The decision that changed my life

In 2018, I made a drastic decision that turned my life upside down, in a good sense. In retrospect, it was the best decision I ever made.

But first: throwback to 1997

I was an adolescent fairly interested in computers. One day at school, a teacher demonstrated the internet. It immediately blew my mind. Some sort of network where you can search for anything, like some endless library? Also, you can put things on it yourself and anyone in the world can see it? Wow. Kids these days think it’s the most normal thing in the world and I don’t know if my children will ever experience a revelation like that in their lives (maybe they will with Elon Musk and the Mars stuff, who knows). Anyway, it was love at first sight. At that moment, my passion was born. I knew I would spend the rest of my life creating things for the web.

In 2000, I went to college to study informatics. During my studies I was already building things for friends and family, you know how it goes. After college in 2004, I started freelancing for agencies. I had the time of my life.

Starting a real company

In 2006, I co-founded a web agency called Media Mates with my buddy Yves, who I had met a couple of years before. Yves was passionate about sales and marketing, as I was about programming. Those first years were magical. We were complementary as hell, producing one project after another. I could entirely focus on the technical side of the business. I did design, front-end coding, back-end coding, customer support, and much more. It was a lot of fun. And it was good business as well: you could ask a decent amount of money for a web project, but it was no rocket science to build one. Responsive design? The term didn’t even exist yet. A CMS? Only if it was really really necessary…

We always saw the potential our little company had. The internet was still a pretty new thing in Belgium. Many companies didn’t even have a website yet, or if they did it was just a ‘digital business card’ as we called them. So we thought: count all the companies in Belgium we can serve… this is going to be huge! We hired our first employee in 2008. Things began to grow organically to 3 employees in 2009.

In 2010, Yves left the company to build his own business about, you guessed it, sales & marketing. He became a successful and well-known sales trainer. We are still friends to this day.

On my own

So yeah, I was on my own. I still was the technical guy of course, so I hired a salesperson. I still believed in all the potential and we grew to about 10 people in 2015. But the business was not taking off as I wanted it to. Given the time and energy I put into the business, the profits were not what I had hoped for. The engine was running, but I couldn’t manage to put it in the next gear. Also, finding and keeping the right people turned out to be a real challenge.

So the question was: how can we turn this around? How can we create an agency that really stands out in the market? We came up with several things.

1. New office

I always dreamed of a cool office. An inspiring and fun place to work. In 2016, I bought an old building in Kortrijk, Belgium. In 6 months we did a complete renovation to turn it into a state-of-the-art office. Luckily I have a father who’s passionate about buildings and was excited to coordinate the whole operation. Thanks, dad!

I was very happy with the result. It really gave a boost to our team and brand awareness. And it saved us time as well: we didn’t need to drive to clients anymore, as they were eager to come and see our new office.

2. Rebranding

We did a complete rebranding and changed our name to Black Lion. We wanted to break with the past and build a whole new image. We also grabbed every opportunity to be in the press. It turned out to be pretty successful. Our name became well known. Many people I met had heard of it, something I never experienced in the Media Mates era.

3. Shuttle

We created Shuttle, a website builder to create websites without the need for coding. We offered it to other agencies as well to build sites for their clients. I was always searching for a product business to complement our service business, and this was an attempt in that direction. It was a decent success: almost 1,000 websites were created on the platform. I still have a nice recurrent revenue from it.

4. DUST

We created DUST, our own genever. ‘Dust’ means ‘thirst’ in my local dialect. The office building we moved to was an old genever distillery, so that’s where the idea came from. It was a really fun project which gave us a lot of press coverage.

5. Bar Noir

We held some client events with the name Bar Noir. The purpose was to invite prospects and clients, inspire them with a keynote about the state of the web, and have some drinks and food afterwards. I enjoy putting such events together and make sure every detail is right. People really loved it and I’m still proud of it. We even made an after movie:

All these things had one goal: to take our sales and marketing to the next level. To make sure everyone had seen us, heard from us, and would like to meet us. To be top of mind: make sure that, if you think about a new website or webshop, the first thing that comes to mind is Black Lion.

Why? Because we’re in a service-oriented project business. We sell a project, build it, and move on. Once a client is served, he won’t order a new project. You need a new client. Cold calling alone won’t get you all these clients. You want them to come on their own through marketing.

Where did it go wrong?

All these marketing initiatives cost a lot of money. If you get good business out of it, that’s okay. But we didn’t. Turns out the web business is not made for such high marketing costs. Prospects and clients don’t care about all those fancy stuff. Do you have a cool new office? They’ll come and take a look at it, but it won’t drive their decision to buy from you. The number of competitors is huge, and most of them have very low-cost structures. You simply cannot compete that way.

