Jochen Callens

The through-line

Callens keeps returning to a single idea: a company is something you build to be sold, and everything else follows from that. He and Dieter D'hondt knew the destination before the product existed. "Eigenlijk wisten we al voordat het product gebouwd was dat we het wel gingen verkopen" [2], a conviction grounded in the pace of the HR-tech market, which changes too fast to hold a business until retirement, so they set a milestone and stayed open to offers once they reached it [1]. That endpoint shaped the means: revenue had to pay for development, no capital rounds, and two or three years spent making the founders dispensable so they could leave cleanly when the moment came [2].

The second thread is a running audit of his own mistakes, told without varnish. A €120,000 product thrown in the bin [1], a nearly missed payroll [2], founders too available during due diligence [1], and a post-exit period he had romanticised and then found himself unprepared for [1]. The shift over time is from operator to counsellor: the same episodes now arrive as advice to other founders, with the counterfactual always attached, what he would do differently if he could run it again.

On building the product

The founding error was outsourcing a finished product to an agency at a fixed price before the market had said anything. That first version of Jobtoolz cost €120,000 and was scrapped in full, and the lesson he draws is unambiguous: "Moest ik het kunnen herdoen, dan zou het een no-brainer zijn om een developer aan te nemen, zou het een no-brainer zijn om een mvp te maken die bijna niets kan en van daaruit te gaan vertrekken" [1]. Just as important as the diagnosis was the discipline of the response. Rather than patch a flawed platform, they threw it away and restarted with an in-house developer, which he contrasts with the founders who keep iterating on a bad base and end up worse off [1]. The thing that made the restart survivable was an external backer who did not flinch: "Die zei gewoon van: ja oké, als dat niet werkt en dat moet op die manier, dan moet je dat doen. Ik geloof in jullie" [1].

What they did get right early was demand validation. Before anything was built they went to clients and non-clients and asked what they would think if this existed, so they knew the product was sellable before it existed [2]. Once selling started, the constraint was fixed from the first month: "Onze revenue moet de ontwikkeling kunnen betalen" [2]. He treats that as the real proof of concept. They never discounted licences, and stayed transparent about the roadmap instead [2].

On naivety as an asset

Callens is direct that ignorance was load-bearing. "Gelukkig waren wij super naïef, want als we niet zo naïef geweest [waren], ging het waarschijnlijk nooit van de grond zijn" [1]. The same thought, expanded: "Wij zijn gestart vanuit de zekere naïviteit dat we dachten van oké, we laten dat één keer bouwen en dan verkopen we dat en dat gaat wel werken. Moesten we het allemaal geweten hebben achteraf, dan gingen we waarschijnlijk nooit gestart zijn" [2]. Had they understood upfront the scale of continuous development and cost, they would not have begun [2]. He pairs this with the corrective instinct that follows the first shock, summed up in his own phrase for getting organised after the write-off: "Get your shit together. Kom, we gaan een plan van aanpak doen" [1].

On co-founders and trust

Investors criticised Jobtoolz for having two commercial profiles and no technical founder, and Callens holds both sides of that argument at once. On the record he defends it, because two sales people could commercialise the product immediately, which he credits as the key to growth [2], and the pair ran on a competitive dynamic, hanging sold-client logos on the wall and counting who had sold more [2]. Given a second run he would still add a technical co-founder from day one to avoid the delays they suffered [1]. What he would replicate without change is trust: "Ik kon perfect zeggen: als ik er niet ben, heb ik 100 procent vertrouwen in wat dat Dieter deed, en omgekeerd. En ik merk soms binnen founding teams dat dat niet altijd het geval is" [1]. Complementary skills are negotiable; unconditional mutual confidence is not.

To answer the investor objection structurally, they let the CTO and marketing director buy in as shareholders. That move did two more jobs than intended: it gave Strada a ready-made internal successor CEO and it let the founders exit cleanly [1].

On selling

"Je moet kunnen verkopen" [1] is close to a first principle for him, and COVID is the case study. When HR staff went home and finally looked properly at their Excel-based processes, Jobtoolz spent the first lockdown weeks calling every HR contact to ask what they were missing, and sales climbed month after month [1]. Conversion from visits went from roughly 25 to 30 percent before COVID to 50 to 55 percent during it, a measure of how acute the need had become [1]. The same instinct governed the investor relationships. After the Main Capital Awards nomination Callens declined funding but held quarterly calls with nearly all of the interested parties, which kept Jobtoolz on their radar, and Strada emerged from exactly that ecosystem of contacts [1].

