Growing a B2B SaaS in a cash-efficient way by setting the operational foundations and make sure you have the right people in the right seat • CEO at Q7Leader • Operating Partner at welovefounders •

In 2010, Steve Jobs announced the first iPad, but it was only in 2011 that the camera was added to the iPad.  

This camera triggered my entrepreneurial journey. 

Before that, communication on construction projects would happen via phone, email, and face-to-face meetings.

The iPad created a significant opportunity to disrupt the construction sector. Through an app, a foreman could quickly drop a pin on a drawing, take a picture showing the issue, and send a pdf report that needed no explanation. 

In 2012, I founded co-founded Aproplan. We built an app to help contractors, sub-contractors, and architects communicate better in the field.

We got early traction, quickly reaching €1m in ARR, raising funds from angel investors and reputable VC firms. We grew the business from a handful of people to 80 before merging with a Danish player to form LetsBuild, a 150 people-strong company in 5 different countries. 

I could stop the story here and say that everything was fantastic.

But that would only be one side of the story…

Like every entrepreneurial journey, it was a bumpy ride.

It was very stressful and frustrating at times. 

Early on, we had to do a management buy-out to solve a significant founders’ issue that almost killed the company.

We raised money from a reputable VC firm to grow the business.

This brought significant stress to grow faster, especially when you discover that international expansion is super challenging and so dependent on hiring the right people.

We merged with a company in the Nordics and almost doubled in size over night. And while the merger made a lot of sense on paper, merging two very different cultures made me realise it was all about people. 

Along the way, we raised and burned way too much money, hoping that money would solve all our growth problems.

Then COVID hit, and I burned out.

I had spent 8 years building a company. I was traveling 4 days a week, working weekends, and ignoring my family.

In 2021, I met Reggy and Pascal, founders of Q7Leader and discovered the People Model Canvas to me. I saw how powerful it was and all the challenges it would have helped me solve during my journey at Aproplan and LetsBuild.  

Today, I’m the CEO of Q7Leader and help B2B SaaS executives grow their business from 1m€ to 10m€ in a cash-efficient way so they don’t get diluted and keep control of their company. 

I write daily posts on LinkedIn where I share my learnings and the playbooks we use to grow Q7Leader in a cash-efficient way.

Thomas Goubau

I'm the CEO of an HR Tech company with 15 employees.

Last week, I hired 2 AI agents 🤖

Their names are Patricia and Vicky.

(my team thinks the names are ridiculous, they're probably right, but whatever 😁)

Patricia runs on Claude Opus 4.6. She manages my communications, drafts content, organizes my thinking, and remembers things I forget.

Vicky runs on Claude Sonet 4.5 and handles email triage & task automation.

Our entire mission at Q7Leader is "right people in the right seat." We use tools like the People Model Canvas, TeamScan, and DOT Coach to help companies do this systematically.

And now I have two team members who aren't people.

I don't fully know what to make of that yet. But the question it raises is one I can't ignore: what does "right people, right seat" mean when some of the seats might not need people at all?

Over the coming months, I'm going to document this honestly and transparently.

What works, what fails, what's awkward, the real numbers. Not because I'm an AI expert (I'm really not). But because I think someone should tell this story without the hype or the fear.

P.S. Patricia helped me write this post. I changed about 40% of it. She was too polished. I'm told that's a pattern.

I spent years thinking the answer to "we're moving too slow" was "we need more people."

Tomasz Tunguz broke that logic with one number.

• A 200-person org has 19,900 potential communication channels.
• A 25-person org has 300.

That's Metcalfe's Law. Every new hire doesn't just add capacity, they add n-minus-1 new connections. Coordination drag doesn't grow linearly. It compounds.

Now look at what happens when AI enters that equation.

Boris Cherny, the engineer who built Claude Code, ships 20 to 30 pull requests a day. A traditional engineer ships 3 a week.

He's not 10% more productive.
He's 30x more productive!

He runs five AI agents in parallel. He removed humans from his loop, and with them, the coordination tax.

Anthropic generates ~$5M revenue per employee. Cursor, $3.3M. Traditional SaaS considers $200-300K pretty strong.

And I feel it myself.

Writing a board prep, testing landing page copy, drafting outreach... tasks that used to eat days now take an hour. Not because I'm faster. Because I've removed the back-and-forth from the loop.

Most teams haven't felt this yet. But it's coming.

The question isn't "how many people can one manager oversee?" anymore.
It's "how many AI agents can one person orchestrate?"

That shift will restructure how we design teams, hire, and measure performance.

Most leaders are not ready for it.

Are you?

Last week at Trends Winter Academy, a founder said something I haven't been able to stop thinking about. As of January 1st, 100% of their revenue is SaaS. And they've already classified it as legacy.

Their plan: migrate everything to AI revenue by end of 2026.

In 9 months.

