Start your entrepreneurship journey or not? Insights from Etienne Van Den Peereboom

Are you intrigued with starting your entrepreneurship journey?  This episode of the Excellence Foresight Podcast delves into the fascinating journey of Etienne Van Den Peereboom, a distinguished art gallery owner and former management consultant. 

Throughout the episode, Etienne shares invaluable lessons drawn from his experiences, offering listeners a wealth of insights into building resilient teams, nurturing trust and loyalty, and the unwavering commitment required to propel a small business to great heights of success.

The dialogue intertwines the worlds of art and business, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between innovation and unconventional approaches in driving progress. Etienne's reflections serve as a blueprint for cultivating patience, determination, and clarity in personal motivations, inspiring listeners to embark on their own entrepreneurial endeavors with confidence and purpose.

Chapters

• 0:13 Building Leadership Skills in Small Companies
• 9:43 Empowering Leadership and Entrepreneurial Insights

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Welcome to the Excellence Foresight Podcast. I'm your host, nancy Naimi. I'm a culture transformation and organizational excellence consultant, leadership coach and a mentor. My passion is to make excellence an everyday habit and that's why I've created this Excellence Foresight podcast. This episode is a special episode. It's a guest episode and we will continue the discussion around art, culture and business In today's episode and to share his stories about art and excellence from a management consultant to an art gallery owner. I'm very pleased to extend a very warm welcome to Etienne Vanden Peribon. I've known Etienne for many years now and I'm so pleased to welcome you here today. Etienne, we've discussed several times about leadership in our meetings and today I would like you to share those stories with our audience. Etienne, would you like to start by introducing yourself and why you've moved from a consultant career into becoming the owner of your own company and entrepreneur?

Speaker 2: 1:16

Hi everyone. Well, first, I worked for 17 years in business consulting, so that's quite a large amount of time, so it was time to do something else. But the main reason was actually there are two main reasons. One actually, I started business consulting with a goal in mind. I went into business consulting with the purpose of learning how to start and manage businesses I just stayed longer than I thought and manage businesses. I just stayed longer than I thought, but I reached a point after a while where it was time to essentially jump the plane and actually start a business by myself. The other reason simply through my journey in business consulting that's the very usual view about consultants I spent a lot of time telling all the people what to do and how to do it and I felt I should do it and see how it goes actually and really do it for myself. And it really is different and I really do not regret the change.

Speaker 1: 2:16

I think, from what I hear about your companies, etienne, you're doing great and I think that move helped you a lot. And I see a lot of people in our region wanting to make that move, establishing their own companies, and I think it requires a lot of passion, a lot of dedication initially to do that. So, from your experience, what are the primary hurdles faced by small companies or entrepreneurs, and how should they focus on enhancing their internal capabilities to foster growth and achieve excellence within that business model that they are creating?

Speaker 2: 2:47

Obviously, some people are quickly successful in starting new businesses, but generally for most people it is hard. It's really difficult, especially when starting a business completely from zero. There's a lot of things to handle that consumes time, that are not necessarily difficult, but that we need to do ourselves. So we'll come to what we need to do internally. But the way I look at a company essentially is especially small companies and also startups I invested in. The project is something to achieve and the project needs a certain set of skills. So the first question is do you have in your team all the skills required to achieve the project? If you're lucky, all the skills are concentrated into the one founder, if not within two or three founders. If not, the founding team plus employee, plus employees, plus advisors.

Speaker 2: 3:46

But for small companies, I found that looking at the set of skills required is the right measure initially, the right measure of success. So as you focus internally, just make sure that you have all those skills at different steps for the coping. If you don't have marketing skills and you start, you'll have a hard time marketing your company. As simple as that. And I've seen you know other founders no-transcript. They would tend to focus on what they are good at and what they like to do, and I fell into that trap. Marketing was not my strength. I've done everything I could for a business. I grew despite not having good marketing. I saw someone who grew with a strong focus of marketing but not being strong in the operations, so that's a key learning for me.

Speaker 1: 4:39

This is a great answer and I think there's a lot of learning. Me. This is a great answer and I think there's a lot of learning. When you are establishing your own company, you need to develop these skills and gradually bring new people to the company, which need these skills also. So there's a lot, like you said, I think, time to be invested when you are a sole entrepreneur or you have a small team. So there's a lot of learning that needs to be done, and I think we learn in organizations to develop capabilities.

