When was it most difficult for you in your business?

Now may I be very arrogant? Really insurmountable problems we haven’t had yet. Those are the discussions I already have sometimes with my father “you don’t know what that is, failure”.

I am indeed not a pioneer, my father was a pioneer and he literally gave up. Who started on the living room table in 1967 on a toile cirée because he had the unlikely drive that he could serve his customers much better than with the products and services of his then employer and he started for himself. For 6 years he did it all by himself. Can you imagine. Working 7 on 7, 16 hours or more a day. Until his doctor, when my father was in his bed following a heart attack, said, “Sir, if you want to see your children grow up, you will have to hire someone anyway.” My parents then scraped all over the place because they really started from a blank page. They had no money, a client who didn’t pay, that was a drama.

I experienced all that in my youth but I also learned from my father to grow very organically. And I think maybe that’s the key to avoiding big failures. That does have a drawback. You don’t grow exponentially and you don’t shoot forward with seven-mile boots.

It means planning and executing each step very meticulously according to your entrepreneurial vision. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” by Peter Drucker is one of my favorite quotes and I firmly believe in it. By growing with small steps, setbacks don’t come across as big failures. Let me be clear, not everything we grasp becomes gold.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” by Peter Drucker

Does this mean you are more agile?

It’s to say, less vulnerable. Our resilience is much greater by growing organically because you keep what you have and you keep putting layers on top of that. And that’s slow, just like a boxwood. If you buy one of those little buxus balls it looks like that thing is not growing. But so that does grow at 10% of its size per year and then when that has become a big bush you have to prune that even twice a year. The advantage of slow growth is that it is solid.

So what do you do to mitigate those failures?

We look very much at our world and our market. Looking at trends, innovation, technology and trying and daring to stop if it’s not good enough. That is not failure but building experience and learning.

Failure for me equals damage. You have had to let people go, you have suffered heavy losses.

We learned that from our father because he did see black snow. We guard our resources and finances, (which à propos he so did not have), very strongly and put them back in. We still make sure we have a stocked barn, just like my grandparents who were farmers. This is very important, because when you are under stress under a shortage of resources you are often forced to make choices too quickly that you may regret in retrospect.

What I would also like to add is that one of our strategies is “focus. We choose a narrow scope, but very in-depth, not in breadth in order to be the specialist in our market.

So what does success mean to you?

That’s a good question (thinks deeply)

From our company’s perspective, two things are important. First, ensuring continuity across generations, over the long term. That means that we have to provide resources and that we cannot do it alone, c.q. my father who after six years was doing everything alone and realized that dividing responsibilities across multiple shoulders was strategically the right choice for growth. We want sustainable cooperation with our partners and employees so that they can develop, for our customers so that they can make their furniture faster and more efficiently, and for our suppliers to help ensure a good market share. If we can do all that then we will get to our omega.

So what is success now? That I can fulfill my entrepreneurial vision. If I can create well-being. If I can continue to exist across those generations, if I can give sustainable growth to people.

Just because your name is on the building here doesn’t mean you are in charge.

If I understand correctly, your story is about taking it easy and focusing, making success a part of the process and not just the end result.

You can put it that way, yes. My father only realized after ten years that he had a firm, through hard work. Success is being able to look back and realize in that moment that things did turn out well both around failures and good things and that the sum as you say is positive.

You talked about those waves. I wonder what you are doing then. Because those waves are coming faster and faster and fiercer. How do you guys make sure to keep shifting to that next step?

That’s a very good question and that brings us directly to the two questions we ask ourselves every year.
The first question is: What do we have to do today to still be relevant in five years? That question has to be answered, otherwise you don’t know where you are going. That used to be 10 years but if we look at our employees we are already screwing that down to 3 years and maybe in the industry it will be down to 2 or maybe 1 year.

The second question is: If we hadn’t been there, what would our customer have missed? If you can’t answer this, then by definition you are no longer relevant. Because that means you are 100% interchangeable with your competitor. If you can’t say, “If our customer hadn’t had that,” then your competitor can do just the same thing. It is the search for those two answers that drives us to question that business model.

From this I understand it’s all about added value?

Exactly. Allow me to take a brief look back at history?

Go ahead.

