taken on to fill a skills gap. Handing 50% to someone you barely know has gigantic consequences: "Ik geef toch ook de helft van mijn huis niet weg zomaar aan iemand die ik niet ken" [1].

On the 30% rule and running on cash you actually have

She repeats the same arithmetic in every setting because starters consistently overestimate revenue and underestimate costs [5]. Ask for 30% more funding than you calculated, add 30% to projected costs, and take 20% off projected revenue because it always arrives later; if the plan still stands, you can start [1]. She also states it in the shorter form: "Trek dan 30 procent van uw omzet af en tel 30 procent bij uw kosten. Als je er dan nog geraakt, dan moet je starten" [2][5]. Alongside it sits the biggest lesson of the post-9/11 collapse, which is to operate only on cash you have actually received rather than on invoiced revenue. During corona, invoices to affected companies sat in turnover and might never be paid [5].

Time is the third variable. "Je hebt tijd nodig, een bedrijf bouw je niet op twee, drie jaar" [2]. She also learned to have the company valued every three to four years, because once she understood what actually drove valuation, such as recurring revenue and signed contracts, she began managing in function of company value rather than by instinct [1].

On surviving the crash, and the clarity that comes with it

She sold Executive Research the week before Lehman Brothers fell, which she frames both as luck and as the start of the worst period: "Ik heb verkocht en timing is everything: de week voor Lehman Brothers viel" [2]. The product business then had no market and only costs: "Ik had geen markt niet meer, ik had alleen maar kosten" [2]. Her description of what followed is unsparing. "Wij lagen op een hongerstrand met ons bedrijf... en dat is geen strategie geweest, dat is pure angst" [1]. Bankruptcy was ruled out as an option from the start [1].

What she credits with the turnaround is the mental effect of hitting bottom: "Als je niks meer te verliezen hebt word je terug helder. Al de rest verlamt je" [1]. She puts it more bluntly elsewhere: someone has to pull the ground from under you, gently, so you fall hard on your face and can suddenly think clearly [5]. In that state she called back churned clients and asked how they could keep working together, which restarted cash flow [1]. A customer also handed her the pricing insight that saved the company: fixed prices work in a high economy, variable credit-based prices in a slow one. Implementing the credit system brought in many more clients and drove the business to break-even [1]. Hence her broader rule: "Bestaande business modellen moet je soms challengen, want soms kloppen die niet" [1].

She is equally direct about layoffs. Firing two people to save ten is a rational continuity decision, because keeping everyone risks all twelve going down with the company, and the entrepreneur must take that responsibility fast, both for cash reasons and out of respect for the good people who stay [5]. On the personal side she rejects the standard advice to detach: "Als het financieel niet goed gaat met u is het mentaal niet goed... dus laat los is de grootste zever die er is" [1]. And on the cognitive cost, "Stress kills the brain" [1].

On why services and software cannot live in one company

Splitting the recruitment firm from the software was forced on her by both sides of the business. Internally the two need different people; externally, clients feared the recruiter would poach candidates they had entered into the tool [2]. The economics differ just as sharply: in a service business there are no costs when there is no work, the uurtje-factuurtje model, while in a product business the costs keep running after the market disappears, which is exactly what made the post-Lehman period brutal [2]. One consequence surprised her: banks were willing to lend only while the cash-generating service business was legally attached to the product startup. Once the split was clean, all bank interest evaporated [1].

On pitching and the duty to blow your own trumpet

A public humiliation by financiers at a pitch contest in Luxembourg made her realise she radiated no success at all, so she taught herself to pitch and now coaches pitching around 20 times a year [2]. Her technical point is that a pitch must be slow, and that every word and every intonation counts. She won a European pitch competition partly because her competitors pitched in incomprehensible fast English, and the win directly triggered multiple €1M offers with nothing else about the company having changed [1]. Behind the technique sits a cultural argument: "Zeker als Vlaming hebben we het gevoel dat we niet mogen stoefen. Als ondernemer moet je dat wel, want als jij het niet doet, gaat niemand anders het doen" [5]. The same competitive instinct runs through her view of participation: "Meedoen is toch wel belangrijker dan winnen? Wel, de grootste onzin die er bestaat. Je doet mee om te winnen" [5].

On surrounding yourself with people who have felt the same pain

Her single most repeated piece of advice is to build a network of fellow entrepreneurs from day one, and to put them on your advisory board: "Zorg dat je mensen hebt die gelijk gestemd zijn... omdat je dezelfde issues en pijn moet voelen om een goede advies te kunnen geven" [3][5]. She is specific about the profile: "zorg dat er ondernemers zitten, mensen die weten hoe het draait, waarom cash belangrijk is, die niet zweven, die met de voetjes op de grond staan en die echt echt echt ook u willen helpen" [4]. The inverse of that rule explains her distrust of startup competitions, where juries rarely contain entrepreneurs, so a prize can validate an idea that will never work commercially [5]. It is the same defect she identified in her own boardroom, where an independent director's independence turned out to be nominal [1].

