Thank you for visiting my blog. I experience regular bursts of inspiration and periods of total silence. You can always follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn. Underneath is my resume should you want to use it.
Yves is passionate about everything he does in his life. He’s an energetic business leader, go-giver, coach, techie, customer-person, family man. He’s a humble warrior, a pioneer who likes tough challenges and never ever gives up. Willpower, speed and discipline are his core talents.
He has had the chance to learn from amazing people in different industries, different countries and in different entrepreneurial jobs. With the help of his teams, he turned a few small ideas in successful multi-million dollar businesses.
Yves is convinced that purpose, great teams, process and strong networks can make people change the world into a better place. He deeply believes that everything we do is all about Energy and Resonance and that there’s more in life than IQ and EQ.
Yves loves to speak for large crowds, enjoys traveling, likes to share his thoughts, believes in long-term relationships, doesn’t believe in Unicorns but believes in Camels, hates politics, has a very broad interest, loves to learn from amazing individuals, has a passion for leadership, absorbs tons of information fast, enjoys coaching different types of people in achieving extraordinary goals and through his abstract thinking capacities he develops a clear vision on complex situations.
Together with Inge, he raises 3 kids in Belgium and Dubai. Yves has a Masters degree in Math and IT, an MBA and a post graduate degree in Operations Management. He speaks Dutch, French, English and understands German and went through all the usual and unusual corporate training programs. His library is bursting with books, some interesting, some not.
After University, Yves climbed the corporate ladder. He started as Project Manager in life insurance at Royale Belge/AXA, became CIO at Pauwels Trafo a global leader in the transformer industry, Business Unit Manager at Telindus the largest ICT integrator who was bought by Proximus, the Belgian incumbent operator, and finally CEO at Nascom, a pre-Facebook social agency.
At the very start of the recession of 2009, Yves and his wife Inge decided to take a big risk by ending their high-profile corporate lives to start “Herculean”, a cooperative company, in the basement of their house. In 2 years time, they took the amazing success of Hercules Trophy in Belgium to the UAE, The Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, Germany, Lithuania and the USA. Back in 1999 Yves started the Hercules Trophy with a few friends. Today, they count thousands of fans from large and small companies everywhere in the world.
At the end of 2011, Yves and Inge took on an extra challenge. They both wanted to do more good through sports. Yves became CMO for Special Olympics Summer Games Europe-Eurasia 2014 and Inge started the Herculix Foundation. In the meanwhile Yves also teached a few years at the Real Madrid Sports Management MBA.
In 2014, they founded the Hercules Academy to help organisations with holistic and integrated corporate wellbeing programs. They also started Hercules Projects in which they help organisations with the sportainment know-how that was collected over the years. Teambuildings, family days, incentives… everything that helps improve employee engagement. A few years later, the Pink Ladies Games were born. For Active Women Who Care. Again, thousands of women participated in this CSR project.
In the meanwhile they learned how to gather investors to help them grow the Herculean business. They even did equity crowdfunding and became “Crowdfunder of the year”. In 2019 they won the Techshare award from Euronext, which is an IPO readiness program. In 1999, Yves was awarded youngest CIO of the Year in Belgium.
In 2019, Duval Union joined Herculean as an important minority shareholder. Duval Union is a well known marketing ecosystem which was founded by the “Mad Men” of Belgium. We believe that HR will go through a similar transformation as Marketing, so it was a good idea to join forces. Herculean was rebranded to Herculean Alliance, employee engagement specialists. Crafting powerful workforces since 1999. We are building an ecosystem of experts, formats and technology. The Employee Engagement Awards were born at the beginning of COVID. Through the awards, we want to create a communtity of candidates, experts, nextgens, media and partners to listen, learn and share ideas on how to improve employee engagement. Because high engagement drives customer delight. In the years to come, this format will be rolled out internationally. During COVID, the book “Employee Engagement, what else?” was written. It identifies 12 drivers for employee engagement. The book is now being translated to English and Arabic with local cases from the UAE.