Jo Deferm

The through-line

Everything Jo Deferm says circles back to one idea: the small operator deserves the same firepower as the big one. Webhero exists to give freelancers and small businesses "de wapens om tegen die grote bedrijven te strijden" [5], and the same instinct shows up in how he spends his time on the ground, updating local entrepreneurs on what AI search is doing to their visibility over a croissant and a coffee [1]. The second constant is a willingness to leap before the landing is clear: "Ge moet durven springen en soms denk ik wel van: we springen gewoon en we lossen het wel op" [5].

What has shifted is the machinery underneath the leaping. By his own account the first ten to fifteen years of entrepreneurship ran on instinct alone: "Alle beslissingen werden op buikgevoel genomen" [6]. Only later did coaches, consultants, targets, processes and dashboards come in, to the point where the company could run for a while without its founders, a stark contrast with the chaotic, organically grown agency where nobody knew who owned what [6]. The jumping has not stopped; it now happens on top of structure rather than instead of it.

On arming small businesses

The strategic decision that defines Webhero is choosing small clients over impressive ones. Big-brand agency work looks excellent on a website, but it comes with pitches that eat roughly 30% of capacity, 90-day payment terms and difficult collaborations, while small clients deliver higher impact and recurring revenue with the risk spread across many names rather than a few [5]. That choice imposes its own discipline: because the target group is freelancers and small businesses on affordable pricing, operations cannot afford "bokkensprongen", the erratic one-off exceptions that quietly destroy margin [6]. Affordability is an operational achievement before it is a pricing decision.

On digital marketing as a baseline skill

He puts digital literacy on the same footing as bookkeeping: "Als ondernemer moet je, of je dat nu wilt of niet, je moet een beetje boekhouding kennen om te ondernemen. Ik denk dat een beetje meer digitaal marketing kennen ook gewoon de basis [is]" [6]. The basics of digital marketing and internal digitalisation should be assumed knowledge, and in his reading most entrepreneurs are still at the very beginning of that curve [6]. It is the same conviction that has him standing in front of a local economic council explaining search behaviour to shop owners [1].

On the end of the SEO funnel

His current preoccupation is that search behaviour has changed fast and structurally. People reach for AI tools first and Google later, queries have become much longer, and voice conversation with ChatGPT is now part of normal search [1]. The SEO funnel worked well for twenty years, but from here it looks different: "Discovery becomes decision" [1].

The mechanism he points to is the query fan-out. For two decades SEO was reasonably predictable, one keyword leading to one page, but tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude break an elaborate question into many sub-questions about context and intent, read the answers across all of them, and return a personalised summary rather than a list of links [3]. The practical consequence for entrepreneurs is blunt: ranking for a single loose keyword is no longer enough, and the job becomes claiming topical authority, proving you are the expert on the whole subject [3]. He is candid that AI tools still account for only a fraction of web traffic today, which is precisely why he frames this as an update rather than an emergency [3].

On pivoting, and killing a brand that worked

The Webhero pivot is the decision he defends most strongly: "dat moment was de beste beslissing die we sowieso genomen [hebben]" [6]. It was also expensive. Killing the Content Crackers brand meant surrendering 70% of the existing business and raising new capital, with partners reinvesting alongside a new investor, to cover two to three years of cash burn before the new model turned cash-positive [5]. The whole team was deliberately kept, but everyone moved from client project work to a single product, with new roles from one day to the next [6].

The lesson he draws is about branding, which he calls the most underestimated factor in a pivot; choosing and building the Webhero brand turned out in hindsight to be one of the best investments of the entire transition [5]. He also learned to calibrate ambition: setting growth targets too high burned money too quickly and put permanent pressure on sales and marketing, while recalibrating them made the work pleasant again and clarified what was actually possible [6].

On saying it out loud

Accountability, for him, is a deliberate technique rather than a personality trait: "Ik heb daar een sport van gemaakt om tegen zoveel mogelijk de juiste mensen te zeggen wat ik ga doen, want die mensen houden mij accountable" [5]. That extends to publishing yearly targets and results in public, including growth numbers that were missed, which he treats as a source of self-motivation rather than a genuine risk [5]. Writing targets down publicly means you cannot quietly lower them afterwards, and he accepts that as the price of daring to state them at all [6].

