Rudi De Kerpel

The through-line

Everything he says circles back to one combination: an appetite for jumping at opportunities with no long-term plan behind them, paired with an obsessive control of the downside. "Ik heb nooit in mijn leven plannen gemaakt of lange termijn. Ik vind gewoon ondernemen leuk en als ik een kans zie om iets te doen dat ik denk goh, dat zou wel kunnen lukken, wil ik dat gewoon proberen" [1]. But the same man kept a full year of loan repayments in cash, took no outside investors, and insists "ik heb ook altijd een plan B, altijd, in alles wat ik doe. Ik heb plan B en soms zelfs een plan C" [1]. The opportunism is real; the recklessness is not. Where he does plan, it is to force a healthy business to change against its own comfort: in 2015 he decided that by 2025 retail should be no more than 50% of group income, and diversified deliberately, including into a pet health centre for cats and dogs that grew to four locations [2].

The second constant is proximity. He does not believe in running a company from a distance, and the tests he applies to himself are all about whether he is close enough to the market and far enough from his own ego. The arc over time runs from building and holding for 23 years to engineering an exit and starting over at 55 with a reusable-packaging venture, on the reasoning that "ik was zo 55 jaar, dus ik had ook nog iets van: ik wil nog wel eens iets anders doen" [2].

On standing in your own market

His whole marketing philosophy is a pun and a discipline: "Marketing, ge kunt daar heel veel dure boeken over lezen, maar ge moet gewoon de eerste vijf letters daaruit nemen: ge moet gewoon in uw markt gaan staan" [2]. He acted on it literally, working 40 weekends a year at the cash register for 23 years, framing it as "gewoon uit respect naar mijn mensen toe" [2] but using it as continuous market research: the questions customers asked at checkout drove Monday's decisions on assortment and merchandising [2]. The same Sunday shift doubled as a management system. He noted every customer request his staff could not answer and brought the list to the biweekly team meeting, which made people behave as if he saw everything, even though he was only there once a week [1].

Learning from peers worked the same way. He professionalised the garden centres by joining an alliance of around 40 garden centres and a Dutch group including Intratuin, pooling purchasing power and using the others as mirrors to copy what worked and to learn metrics like return per square meter [2]. And with Goodless the positioning is explicit: "In plaats van in de Rode Zee te duiken hebben we geprobeerd onze eigen Blue Ocean te creëren" [2].

On buying out of bankruptcy

Starting from a bankruptcy is, in his view, the most underused entry route into business, and the system makes it harder than it needs to be. He wants more transparency from curators, and goes further: a pre-bankruptcy "positive reporting desk" that matches struggling companies with entrepreneurs able to fund a restart [1]. He bought Ganda Plant out of bankruptcy and turned it into the Eurotuin chain [1], and he is candid about how he negotiated: knowing there were no other buyers, he deliberately stalled and cut a million Belgian francs off his offer for every additional week of waiting [2].

On bluffing, deadlines and always meaning it

The Eurotuin exit is his set piece on negotiation. He ran two buyers to a hard Friday 2pm deadline and raised the price on one of them mid-process [1]. A branch manager on the losing side later admitted "wij dachten dat hij blufpoker aan het spelen was" [1], which is precisely his point: he never bluffs, he simply always has an alternative, so the deadline is real. One buyer's motivation he recalls in the buyer's own words: "gij had zoveel vuur en ik voelde als ik niet bij u kocht dat ik u ging breken" [1]. The credibility comes from the same habit he names as a personal strength: "noem dat één van mijn kwaliteiten, in alle onbescheidenheid, dat ik altijd de olifant in de kamer benoem" [1].

On risk you can survive

His risk-taking is always structured so that failure has a floor. Breaking into the Chinese azalea market meant proposing to his Hong Kong partner that they split the damage if a test sea-freight container failed and split the profit if it worked; competitors were stuck on airfreight at three times the cost, and within three years he was the largest exporter [1]. He broke open a closed exporter market by paying growers 50% upfront and 50% on delivery, where incumbents paid after six months, funding it with advances from the Chinese customer [1]. He never took outside investors and always held a year of loan repayments in reserve, and he contrasts that with startups spending raised money on workations, doubting founders would behave that way with their own money [1].

The other half of the discipline is knowing when to stop. Experiments get a budget, and when the budget is gone you quit: on the failed Brussels store, "neem uw verlies, sluit het af, probeer er iets van te leren" [1], instead of doubling down like a gambler pushing in his last €100 [1]. None of which stops him telling would-be founders to commit hard when the odds are there: "verkoopt desnoods uw laatste broek die je hebt om uw droom waar te maken. Als het kans heeft op slagen, moet er voor gaan" [1].