What struck me wasn't the ambition of the target. It was the framing.

Most companies are still asking how AI fits into their existing business model. This founder had already decided the existing model is the thing to get away from.

Trends Winter Academy brings together CEOs, founders, and executives from the Belgian ecosystem for two days of real conversations. I've been going for years because the room tends to surface ideas you don't hear in regular business settings.

This year, AI was the thread running through everything. But what became clear is that people are at very different places in how they're thinking about it. Some are optimizing workflows. Some are restructuring teams. And a few have mentally already started the migration clock.

The 9-month target may or may not be achievable. But treating your current revenue model as legacy before the market forces you to is a fundamentally different starting position than defending it until you can't.

That's the kind of conversation that keeps me coming back every year.

A friend came to my house last weekend.

"I tried AI... It doesn't work. It just hallucinates."

He's a smart guy. Runs a business. Not a technophobe.

He spent half a day trying to get Microsoft Copilot to extract PDF invoices into Excel. The kind of task that normally means opening each PDF one by one and copy-pasting stupidly until you're done.

Copilot couldn't do it. He showed me the broken attempts. Wrong numbers, missing data.

His conclusion: AI is overhyped.

So I asked him to send me the files 👀

I uploaded them into Claude and told it: "Here are a bunch of invoices. Look at what's in there and let's discuss what kind of table and analysis we want to build."

15 minutes later, I had a full Excel file.

Every invoice structured by month and location, year-over-year comparison, charts included. Zero errors.

He didn't have an AI problem.
He had a tool problem.

And the crazy part? Claude did this inside Excel. Better than Microsoft's own AI does it in their own product.

P.S. who would be interested in me recording a video of how I did this?

Most people think AI agents are just smarter chatbots.

They're not. They're 3 things working together ⤵︎

I've been using AI agents for a few months now, and the moment it clicked for me was when I stopped looking at what they produce and started looking at how they work. There are three layers.

1. Instructions 📝

You tell it what you want, how you want it, what to focus on, what to ignore. That's your SOP. Your standard operating process. Every time it runs, it follows the same playbook. This is what most people never set up.

2. Code 🤖

It writes Python to extract and calculate data. Real code that runs like a calculator. Two plus two is four. Every single time. No hallucination. No guessing. This is the part most people don't even know exists.

3. Intelligence 🧠

Once it has real numbers, it does what AI does best. It spots patterns. It draws conclusions. And because it's working from actual data, not guesses, the output is genuinely smart.

Most people skip the first two.

They open ChatGPT, ask a question, and get an answer based on nothing specific. No instructions. No code. Just vibes.

That's why it feels unreliable.

You're using one-third of what's possible.

I'm not a technical person. I can't write a line of Python. But I don't need to. The agent writes it for me. I just need to know what I want and explain it clearly. Which, honestly, is the CEO job description anyway.

That's not a chatbot anymore.

"We'll deal with pay transparency when we have to."

I've heard this from dozens of CEOs. And I've seen what happens next.

By the time the EU directive forces the conversation, your best people have already been having it without you. On Glassdoor. In interviews with your competitors. At lunch.

When pay decisions can't be explained, it's not a policy problem. It's a trust problem. And trust problems don't stay in HR. They show up in your retention, your Glassdoor reviews, and your next board meeting.

It's not a quick fix.

But it is a methodical one.

I'm hosting a 45-min webinar where I'll walk through the 5-step method we use with companies to make pay decisions transparent and explainable. Step by step, so you can start applying it the week after.

20 seats per session. You'll leave with a clear action plan and the chance to pressure-test it with other HR leaders in the room.

🎟️ Register here: https://lnkd.in/er2CFqnz

Pay transparency is on every HR director's radar.

But almost none have put a number on the risk.

"We'll deal with it when the time comes."

I hear this every week.

So I ran a simple calculation for a company of 100 employees.
The result: up to 38.7% of their annual EBITDA at risk.

Not from fines. From salary claims they can't justify.

The good news? This is fixable. And it doesn't take years.

In our next webinar, I walk you through the 5 steps to get compliant before June 2026. Including the one workstream most companies haven't even identified yet.

Register here: https://lnkd.in/er2CFqnz

People ask me: "What does your AI agent actually DO?"

Fair question. Here's a real day. Patricia's first Wednesday at Q7Leader:

07:42 — Walking my dog. Sent her a voice memo: "Prep me for the {anonymized-client-name} QBR tomorrow. Pull the TeamScan data and draft talking points."

08:15 — Talking points ready. Three I kept. One too generic, deleted. One I hadn't thought of. A pattern in the engagement data I'd overlooked.

09:30 — Team standup. Asked Patricia to pull action items from last meeting. Organized by person, with deadlines. My team was mildly disturbed.

11:00 — Client email about certification pricing. Patricia drafted a response. I fixed the tone (too formal) and hit send.