When my father started it was just to satisfy the customers.
“Customer first,” the customer first.
“Remove all friction from the customer,” make sure the customer is free of friction.
“Safe time,” save time.

That is our sacred mantra of the enterprise.

My father’s business model was pure distribution in 1967. Imagine, just get material from Germany or Italy in those days.
There were borders, language barriers, foreign currencies, customs forms, very complex administrations, transportation on a cobblestone road. Availability was a competence at that time. Availability. If you had the goods the customers were queuing up.
That availability is the foundation of a wholesale furniture hardware business. There are competitors today who still operate this business model, and believe me, they are not going to be able to answer our second question; did they miss us? So there’s a lot of pressure on our model. The borders are open, anybody can go get and trade goods with a van. So the thing is to watch how the market situation evolves. Case in point: 1995, the Internet makes its appearance. For the older ones among us, they remember that typical beeping sound. By the end of the 1990s, just about everyone had the Internet and we went on Yahoo (there was no Google yet) and suddenly a world opened up. The result was that our customers, furniture makers, came to us complaining about their customers. “What they all come asking man!”.

And how did that come about? When you used to go to a kitchen store, the salesman was the dominant person in the sales process. That person sold the customer what he could make good, what he made a lot of money on, and talked all the other crap out of the customer’s head.

At the turn of the century, that balance of power completely reverses and the customer determines what he wants. The salesman no longer gets away with answers like “that doesn’t exist,” or “that’s not possible.” No, that consumer sometimes knows more than the salesperson.

An anecdote. One time I went along as a mistery shopper with a good friend of mine who wanted to buy a kitchen.

At one point she says to the salesman: “I would have liked to have a Miele steam oven type blablabla in it”, to which the salesman says that that doesn’t exist. To which she immediately replicates: yes, it won’t come out for another three months but it’s already on the Internet as a preview, and since you can’t deliver that kitchen for another four months, you can install it perfectly.

You understand that that puts a tremendous strain on the services that our clients have to provide as furniture builders. Suddenly those have to do everything. Before that, those had a white ‘schuifke’ and everybody bought that white schuifke.

Now that customer comes in with a wide variety of color, shape and materials, and if the builder says it can’t be done, the consumer doesn’t mind and goes elsewhere. I will even say more, that consumer hadn’t even been inside that builder’s home, because she had already seen on the Internet that he didn’t have or couldn’t supply what she wanted. Our client is having a particularly difficult time with this situation.

Pure furniture hardware is no longer relevant to us

We say, come, give that to us. “Remove all friction from the customer” and “Safe time”. You don’t have to keep stock anymore, we are going to deliver it tailored, ready-made, by the piece and when you need it. You clearly know the price so you can turn fixed costs into variable costs and sit back and relax. So that furniture builder can say to his customer, take your pick, because we take care of him. Thus, we have changed from a distribution model to a value-added model. Instead of offering products, we now offer services. So today our strategy is service leadership and mass customization.

If we had to make here, theoretically, all the drawers we can make, that’s 15 billion.

For 3 times in a row we have been Factory of the Future and people from the automotive industry sometimes come to visit us. They then tell us that they can’t do what we do here. I myself am always quite impressed with the technologies after visiting an automotive factory. But really they are just assemblers of parts.

So do you stick them all together within the 72 hours?

The guy from Volvo Gent who visited here once made the comparison and said that if they worked according to our way they could deliver any car that was different in color, model, length, width and height per millimeter. So Wim, you’re a big person so you could say, I want that ceiling in that car an inch or two higher anyway. But you can’t because they do mass production in a certain order (cq Ford T[1]).

At the beginning of the conversation you say you are arrogant but here I discover your modesty. Everyone is almost copy past and you don’t want to be. You don’t sell furniture fittings.

No, that batter has become irrelevant, and that sounds weird lol.

Of course it’s the basics, because without products we can’t get started.

Let me put it another way, Warren Buffet only buys and invests in companies that are able to dig a moat around their own customers and put a fence around it. If, as a company, you manage to build a wall around your customers that your competitor can’t get over, or have to go to enormous lengths to break down that wall only to get to that customer. In a recurrent B2B, then, you are very strong. What you have, you keep and for the rest you can grow. Building that fence is done with service. To begin with, with Blum products we have the best manufacture in the world. That master quality that helps, I have to be honest. At a certain point, competitors also came up with better products, and there was even an advertising slogan that said: the differences are in the details. Then you are very close.