On people, ownership and letting go

He is the only one in his sector, he says, who let employees buy into the holding, and the crucial detail is that he did not gift the shares. They paid, through a Deloitte-designed structure with five valuation parameters governing entry and exit, and he credits that for the team's commitment and for clean splits when partners left [1]. Culture was transplanted rather than announced: when Eurotuin expanded, the manager of the largest store chose the new location and each store's assistant was promoted to filiaalleider, carrying the DNA into every branch [1].

He is equally blunt about the failures. Early on he fired two-thirds of his staff within a few months and puts the blame squarely on himself for not building structures in time to develop people; once the culture sours, you cut knots or the company dies [2]. He also rejects the comfortable reading of long tenure: if people stay because the company doesn't evolve and the founder doesn't dare let anyone go, that is a bad sign, and companies sometimes need new blood [2]. On the other side of the labour market he is just as critical of the modern pattern, where average tenure among young hires has fallen from seven years to roughly two or two and a half: "vandaag komen mensen in de arbeidsmarkt en ze springen van molshoop naar molshoop naar molshoop" [2]. That, he argues, prevents mastery, makes ambitious people unhappy, and destroys the employer's return on a hire [2].

On not calling your company your baby

The emotional test he applies to owners is direct. Calling the company "my baby" signals entanglement that blocks every big decision: you won't share equity, you won't exit in time, you won't balance your wealth, which is why in his estimate 80% of entrepreneurs at 67 don't know what they still want from life [2]. "Een bedrijf, dat is in principe een hefboom" [2]. He tested his own detachment by asking his two key managers "moest ik gisterennacht tegen een boom gereden hebben en ik lag drie maand in coma, wat zouden jullie dan doen?" and then moving to New York for three months; the weekly Skype calls shrank from two hours to "anything? no" inside three weeks [2].

The exit itself followed from a read on the sector rather than a personal wish to cash out: he saw garden retail becoming a game of big numbers on price setting and purchasing power, which left build or sell, meaning acquisitions of 15 to 25 million or the door [2]. Money is not the driver he wants credit for: "eigenlijk interesseert geld mij niet, maar ik vind het leuk om te verdienen... ik vraag me soms af wat is het verschil tussen 100 miljoen en 500 miljoen" [1].

On Goodless and the reuse bet

The second act was nearly stillborn. His Goodless co-founder turned out to be a fraudster who vanished six weeks before COVID, leaving him majority shareholder with 170 cancellations, and he doubled down anyway on the reasoning that the Green Deal ban on single-use plastics guaranteed the reuse problem would only grow [2]. The product logic is characteristically about closing loopholes rather than about the product: the deposit model links five cups to the person who paid for the round, so the refund goes back to the buyer rather than to whoever happens to return the cup, which means an organisation never refunds more than it took in [2]. He also describes an ambition for a new chain of 50 flower stores [1].

On vulnerability, setbacks and what the market blocks

He treats openness about trouble as commercially useful, not therapeutic: being visibly vulnerable about problems instead of protecting your ego attracts unexpected help and solutions, and honesty about dreams and difficulties alike is an asset [1]. The satisfaction, in his telling, arrives afterwards: "voldoening komt nadat je door de modder gekropen zijt, heel vaak. Ik heb eigenlijk veel zwarte sneeuw gezien, bedenk ik dan achteraf" [2], and "ge kunt geen vreugde kennen als je geen verdriet hebt gehad" [1].

Not every failure is the entrepreneur's own. His Radar-style venture matching retired experts' knowledge with young entrepreneurs drew 600 visitors and 100 company applications after a single VTM news item, so demand was never the issue; it died because the unions blocked the legal statute that would have let retirees step in and out of work [1]. That sits alongside his call for curator transparency [1] as his standing complaint that the institutional plumbing wastes usable capacity. His summary of how opportunity actually arrives is shorter: "wat dat ge zoekt, zoekt u" [1].

Takeaways

• Structure risk so failure is survivable: split the damage on a test shipment with your partner, keep a year of loan repayments in cash, take no outside investors [1].
• Give every experiment a budget and close it when the budget is spent rather than doubling down, and "neem uw verlies, sluit het af, probeer er iets van te leren" [1].
• Sell equity to your employees instead of gifting it, using a formal valuation structure for entry and exit, to get real commitment and clean exits [1].
• Work the shop floor and the till yourself; customer questions at checkout are free market research that should drive Monday's assortment decisions [2].
• Test whether the business runs without you by asking your managers what they would do if you were in a coma for three months, then actually leaving for three months [2].
• Long employee tenure can be a warning sign, not a virtue, if it means the company isn't evolving and the founder won't let anyone go [2].
• Read the sector before the exit: when the game turns into scale, price setting and purchasing power, the choice narrows to build or sell [2].
• Bankruptcies are an underused entry route into business, and would be more so with transparency from curators and a pre-bankruptcy desk matching failing firms to entrepreneurs who can fund a restart [1].