We are proud to announce that as of today, for the next 30 days, we open the Herculean cooperative company to new investors. You could be one of them and you are not alone.
Together with banks and co-investors we are raising up to 1,5mil EUR to scale-up the Herculean business all over the world.
We are deeply humbled that during the private launch of the past weeks almost 500K was already raised and banks have confirmed for another 500K.
So now it’s a great time for YOU to join. Why?
Because you believe in the Herculean business
Because you can invest from 100 EUR already
Because you will become a Herculean ambassadors and will receive advantages (you will be invited as a VIP for the Herculean Days, which is already worth 175 EUR)
Because the whole process is driven by professionals
Because you are not alone
Because you want to show the world that cooperative entities are the new normal
Because we are a scale-up with a proven track-record since 1999, not a start-up
How?
Just click on https://www.mymicroinvest.com/nl/financings/2593-herculean, read the investment profile and invest online. A very limited private crowd has already invested 20K in the past days. They were invited to two private investment events, and they loved the story.
Did you already invest?
THANK YOU. Good Karma is coming your way and you will start receiving priviliged information about our business. Feel free to spread the vibe to all your friends by sharing our message online.
Woke up this morning with Wouter Torfs on my Facebook wall. Probably because Mr Zuckerberg decided it was relevant.
Friday is our Herculean Scrum day. We look back one week, try to be thankful, finish stuff that should have been finished, do some serious cheering, learn new insights and start making new plans for the next week…because the world changed again, like every week. And guess what: things you couldn’t predict or imagine DID happen, just like every week.
We believe that an agile mindset, a growth mindset, brings happiness.
It rarely happens that I relate nearly 100% with an interview. And it almost never happens that I listen more than once. This time it was different. Kudos Wouter Torfs, Zwijgen is geen optie and Anthony Bosschem. You made me smile. You made me think and write. Here’s the interview in Dutch.
Want to share a few personal take-aways to remember when I turn 45 at the end of this year (no, not 50!!!)
“Pull yourself by the hair out of the swamp”, is exactly what I told the crowd a few days ago. And it made me very emotional on stage when I said it and looked at Inge and my parents from stage. Being a first generation entrepreneur, chasing your dream, feeling like everything depends on you, having to “fix” everything, is the most difficult part of the job. It’s a marathon. It’s draining. Nobody will do it for you. It shapes you, but it confronts you with loneliness. My family, enough rest and daily meditation keep my energy levels high.
Et Alors? When you are out there, doing everything you can, fighting for every inch, protecting your baby, you often get the feeling that people turn against you. That the gods are testing you to see if you really want to go for it. During that struggle you go from mistake to mistake. You learn and adapt. As I turn older, I become milder. I’m not there yet though, but I should according to my personal coach. Because it’s bad for my heart.
A company is more than a money-machine. As I’m a huge fan of cooperative thinking, this one’s right up my alley. Torfs grew tremendously in the past 10 years. And they did it while being Best Employer for 6 years. Respect! The multiples are comparable, but Torfs’ numbers are a lot bigger. Like…a lot! The challenges are the same I guess, because they don’t depend on the size of the numbers, but on the multiples. A company that grows 1% every year has different challenges than a company that grows with two digits year after year. When I explain our cooperative structure, I still see people think we are not about making money. People who join Herculean sometimes mistakenly think it’s all about “Flower Power”. It’s not. It’s about a lot of hard work and about growing! We ARE about making money and profit (otherwise you go out of business) but we are about sustainable growth and getting the right people on board and doing the right thing. We are about creating a system where the right people stay and other people automatically leave, no hard feelings. Where the right people build amazing experiences for customers, so customers come back and buy more, become ambassador and convince other customers to join, so we make a profit and stakeholders are happy about their investment. Not just happy about the financial return, but happy they could change the world a little bit. Happy they did it together with a lot of Herculeans out there.
“Moeidu”, or speak up! Anthony, the interviewer says: I can imagine that Barbara sometimes says: “Wouter, do shut up, we sell shoes Wouter, SHOES!” I couldn’t stop laughing when I heard that. As I had the opportunity to get to know Barbara a little bit in the past weeks – as she will become our new Managing Director Belgium and member of the Board – I could actually SEE her saying it 🙂 It’s in fact a topic that we discussed regularly during our initial talks: how far can you go as a company when it comes to formulating a public opinion? Inge and myself like to keep a low profile when it comes to our personal opinions. Inge even more than me. Lately, this is changing with everything we see happening in the world. As Hercules Trophy is a corporate festival, it represents a certain group of like-minded people and it’s our moral duty to formulate our opinions from time to time. So, Barbara, it’s now your time to speak up! 😉
Are you an entrepreneur or a smart investor with a proven track record? Are you looking for a solid investment opportunity with exciting international growth plans in the sportainment and corporate wellbeing business? Do you want to share your experience, open your network and learn from others?
