“A great step forward in the professionalisation of our company and the starting point for change and growth.”

03 November 2024

Mathias Selleslach, owner of the IT application specialist Content & Coffee, recently took the SME Excellence programme. This hands-on programme with a focus on practice, which is tailored to busy business owners and managers, proved to be highly valuable to his company. “The insights we gained from this programme have helped us get to where we are now.” Today, Content & Coffee helps organisations professionalise their IT skills by aiming for operational excellence in the present as well as transformational excellence with a view to the future.

insights-Mathias-Selleslach

About Content & Coffee

  • Helps IT teams become a trusted partner within their organisation
  • Founded in 2015
  • 16 employees

What insights from the programme have offered a response to the challenges facing your company?

“I gained so many insights from the programme that we apply on a daily basis in our business operations. The most important insight is also the most difficult to apply in practice. It is about the position that my co-owner and I have in the firm as ‘indivisible leaders’. As a company grows, there comes a point where you simply can’t do everything on your own anymore. Accepting that and dealing with it in practice is certainly not easy, but it is necessary if you want to keep on growing your business. Professor Yannick Dillen’s ‘entrepreneur versus manager’ session gave me the support I needed to get to grips with the issue.”

“A second insight was about our positioning in the market. Besides needing to fine-tune that, we had to tailor our services better to meet our customers’ needs. That’s another area that we’ve been taking a lot of steps lately to improve.”

How did you convert the insights from the programme into concrete action for the company?

“We started by taking a long, hard look at our strategy and adapting it more precisely to the needs of the market. Professor Kurt Verweire taught us how to set ourselves apart from other players more effectively. We have evolved from a digital agency into ‘the application lifecycle company’. Whereas our focus used to be mainly on building and maintaining (web) applications, we now take a much broader approach. We still have people on our team who can build applications or contribute their skills to development teams in organisations. But now we also offer general support for application management and application landscapes, and help companies professionalise their IT skills. Our approach is very hands-on and pragmatic, tailored to SMEs that want to achieve tangible results fast, in their team and with their people. Many IT teams need help with effectively implementing and embedding the strategy that their company wants to adopt. Our team leaders, application managers and architects are the ideal partners for this.”

“Professor Miguel Meuleman’s coaching session on the growth scan and business strategy also gave us the means to map out all the strengths of everyone in the management team. Then we started actively recruiting to bring the missing talents on board. For example, we have contracted an experienced managing director to support the growth of the company. In the long run, our goal is to enable the company to function independently of its founders. We also have ambitious future plans, with major investments on the horizon.

In short, the insights from SME Excellence have led to concrete action that has strengthened our company and allowed us to grow with confidence.”

What business impact have you achieved so far by taking this concrete action?

“First and foremost, we have succeeded in positioning ourselves more clearly in the market and improving several of our services. By bringing complementary expertise into the team, we have gained more insights into our finances and the efficiency of our business processes. In turn, this has enabled us to make better decisions and resolve difficult problems. In concrete terms, we feel that we have taken a great step forward in the professionalisation of our organisation. So the SME Excellence programme formed the starting point of considerable change and growth for us.”