Speaker 2: 5:07

So this is where we need to start as an entrepreneur and building those capabilities within the organization. Now, etienne, yeah, I mean with the first company I started. Initially my first reaction was to hire a manager to run operations. I couldn't afford anyone, so I hired someone who was fairly junior and six years on the person is still with me and I have indeed invested in training that person all along. So where I was lucky is I could find somebody initially who had that capability to grow, that desire to learn and all the intrinsic personal qualities of trust and working well, et cetera that were there. So I was lucky to find somebody who had potential. But I have trained that person as the manager of the company year after year, month after month, and at times the growth of the company was limited by his speed of work.

Speaker 2: 6:01

Now, I was not full-time in that company at that time, but now I enjoy. It's a small company, a team of five only, but I enjoy having a team that has a lot of coherence. They all work very well together, they all learn and you get a lot of value back. They all work very well together, they all learn and you get a lot of value back when you teach people. They stick with you. They want to stay even in difficult circumstances.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Exactly, I think. You build loyalty, you build trust within the team, and this is what helps the team to work well together. I think we've heard a lot of success stories in small companies. Especially when they manage to get a team who has high potential and is able to work together, that really speed up the growth process. So, etienne, we hear a lot of good qualities from what you have been sharing. So what specific leadership qualities are essential for effectively navigating this obstacle of building a new company and putting a new team together?

Speaker 2: 7:02

Well, in terms of leadership skills, it really depends on where the company is right. So there are times where you should and you want to grow really fast. You need to be able to push people to the maximum at that time. There are times where sometimes being a bit more patient with the market is needed. We've had a time where we just build the customer base little by little so that customers would come back, and at times, being patient with the team understanding them well is another quality of leadership that's useful. But across all different times, personally, my style, especially at the beginning of the company, has been to be involved in everything. So up to three years into the company I was able to do everything myself in the company. You cannot sustain that for a long time, but that gives you a very strong base to lead by example afterwards and that gives the team a lot of comfort because if something wrong happens, you're able to help them in times of crisis.

Speaker 1: 8:10

I think I want to stop a little bit here and reiterate what you're saying. In fact, when we talk about the excellence model, we talk about the leadership, and how much important is it for a leader to be hands-on, to know what's happening in the company, to be able to know the in and out and be able to support the team and I think this is a great uh quality and the leader is to be able to understand what the team is doing, what are the challenges, and be able to support.

Speaker 2: 8:35

I think this is really very important uh yeah, and and what I personally pay a lot of attention to is being very careful, because when you know everything and you can help them with a lot of things, they might feel they don't have their own space. So it's about creating the right balance of knowing a lot of detail, being able to help and to drive the business by knowing everything from top to bottom, but, at the same time, letting them have their space, having their own decisions, being tough on mistakes when it's needed to be tough, but being relaxed about mistakes when these are mistakes that they should be doing and they are within a scope that doesn't impact the customers too much or the reputation of the company. So always actually actively paying attention to the learning space that they have, because you cannot learn without making mistakes and you want them to make small mistakes and not huge ones. So that's the balance that I tried to find.

Speaker 1: 9:42

That's a great point. I think this is how we empower people and give them space to learn. At the same time, they have to learn from their own failures, their own mistakes, but they need to be able to try. So if we block them a lot, if we blame them for trying, then that's really going to have a negative impact.

Speaker 2: 9:58

I like this approach of leadership.

Speaker 1: 10:00

At the end, any other qualities come to your mind? I noticed that you mentioned patience, which I think is very important. When you establish a new company and a new team, you require that. Any other qualities you could think of in terms of leadership?

Speaker 2: 10:15

I mean being determined to succeed. Keep working through difficult situations. You always hear that At the end of the day, I mean I can say in my case, making the transition was easy for a simple reason this is exactly what I wanted to do. That's what helped me go through, honestly, very difficult times. So for somebody who looks at the transition, I would say know that if you know this is the right thing for you, that already will carry you for more than 50% of the difficulties. If you go into entrepreneurship as a trial, you might get lucky, but I would not recommend it. You need to be very clear for many personal reasons that this is right for you and then also sort out your personal life. I did not try entrepreneurship before owning my house and paying for it, knowing that the cost to sustain the family were minimal. I started after having kids. So just make sure that your personal life and personal motivations are all in order before starting.

Speaker 1: 11:27

That's a great point and I think a lot of people these days maybe they just lose their jobs and would like to, but there's no motivations at all in order before starting. That's a great point and I think a lot of people these days maybe they just lose their jobs and would like to start on their own, not to go through that hustle of finding a new job, or sometimes it's difficult. So I think this is a good point to have a certain stability before you establish, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel the burden of establishing a new company. You have to do a lot of things and your time, your time management is going to be different and our work-life balance is going to be impacted. So I think it's a great advice to give to our audience today.