On refusing venture capital

The refusal was temperamental as much as financial. "Wij zijn ondernemers en wij willen niet continu bezig zijn met te lopen van kapitaalronde naar kapitaalronde" [2], and he adds the burden of constant financial reporting to the list of reasons [2]. Bootstrapping meant the revenue rule stood, and when scaling abroad genuinely required capital they took the other exit from the dilemma and sold the whole company rather than fund the expansion [2]. Alongside that, a lesson from a near miss on payroll in the early days: he kept a buffer of at least three months of cashflow to cover salaries, out of responsibility for employees' families [2].

On the entrepreneur and the manager

Part of the decision to sell was about who he is. "Je wordt groter en je wordt eigenlijk meer een manager, minder een ondernemer, en ik denk dat dat twee verschillende zaken zijn" [2]. He loves pioneering with a small team, and as Jobtoolz grew, the role drifted away from that [2]. Making himself dispensable was therefore both an exit mechanism and an honest reading of his own preferences.

On engineering and executing the exit

The two or three years spent building processes and delegating to the CTO and marketing director bought the founders the leverage to choose their moment and to leave without a long earn-out [2]. That full departure was non-negotiable: "Voor ons was dat heel duidelijk: als we exit, dan moeten wij er ook uit" [2]. He supports it with what he heard from other entrepreneurs who stayed on for one to three years post-acquisition and were fed up within six months, because culture and vision inevitably change under new ownership [2]. Jobtoolz, grown to 3,000 clients in five countries over six years, went 100 percent to ISH Holdings (Strada Partners) [2][1].

The operational regret is in the due diligence. "Wij zijn daar ook weer als ondernemer wel in de fout gegaan omdat we te bereikbaar waren" [1]. Answering the buyer's questions directly instead of routing them through their advisor handed Strada unfiltered information and generated endless follow-ups; redoing it, he would delegate fully to Dealmakers [1]. He is also careful to puncture the glamour of the process itself: "Iedereen ziet altijd de mooie kant van verkopen, maar de jaren ervoor... Ik herinner mij momenten dat wij belden met elkaar en dat we zeiden van: oei, en nu volgende maand, hoe gaan we dat doen?" [1].

On what happens after the money lands

The expectation was straightforward: "Ik dacht van: de keer dat die handtekening er staat en het staat op de rekening, dan begint de nice life" [1]. It did not go that way. Instead of the romanticised calm he was restless and anxious, circling the question of what now [1], and the sudden sea of free time produced a near-manic pursuit of new ideas, including an aborted plan to start acquiring car washes after watching an interview with an American investor [2]. He jumped too fast into a CEO role at Board+ that did not match his passion before finding his fit at Voka [1]. The eventual correction was deliberate slowing down [2]. On the money itself, he took the advice of other exited founders and parked the proceeds on a one-year term account to buy thinking time, then chose a fund-of-funds with exposure to Smartfin, KKR and EQT over direct startup tickets [1].

Takeaways

• Do not commission a finished product from an agency at a fixed price before the market has responded; hire a developer and ship a minimal MVP instead, which is what Callens would do with the €120,000 he lost [1].
• When a platform is fundamentally wrong, scrap it rather than iterate on it; founders who keep patching a bad base end up worse off [1].
• Make revenue fund development from the first month of sales: "Onze revenue moet de ontwikkeling kunnen betalen" [2].
• Validate by asking clients and non-clients what they would think if the product existed, so you know it sells before it is built, and hold prices instead of discounting licences [2].
• Prioritise total mutual trust between co-founders over complementary profiles, while still adding a technical co-founder on day one to avoid build delays [1].
• Spend the years before a sale making yourself dispensable through processes and delegation; that is what buys a clean full exit with no long earn-out [2].
• During due diligence, route everything through your advisor rather than answering the buyer directly, or you hand over unfiltered information and invite endless follow-up questions [1].
• Decline funding without cutting contact: quarterly calls with interested investors kept Jobtoolz visible and the eventual buyer came out of that network [1].
• Plan for the emotional drop after an exit; park the proceeds somewhere safe for a year and resist jumping into the first available role [1][2].