Journalist Benny Debruyne articulated it perfectly in his article on Participium in Trends of 7 April 2016: “We are going to build companies”. That is exactly what Participium wants to do: create a business, create a lean start-up company around it, let that company quickly do business with its first customers and then achieve years of growth with a solid capital injection. The role of Participium is not that of an investor, but that of an inventor, entrepreneur and manager.
Francis Dams (left on the photo) is a lecturer at the University of Antwerp, and made Participium realize that, for the early stage, they need a typical entrepreneur such as Jan Lagast (partner at Forte, center of the photo) with a lean team. The years of growth on the other hand are best supported by an experienced manager such as Herman Demarbaix (former top director in the petroleum sector, right on the photo).
Every company gets its own manager, also known by Participium as business leader. They call it that way because they want that person to focus on generating business and coaching the team to develop that business and to take good care of customers. The business leaders of Participium are typically 45+ people who are tired of the corporate environment and yet do not want to take the risk to develop their own company alone. Participium offers them a team consisting of a visionary inventor, a financial planner, a business analyst and a back-office operations manager. Each of them providing support services. They also find a company that has traction in the market already, so they don’t have to (re) invent the wheel themselves. They will find a team that searches together for the capital they need in order for that first nucleus to grow into a beautiful pan-European growth company.
Many financial parties answer “team-team-team” to the question “what do you think are the three most important success factors for the future of a company”. The bringing of this very team is the strength of Participium. Special thanks to Jo Libeer for this reminder.
Participium 