Deloitte

Half of the organisations surveyed in the Rising Star Monitor, a report on the trends and challenges for young, high potential ventures in Belgium, intend to grow, but not always at very high speed. A second major finding refers to the fact that founders often forget to enter into a proper shareholder agreement, which is worrying as one in four founders leaves their company within the first three years. To support high-potential ventures in their path to rapid growth, attention should be paid to attracting potential employees in a more professional manner and providing existing employees with more feedback and a clearly defined career path.

In mid-March, Deloitte concluded a Prime Foundation Partnership with the Executive Remuneration Research Centre. The consultancy firm is thus creating a leverage effect by involving its European network in the executive remuneration figures for 700 European CEOs and CFOs that Vlerick gathers every year. A talk with Patrick Derthoo (Deloitte) and Professor Xavier Baeten.

Deloitte’s Technology’s recent FAST 50 competition put young and promising tech companies in the spotlight. Frederik Falepin from Deloitte and Veroniek Collewaert, professor of Entrepreneurship and jury member, are critical of the average young Belgian technology entrepreneur, however, claiming that they have “insufficient ambition to grow internationally.”

The majority of all scale-ups in Belgium today were founded by a team, usually composed of two people who know one another well. Often, they hold a C-level position in which the directorship of the company is shared between the two. Their remuneration consists primarily of shares and cash, with shares as the primary form of remuneration, particularly in the first few years. Only two in five founders of young scale-ups actually pay themselves a salary, while only about half of all scale-ups conclude dynamic share purchase agreements from the start about the course of action to be taken should one of the founders leave the company or take up another position.

During the Masters graduation event on 1 July, our corporate partners were delighted to present awards to students who excelled in a field that is close to our partners’ hearts. A gesture that symbolises the strong interaction between our students and the corporate world.

How do young ventures tackle their compensation policy? How can they find adequate sources of financing? And how do they set up strategic partnerships that help them grow into a sustainable, profitable business? That is what we want to find out together with our Prime Foundation Partner Deloitte Belgium during the Entrepreneurship 2.0 round tables and subsequent research.

“An often-heard complaint is that there are not enough start-ups and too few that grow into sustainable profitable businesses. But actually, there’s been a significant increase in new ventures, with the emergence of a new form of entrepreneurship, often technology-based and innovation-driven,” says Nikolaas Tahon, Managing Partner at Deloitte Accountancy. “We want to understand the specific challenges they face in order to be able to support them more effectively”. This is the aim of Deloitte’s renewed partnership with us.

Changing consumer needs and expectations, combined with ‘post-digital’ technologies – such as big data, social, mobile, cloud, and cyber – are pushing the financial sector to fundamentally rethink operating and business models and to investigate new opportunities – especially mobile opportunities. A major strategic theme for the coming years will be how best to deploy one or more of these technologies to drive post-digital business innovation.