Deloitte

A company’s Advisory Board and Board of Directors can have significant impacts on its performance. However, not so many young Belgian companies with growth potential have such governing bodies. Only 8% have Advisory Boards, and one in five have Boards of Directors. Although the compositions of the Boards of Directors are relatively diverse and complementary, only one in five has independent directors. Moreover, only 16% have a female presence; compared to the US (37%) or the UK (47%), women are under-represented on Belgian Boards of Directors. On the positive side, the Boards of Directors meet much more frequently than is generally recommended, which means that these young growth companies fully exploit their expertise. These are the main conclusions of the fourth edition of the Rising Star Monitor

On 20 February we invited the crème de la crème of the Belgian scale-up community for the first alumni round table of the Entrepreneurship 2.0 programme, which is now on its fourth edition. The programme’s two founders, Professor Veroniek Collewaert and Deloitte’s Sam Sluismans, look back at it with satisfaction.

When Deloitte and Vlerick began collaborating on entrepreneurship in 2014, there were plenty of initiatives for start-ups. But once they were ready to progress and had reached the scale-up phase, their managers were generally left to their own devices. The past three years have shown that there was a need for a community of like-minded people. Now our aim is to further strengthen that community and to meet the needs of the new generation of ‘born globals’ with the help of useful benchmarks. Because their burning question remains: how do other scale-ups do it?

Young Belgian companies with ambitions to grow set the bar for growth higher and higher. These scale-ups do not shy away from taking the step to sell aboard, where they generate nearly 30 percent of their total turnover. They are growing smart and are doing so primarily through less risk and hybrid ways for growth, such as licences and strategic alliances. Finally, the average salary that the founders pay themselves has remained constant in the last three years. These are the most significant conclusions of the third edition of the Rising Star Monitor. This annual survey by the Vlerick Business School and Deloitte Belgium provides insight into the trends and challenges for young Belgian companies with growth potential.

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.