“But the experience of being at Vlerick and doing my Full-time MBA set me on a completely different track. Vlerick is strong in entrepreneurship – and gives you the tools to understand yourself and what will fulfil you in life. If I hadn’t done my MBA at Vlerick, I would never have started my own business.”

From executive to entrepreneur

Pierre-Antoine had a master’s degree in bioengineering and had been working in managerial agri-science roles since the mid-2000s. Every time he was promoted, he led bigger teams and took on more responsibility. Then – after more than a decade of expat life, working in central Africa and Papua New Guinea – he decided he wanted to come home to Belgium. But to what, he wasn’t sure.

He says: “The only thing I could do was keep progressing to bigger teams and bigger responsibilities. I was ready for a change and so I started thinking about doing an MBA. I had been in the driving seat for a long time and the more I thought about it, the more the opportunity to let someone else take the lead for a while appealed to me!

“I chose Vlerick for practical reasons – but it turned out to be the best choice possible. A lot of what I knew already, I had learned instinctively on the job. Vlerick gave me a framework for thinking about business – and the language to describe it.”

Coaching changed everything

Pierre-Antoine says: “The most powerful thing for me about Vlerick was the one-to-one coaching. It changed everything for me. My coach was fantastic and gave me the tools to really understand what it was I wanted.

“One of the exercises we did was to think back to childhood memories and grade them from zero to 20. Zero is something that drains your energy totally. Ten is average – and anything above ten is something that gives you a lot of energy.

“I realise that the things that give me energy are fishing and bees. I love fishing – but I didn’t want a career taking American tourists on fishing trips. But bees… they have always been a passion.”

Pierre-Antoine’s interest in apiculture started when he was a teenager. He learned to keep bees with a family friend – and soon had his own hives. Then when he got to university, his dissertation was about identifying disease-resistant bees.

But how do you transform a passion into a viable business?

Living and learning entrepreneurship at Vlerick

The more research Pierre-Antoine did, the more he came to believe that an eco-friendly bee business had legs. He says: “There are less than ten beekeeping professionals in Belgium, so the market was wide open. And as a nation, we import bees – so there was an opportunity to supply Belgian bees to Belgian beekeepers.

“And of course, there are opportunities for bee-related products like honey and pollen.

“If I had been starting a business at any other time, it would have been terrifying,” says Pierre-Antoine. “But because I was doing my MBA, I had expert faculty and all my classmates to describe my hypotheses to. I could talk about plans and have them challenge my ideas. This helped me to assess and refine my thoughts.

“It also helped me to overcome some of the things I thought of as obstacles. For example, I am not a good salesperson. I’m terrible at it. At Vlerick, they said, OK, you don’t like sales – so find someone who does. So I have a partner who can look after that side of the business.

“Starting a new business while you’re doing an MBA is a perfect time. I had a lot of support from Vlerick to do it.”

Taking the leap – and launching a new apiculture business

“My MBA helped me to develop skills I didn’t already have – like marketing. I still use the customer journey mapping approaches I learned at Vlerick – for example, as we built the purchasing platform for the website, we used customer journey mapping to inform the user interface.

“My MBA also helped me practically, with experience that was easy to transfer into my business. My knowledge-in-action project was working with a company that produces juices and jams. I developed a new strategy for their products. I learned a lot from starting my own business from the experience. I made contact with people in the market – and I learned how they value organic, local produce. These are all things that I’ve been able to carry over into the business.”

Pierre-Antoine and his business partner launched BEELGIUM in January 2020. It sells bee colonies and artificially inseminated bees, it rents out hives for agricultural pollination, and it sells honey, pollen and bee products. And it operates a Beeclub, with events, training – and free honey.

It’s a large operation – with more than 450 hives and facilities to extract honey, pollen and royal jelly. “At a smaller scale,” explains Pierre-Antoine, “it’s difficult to get pollen perfectly clean. We have the scale to prepare it beautifully.

“We are not the typical profile for beekeepers,” he says, “We’re younger and we have some interesting ideas – and we all need bees.”

So how much energy is life-giving Pierre-Antoine now, on the 1-20 coaching scale? “When we started the business, we gave ourselves some rules to follow – and number one is to have fun.

So the answer is at least 18,” he says. “And I’m recruiting at the moment – so the sky’s the limit.

“Two years ago, I would not have believed any of this could be possible. I have my MBA to thank for it.”

Pierre-Antoine Couvreur graduated in 2019.

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