The pressure on the sales department to keep 20 people busy is enormous. I underestimated that a lot. But why needed the team grow so fast when I didn’t know it was gonna work out? Well, I guess the answer is: you have the idea that bigger is better. You see other agencies & startups with 30, 40 or 50 people and you think they made it and sorted everything out. I wanted so badly to get to a point where everything was falling into place and the whole business ran smoothly on its own. My idea was that the only way to get taken seriously by clients and employees and make some real profit, was to grow to a decent team size.

Guess what? Bigger is not always better. When the team is small, you think you can multiply everything. If you have 3 people and x profit, and you grow your team to 15, you get 5x profit, right? Not so fast. I underestimated the cost and effort it takes to manage a bigger team. Suddenly you need to hire an HR Manager to cope with all the employee and salary stuff. Oops, that was not in my business plan. Even some SaaS apps will cost you suddenly more than you expected (take JIRA for example: free for up to 10 users, beyond that it will cost you $1,700/year). And it all adds up fast. Many business plans fail because you can so easily multiply in Excel.

Another consequence is that you become a manager outside your will. As I am mostly a technical person myself, that was a role that didn’t suit me so well. Remember my passion from 1997 about web development? I rarely got my hands on any code anymore. I was constantly dealing with managing everything and worrying about all the problems, even in my spare time. It’s like a CPU constantly running in the back of your head, draining your battery.

The last straw

In March 2018, the sales figures dropped significantly. Despite all the branding and marketing we did, they fell like a stone. I was desperate and had no idea how to turn the situation around. This was the final straw that took my last energy.

Some weeks passed by and things didn’t get any better. In April 2018, my wife Claire and I sat down at the kitchen table and tried to come up with a solution. The atmosphere was tense. I felt really bad and felt failed as a person. The whole situation had also been weighing a lot on our relationship.

Claire asked me what I really wanted in life. What are you good at? What do you enjoy the most? What if you woke up tomorrow and everything you built was gone, what would be the first thing you do? And then it hit me. I needed to gain back the passion I had as a young adult. The love for the web I had since the day I saw it. We asked ourselves if it would be possible to return to that situation. At first, it seemed impossible. But you know what? Nothing is impossible if you really want it.

The next few days we laid out the steps it would take to work on my own again without interrupting the whole business. A week later we informed my employees. It was one of the toughest things I ever did. How do you tell 20 people you will all fire them?

I knew there was only one way to do it: to explain in every possible detail how I’ve come to this point and that there was absolutely no other option. That night, I started writing and couldn’t stop until 2 o’clock in the morning. It was quite emotional but at the same time, it felt as a big relief.

On Friday 27th of April, I gathered everyone in the office. Claire sat next to me as I read my letter. I was determined and was not nervous. I knew in my heart that it was the right thing to do for everyone in the room.

Of course, they were shocked. Most of them didn’t see it coming. But first of all: no one had a single unpaid day. Most of them still worked a couple of weeks/months for me after the decision, and they got their severance pay entirely legally. Fortunately, the demand for web developers is pretty high, so everyone got a new job almost immediately. In fact, as the news spread, they were overwhelmed with job offers. Four of them even decided to start a new web agency together, how cool is that?

Then I needed to tell the clients. Dozens of them called me to know what would happen to their website. I assured them everything would be okay and the business would keep running, only in another, smaller, form. After some explanation behind the decision, they all were very compassionate and supportive. After all, they’re also entrepreneurs who know about the struggles it takes. Some of them even congratulated me for the courage I had to make such a hard decision.

I spent a year working day and night to get everything done, finish all the running projects, do all the customer support and keep all clients happy. Suddenly 20 mailboxes were forwarded to my inbox, what had I done? But despite all the work and stress to get everything done, I felt pretty great. I saw light at the end of the tunnel I put myself in.

Around that time, Paul Jarvis released his book Company of One. I immediately ordered and read the book. He described exactly my feelings about building a business, keeping everything as small as possible, and grow only if there are absolutely no other options. I felt so understood. If only my 20-year old self would have read that book!

And last year, Arvid Kahl published Zero to Sold. He writes about bootstrapping a business, without any outside funding or assistance: “Bootstrapping is about accomplishing the unlikely using as few resources as possible.” Highly recommended.

2021

Now we’re 2021 and I couldn’t be any happier, despite the whole pandemic situation. I absolutely love my job, I earn more than I ever have, I have a brilliant relationship with my wife and I can spend a lot of time with our 2 little daughters. I’m even working on a new project. What else is there to wish for in life?

Here’s my final advice: don’t spend time thinking about what others expect from you or what they think you should do in life. Figure out what you love the most of all and go for it. It may sound selfish, but the most important thing in life is you and your mental health. Also, it’s much better to make a hard decision than to make no decision at all.

Good luck!