Exactly one year ago Herculean cvba, the holding company of all Hercules Trophy companies around the world, bought the remaining shares of Hercules Trophy Belgium.

As Inge and me decided to go fulltime for Hercules Trophy in 2010 and started Herculean cvba, we felt extremely uncomfortable with the vision of the 2 other shareholders (and vice versa). To avoid unnecessary frictions in our home market, we made the bold decision to do a management buy-out. The investors of Herculean cvba supported us 200% in our ideas. Without any bad emotions we completed the transaction in only 2 months time. Rest assure: after 13 years of collaboration, this requires a lot of maturity from all sides and I’m still grateful that everybody kept their coolness. The two former shareholders even visited this year’s edition and saw what we always wanted to implement was a huge improvement for a concept that already was awesome.

Now you know why we were able to design the new Hercules Trophy from scratch. And it worked! We kept the good stuff and added a lot of new features that confirmed our position of coolest sportainment festival on the planet.

Looking back, it’s best decision we’ve ever taken – for the fans and for us – but back in the days we faced many many many many doubts and fears and during the past year many hurdles crossed our path. So if you think that these type of strategy changes are easy, think again. I love the graph below by the way.