On recruitment, employer branding and the junior gatekeeper

She opens keynotes with a question that silences the room: "Hoe lang is het geleden dat je uw eigen website hebt bezocht en gesolliciteerd via uw eigen website?" [2]. Nobody ever applies at their own company, so nobody knows their own candidate journey [2]. From there she attacks the central contradiction in hiring: companies claim people are their most important asset, yet the first interview is conducted by a very junior recruiter who does not know the company well enough to sell it [5]. As long as that is true, hiring stays CV and diploma driven, because only a senior can look past the resume to personality, which is why "hire the attitude, train the skill" collapses at the junior gatekeeper level [5]. Putting your best senior people on first interviews is an open competitive gap [5].

Employer branding, in her account, costs almost nothing. Let a young employee film colleagues with an iPhone to show the culture, and put your longest-serving employee rather than a three-month hire in front of candidates, because bringing a candidate in is selling [2]. She applies the same willingness to challenge convention to pricing in search: she billed executive search in man-days rather than a percentage of salary, because commission models incentivise pressuring candidates to sign and inflating salaries, and the contrarian model gave her recurring monthly revenue from large clients [5]. On the labour market itself she notes that in Belgium the government is currently the number one favourite employer because of work-life balance, while in the Netherlands people prefer small companies, evidence that reward systems and culture shape workforce behaviour more than stated preferences do [5].

On regulation as a threat that becomes a moat

GDPR in 2018 was close to existential for a small ATS vendor. Clients demanded data processing agreements with penalty clauses of €5 to €10 million she could not sign, and sales fell to zero for a year [5]. Legal fees ran up to 20% of revenue and forced a layoff [1]. By fully automating compliance she turned the obligation into a unique selling proposition toward enterprise clients by 2019 [1][5]. It is the clearest instance of her general pattern: the shock removes the option of standing still, and the forced response becomes the differentiator.

On being fired, revenge and gratitude

Her entrepreneurship started involuntarily: "Ik had een plan gemaakt en toen stond ik op straat, want mijn baas die geloofde niet in het internet" [5]. A partner's remark reframed it, "Ineens zegt mijn vriend: met uw idee heb je Monster niet nodig" [5]. She has since settled the account in her own way: "Je hoeft zelf geen wraak te nemen, succes is de beste wraak" [2], and "Eigenlijk ben ik mijn bazin voor altijd dankbaar" [5]. She refuses to present any of it as foresight: "Als ze mij vragen hoe: ik heb geen glazen bol, want had ik die gehad, dan had ik er nooit aan begonnen" [5].

On chess as training for entrepreneurship

Her ambition to teach every child chess rests on a list of transferable habits: transparency, thinking ahead, working with the resources you have left because lost pawns do not come back, and losing gracefully [5]. She adds wanting to win and mutual respect to that list, and notes that chess is the only game where children and adults are instant equals, because children are unpredictable and adults predictable [2]. The educational argument is sharper still: Belgian education is too language-focused, so highly intelligent children, including gifted kids stuck in special education, fall through the cracks, and chess can both detect and stimulate them [5].

Takeaways

• Run every business plan through the same filter: add 30% to projected costs, cut 20 to 30% from projected revenue, ask for 30% more funding than you calculated, and start only if it still works [1][2][5].
• Only spend cash you have actually received, never invoiced revenue, because in a crisis those invoices sit in turnover and may never be paid [5].
• Before any investor conversation, sign a management agreement with your own company including dismissal terms, and hand term sheet negotiations to a trusted advisor the moment they start [1].
• Treat "independent" board members and startup competition juries with suspicion; both often lack entrepreneurs or carry other interests, and both can validate the wrong things [1][5].
• Never give away 50% to a co-founder just to fill a skills gap: "Ik geef toch ook de helft van mijn huis niet weg zomaar aan iemand die ik niet ken" [1].
• Challenge the pricing model itself: fixed prices in a high economy, variable credit-based prices in a slow one, and a credit system took CVWarehouse to break-even during the crisis [1].
• Apply through your own website before you criticise your funnel, put your best senior people and longest-serving employee in front of candidates, and film culture on an iPhone rather than buying a budget [2][5].
• Pitch slowly, in language people understand, and accept that self-promotion is part of the job: "als jij het niet doet, gaat niemand anders het doen" [1][5].
• Build an advisory board of grounded entrepreneurs from day one, because only people who have felt the same pain and know why cash matters can give usable advice [3][4][5].