After a summer of intense preparations, The Board of Directors, Board of Advice and Management team of Herculean Cooperation have decided to take the next step in the amazing Herculean history. We have started the next investment round in order to finance further international growth with smart capital.
Over the past 5 years, several investors joined the Herculean cooperative entity. Some of them were early believers when it was just a dream and some of them believed in the team when the business was still in investment mode. Today we are looking for people who believe in our sustainable growth plan, based on a profitable business.
Business theorists have long thought of strategy as a game of chess. By making the right moves, managers could diminish the threat of new market entrants and substitutes and improve bargaining power with buyers and suppliers. That, it has long been thought, was what led to sustainable competitive advantage.
Yet strategy in a networked world is different. Competitive advantage is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections. Strategy, therefore, must be focused on deepening and widening networks of talent, technology and information and we do that by accessing ecosystems through platforms.
So, if you are working on a strategy to increase your connections through sportainment or corporate wellbeing: you are not a competitor, let’s talk, because we’d love to co-create with you! If not: bring it, you’ll need more than 12 moves to beat the Herculeans 😉
Every year, we discuss our NY resolutions and pick a word that describes the whole theme.
2015 was all about “ambition”. Looking back at our initial plan and the experiences we had, the word was spot on. The song that influenced us the most was The Nights from Avicii.
For 2016, Inge came up with “Freedom” as it sums up all of our plans. I wanted to share Pharrell’s performance on the roof of the Tonight Show because that describes very accurately. However, it was nowhere to be found. The official version will do just fine. Have a Herculean one and let your firstname be Free lastname be Dom!
The former American Ambassador to Belgium made my weekend with a great interview. “The biggest risk in Belgium is cholesterol” and “It’s failed journalism, not failed state.” Hilarious that he was talking to a typical example of negative journalism. In the same weekend we lost the finals of the Davis Cup which would be celebrated in any other country. In this country the reporter said: “Tomorrow we will wake up with a bad hangover”. Seriously???
29/11/15 – Speaking in the VRT’s Sunday’s TV show “De Zevende Dag”, the former American ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, discussed the issue about whether or not Belgium could be called “a failed state” as some foreign media are doing. “Belgium is the 14th safest country in the world. If it would be a failed state, then the U.S. would be Afghanistan”, Gutman said. Still, it seems Belgium’s image abroad has been seriously dented in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks: “The only failure Belgium has had, is that it let others control the message.” (interview Tim Pauwels)
Scientists gradually begin to understand the wholesomeness of meditation: more compassion, better quality of life and reduced levels of stress, depression, anxiety, pain or insomnia. The American neuroscientist Sara Lazar spent the past years doing elaborate research on the effect. The most striking finding was that the brain actually changes after 8 weeks of meditating, as new grey matter arises.
Dr. Lazar came to the conclusion that meditating can literally change your brain. Long-term meditators have an increased amount of grey matter in the insula and sensory regions, the auditory and sensory cortex compared to a control group.
Empathy and compassion
It’s well-documented that our cortex shrinks as we get older – it’s harder to figure things out and remember things. But in this one region of the prefrontal cortex, 50-year-old meditators had the same amount of gray matter as…
Another milestone achieved: “The most popular Corporate Games event, the Daman Hercules Trophy will now debut in Abu Dhabi at the Zayed Sports City Stadium on 13 February 2016. After a number of successful events in Dubai, the organisers of the event will be launching in Abu Dhabi and this edition promises to be full of exciting, fun and unusual challenges for corporates across Abu Dhabi. The organisers are expecting more than 100 teams to participate at the launch of the Abu Dhabi edition.”
It turns out going hard for eight hours straight every day isn’t the best way to get work done.
Contrary to the popular convention of working ourselves to exhaustion, researchers from the University of Toronto found that taking regular breaks actually makes you more productive. This is because, according to the study’s co-author John Trougakos, once our physical energy is depleted, so too is our pool of psychological energy. Essentially, if we’re working ourselves to the point of physical exhaustion, we’re not going to get superior work performance and focus in return.