We countered that by throwing service against it that our competitors laughed at in the beginning. But it really became something and at some point we started putting our customer service above the product. Our competitor said they were 20% cheaper for the individual components and the customer asked: do you also put them all together within the 72 hours?

A company’s mission is not to make people happy is a common saying.

(interrupts immediately) Ho, ho, ho; I don’t agree with that. Look if the people working here are not happy, then it’s not going to work here.

But well-being and happiness are still two different things.

No, no, no. You cannot experience well-being and be unhappy. When all the components are present to do your job well you experience a kind of work happiness and in that, happiness is also different for everyone.

We put tremendous effort into organization and development. We put a lot of effort into our culture. That is clearly defining for everyone what the company wants to connect with what the individual person wants.

Everyone who works here has a different motivation for being here. There are an awful lot of reasons why people “started” with us but those reasons change over time. Our mission is to be able to keep those people working here in the right balance. I believe very strongly in cognitive diversity and not directive leadership because that doesn’t work today.

During a session with our executives, I asked what leadership was all about and I wrote down everything they said on the flip chart. After three full sheets, I asked the group: and who does all that here and we laughed. Nobody can do all that. So we are going for shared leadership. That means everyone here can take a responsibility for a particular domain. We are a big family but a business is about competence. Just because your name is on the building doesn’t mean you have a say here. We have to make sure if we want to guarantee well-being to those 365 families who work here that the final decision-maker does that correctly, otherwise I’m harming all those people.

We have 15,000,000,000 different drawers, 15 billion!

It took us 5 years with my children to figure out who should sit in my chair. If that person has to do that with stress and insufficient competencies then that person has no well-being either. I myself have the staff number 11. To deliver well-being to 365 people today, that’s a pretty tough assignment. To put that on the shoulders of someone (read family) who has not asked for it, has no desire for it or because it bears his or her name, that is very unwise. Harmful to the person who has to do it and harmful to the 365 families who work here. In that context, work and happiness are things that must go hand in hand.

What does entrepreneur Peter Van Hoecke dream of?

Being able to do the transition to the new owner in the first place. We have the same values, so that’s going to merge seamlessly. On top of that, BLUM asked me to contribute internationally.
Second, there is now also the family office around wealth management.

What does Peter dream about?

Above all, I want to stay mobile and healthy, which is why I do core fitness twice a week. Also hope everyone in the family stays healthy. Like to travel a lot, once two months really away. But I still have too many plans to define just 1 thing.

<PHOTO: the coffee corner in the studio

Now let’s talk about Peter, the man behind the CEO. What do you do to have fun?

First of all, I am already having a great time in my job. I enjoy coming here every day, I love doing this. But at home I have not been idle either. We have 8 children, ^14th grandchild on the way, so I have my hands full with that too.

I also think, what makes me very good is that I can disconnect well. I’m always here early but I’m not a late one. You won’t see me sitting here at 8-9 at night. I end the day nicely in time and really finely unplug. No matter what is going on, I turn it off at night. Because tell me, what can I do in my bed at night about a problem that is urgent and needs all my attention? What can I do about it?

No, no Peter, it’s just unhealthy!

I devote myself to my wife and the children who have since left home.

And then I like to have dinner with a good glass of wine, I can really enjoy that. Sometimes I dare to knock a golf ball. Because you also have to take care of your health, but don’t overdo it. I was born with a heart defect and it was repaired right at birth and I was predicted not to grow old. I’m still sitting here proving the opposite.

In the process, I was advised by the cardiologists never to join the hypes of running a marathon or riding up Mont Ventoux by bike. When I asked if that had to do with my heart defect, they immediately said, no, no Peter, it’s just unhealthy (laughs). Recreational exercise and not overexerting yourself is pure necessity.

If I want to bring out the kid in me again, I’m off on the bike.

How does Peter want to be remembered?

I would very much like to be remembered as someone who is conciliatory, full of compassion and not a conflict seeker.

As someone who is there, when you need him and that I can sincerely help then.

Thank you Peter