Speaker 1: 11:57

Etienne, let's move a little bit to Monda Gallery, and I remember when you established the company, and I think you have that passion for the new ideas you put in place, which is great to see. So what are the insights you gained from observing how exceptional artists innovate to craft distinctive concepts and artworks, and I think you've worked with great ones. So what are the stories you can share with us and the learnings you can share from that journey you've had with them.

Speaker 2: 12:25

Okay, first of all, I would not recommend anybody to do what I did, which is I started a business in a domain I didn't know. It's because I thought I was prepared for that. I always consulted in as many industries as possible, but that made it hard actually for somebody to start a business in the domain that they know. It might actually be quite easy, to be honest, but yeah, so with my brother we went into art. So everything was new. We were entrepreneurs, the domain was new, we discovered everything.

Speaker 2: 12:58

The art domain is interesting in a way that you know every artist is a different universe in their own right. You know they spend a lot of time to explore their own thoughts and their own creations. So you spend an hour, an hour and a half with one artist and then with another one. It's a completely different universe but, interestingly, you know, they are entrepreneurs themselves. I mean, some artists are, you know, very intellectual, but many artists also need to make a living and so it's a business venture in a way.

Speaker 2: 13:31

And then you see also, you see those who are very detailed and work on their craft for many, many years before even starting to try and sell Some, who will make three paintings at a time because it's easier, and will contact art galleries right away and try to sell. So you'll find many, many different business models in artists, many different ways to achieve success. They all have all different goals, but the same laws apply. You know those who prepare well and create something unique. They innovate in terms of a technique and a visual that is both attractive and new and meaningful. They will be successful. Lots of parallels between the business world and the art world from that perspective.

Speaker 1: 14:20

Okay, I think you are emphasizing the need to prepare. I think, in everything we're doing, and especially companies who want to innovate, I think they have to really learn what are the needs of the market, what are the new things they need to put forward for their clients and what are the future trends. And that's why we talk about the foresight right. We need to be ready for the future in terms of the foundation we put now, but also the new ideas and the new needs that the customers would be willing to pay for in the future, and this will give us a competitive edge and help us sustain the businesses we're having.

Speaker 1: 14:56

So, etienne, in terms of arts and artists, I think we learned a lot, and I've had previous episodes talking about also the art and the culture, and we see like cultures have also some traits that are similar to what the artists are. They have, they're innovative, they look for new concepts, they look for sharing the beauty of how they see the world with others. In terms of culture, we also look at how that culture should be able to really to bring people together, to unite people and help organization achieve their objectives. So do you have any additional stories to share with us here?

Speaker 2: 15:32

About how to bring people together, or how to bring people together in business.

Speaker 1: 15:38

Yes.

Speaker 2: 15:39

I mean in business, the best way, I think, simply to bring people together is to bring them behind the goal of the company. I am now at a time with one of the companies where we are going to accelerate the growth, so some employees who are used to work until a certain time and stop and have their time will be, will have their habit disturbed. But I've briefed them that it's going to change and then, basically, by linking what they do very clearly with what we try to achieve, we get momentum. They right away feel that they're having an impact, they feel that they learn. One employee recently told me oh, you know, we learned that last week together and over the weekend I met somebody who has a business and I was already able to help him and suddenly his engagement in work is growing significantly, and again through the learning. So learning and objectives are two good tools to bring everybody together, I feel.

Speaker 1: 16:44

I think uniting people around the vision and giving a clear direction, a clear purpose for the organization really helps having that engagement and that momentum. Etienne, thank you very much for all your answers so far. Do you have any closing thoughts to share with our audience here today?

Speaker 2: 17:00

Yeah, if anybody thinks about going into entrepreneurship, do it. Just choose the right time, but definitely do it.

Speaker 1: 17:07

That's a great advice and I think a lot of people, when they listen to, they're gonna do it. Uh, there's a lot of ideas, there's a lot of concepts that are, I think, waiting just for people to to have the courage to to start them. So, etienne, thank you very much for being with us here today, thank you for sharing your stories, and I wish you all the best, and with all the companies that you have established and the teams, and I think you have a great leadership style, which it's gonna take you to to the success. Uh, with this, I would like to thank our audience for being with us here today. Uh, please stay tuned for our next episode and let's create a brighter future together. Thank you very much, you.