On buikgevoel and the mirror

He is clear that gut feeling carried him a long way and is no longer sufficient on its own. Only in the last five years did he bring in coaches and consultants who hold up a mirror and help position him against his own strengths and weaknesses [6]. He is equally clear that reading is not the same as doing: "Ge kunt veel boeken lezen, maar ge moet het nog wel omzetten in de praktijk natuurlijk" [5]. A self-aware note runs alongside all of it, in his mother's line that he has always had "een lichte vorm van grootheidswaanzin" [6].

On owner, manager and entrepreneur

He separates three roles that most SMEs blur together: owner, manager and entrepreneur. Failing to distinguish them is what made him the bottleneck in his own companies, at BoardX and again at Content Crackers [5]. The corrective is process. Clear flows and defined responsibilities are what let the company operate without its founders present, where the earlier agency had grown organically into a state where nobody knew who was responsible for what [6].

On energy, exit and what growth does not fix

He sold his stake in BoardX while it was still very successful, not because it was failing but because he had lost grip on a 130-person seasonal organisation and his energy and goesting were completely gone [6]. Selling was relief rather than achievement: "Voor mij persoonlijk was het voornamelijk de druk op mijn schouder, dat was echt 10.000 kilo van de schouders" [5]. He generalises the point: growth does not automatically make an entrepreneur happier, because happiness is a sum of life stage, responsibility pressure and personal fit rather than revenue [6]. The version he tells against himself is sharper: "Dat klinkt ongelofelijk om aan uw vrienden te vertellen, het begin klinkt dat fantastisch, maar na vijf jaar kunt gij een koffiekoek niet meer" [5].

On buying out of bankruptcy

The first acquisition came with no room for proper due diligence, the entire deal running about four weeks from the curator's first call [5]. He limited the exposure structurally, buying only the trade fund without contracts rather than shares [5]. The mistake was in the communication: telling the roughly 230 acquired clients too abruptly meant some felt rescued while others discovered the bankruptcy from the announcement itself, and a softer transition would have served everyone better [5].

On alignment without lock-in

Two relationships get the same treatment. With a silent investor, alignment is maintained through radical transparency: a shareholder agreement containing all the detail, plus a shared real-time dashboard of the company's figures [5]. With clients, Webhero deliberately works without long-term contracts, billing per year on the bet that delivered value rather than lock-in is what retains people, and churned clients often come back [5]. Hiring follows a similar logic of knowing what you are getting: recruiting through his own network and letting people grow from customer to monitor to full-time employee, as happened at BoardX, means both sides already understand each other and the hiring risk drops [6].

On the wave

The origin he keeps returning to is a photograph. On 17 August 2000 Laird Hamilton surfed the Millennium Wave at Teahupoo over razor-sharp reef and became a global sensation overnight [2]. Hamilton was sponsored by the French brand Oxbow, whose flower print was everywhere in Leuven around that year, and months later the new Oxbow brochures arrived at TWITS in Leuven with that photograph on the cover [2]. He was the snowboard man there, waxing, sharpening, selling and renting, and had just organised his first snowboard trip out of the shop; the perfect wave, the force of nature and the bear of a man on the cover produced an irresistible urge that set the direction of his life [2].

Takeaways

• Choose many small clients over a few large ones: big brands cost roughly 30% of capacity in pitches and impose 90-day payment terms, while small clients bring higher impact and recurring, risk-spread revenue [5].
• Ranking for one keyword is finished; AI tools split a question into sub-questions and return a personalised summary, so the target is topical authority across a whole subject [3].
• Search behaviour has already moved: longer queries, voice conversations with ChatGPT, less reflex use of Google, and a funnel where "Discovery becomes decision" [1].
• A pivot can be worth surrendering 70% of existing revenue, but budget for two to three years of cash burn and treat branding as a core investment, not an afterthought [5][6].
• Publish your targets and your misses; telling the right people what you are going to do is what keeps you honest [5][6].
• Growth ambitions set too high burn cash and pressure the whole team; recalibrating them restored both clarity and enjoyment [6].
• Buying out of bankruptcy leaves no time for due diligence, so limit risk structurally by acquiring the trade fund rather than shares, and communicate the change to inherited clients gently [5].
• Treat basic digital marketing knowledge as non-negotiable for entrepreneurs, on a par with knowing a little bookkeeping [6].