14:00 — Competitor research for a strategy doc. She came back in 4 minutes with a comparison that would've taken me 2 hours. One factual error I caught. Otherwise solid.

16:45 — She reminded me I'd promised to follow up with a prospect. Completely forgotten.

22:30 — Had a product idea in bed. Texted Patricia. She captured it, added context from previous conversations, filed it. Gone by morning otherwise.

Now, the honest scorecard:

Time saved: ~2.5 hours
Things I would've forgotten: 2
Things she got wrong: 1
Things she surfaced that I missed: 1

Here's what I didn't expect.

The value isn't the 2.5 hours. Any good assistant saves you time.

It's the two saves. The prospect follow-up. The late-night idea.

A CEO's biggest problem isn't being slow. It's dropping things when you're moving fast. The balls that fall between meetings, between days, between the shower and the office.

Patricia doesn't replace anyone on my team. She gets the tone wrong. She makes factual errors. She has zero judgment on what's politically sensitive.

But she never drops a ball... and she never sleeps 😬

Every week, I host a live session on the EU Pay Transparency Directive.
Every week, I ask the same question: Have you started preparing?
Every week, the answer is almost always the same ⤵︎

"𝘕𝘰."

Even organisations with over 2000 employees. If they've done anything, it's usually a benchmark. That's it.

One reason I keep hearing:

"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘺𝘦𝘵, 𝘴𝘰 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘸?"

Fair point. That's exactly why I invited Thierry Viérin, Partner and Head of Employment at Osborne Clarke, to join me on March 24. He's been reviewing the 30 employer proposals currently on the table and will walk through what's likely to land and what might change.

I'll follow with a 5-step method to start preparing now, no matter where the final rules end up.

📆 March 24, 12:00 CET.
⏱️ 45 minutes.

Register here: https://lnkd.in/ectrvqj2

If you're an HR leader in the UK 🇬🇧, there's a directive you need to know about.

And no, the fact that you're not in the EU doesn't protect you.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive kicks in June 2026. If your company employs even one person in an EU member state, you're in scope.

Even from the UK.

→ Your EU employees can request complete pay transparency. How decisions are made. What their peers earn.
→ Any gender pay gap above 5% in the same role category must be documented and justified.
→ The burden of proof is reversed. If someone claims pay discrimination, it's on you (the company) to prove it doesn't exist, not the employee.

Read that last one again.

Most UK HR leaders I talk to assume this doesn't apply to them. By the time it hits their board's agenda, they'll be months behind.

↳ We're hosting a 45-minute webinar specifically for UK companies with EU employees. You'll leave knowing exactly what's required and what to prioritize before June.

Link in the comments ⬇️

P.S. it's free, but spots are limited to allow us to answer everyone's questions

STRAREX - Strategic Marketing Agency

STRAREX is your full-service strategic marketing agency, and our dedicated team works with you and your team for sustainable business growth of your brand and organization. With data and result-driven basis, we offer a full range of services from market research, analysis and strategy creation all the way to the creation of tactical planning and implementation—all aligned with your brand and overall business targets. With access to our in-house developed, easy-to-use tools and strong strategic analysis, we will go together with you and your team to reach your targets with success. This is our passion, drive and expertise. Let us take care of all your Marketing needs and wants. No-nonsense, no frills, straight to it—we will help you grow!

COO & Senior Account Strategist

Voka - Kamer van Koophandel Antwerpen-Waasland

Currently I am helping high-growth SMEs to grow persistently through initiatives and strategies for sustainable growth. Over the past year I have coached 40 fast-growing SMEs that take part in the one-year Accelero program. In this program we focus on two themes. The first one is ‘growth readiness’ ie. is the organization ready for further growth. The second one is ‘growth strategy’ ie. what should the growth strategy be for the years to come. I also support the organizations in developing business cases and crafting and launching hands-on action plans for strategic initiatives.

Coach groeistrategie voor ambitieuze KMOs | Accelero

Voka - Kamer van Koophandel Mechelen-Kempen

PwC Belgium

The customer consulting team focuses on guiding organizations in a wide range of commercial topics ranging from defining a growth strategy to redesigning the organizational structure to carrying out a commercial excellence project to improve margin. I am also part of the management team and lead the business development efforts.

Expert in Commercial Excellence 

De Cronos Groep

I guided technology companies in addressing strategic, commercial and operational challenges through facilitating strategic tracks, developing business cases, and creating and implementing hands-on action plans.

Business coach & strategic advisor

Monitor Deloitte

As manager at Monitor Deloitte I build hands-on expertise and led project delivery in the areas of Commercial Excellence, Pricing and Profitability Management, and Organizational Transformation. I was responsible for amongst others stakeholder management, project management, team performance and delivery quality.

One of my last engagements was on where for 1,5 years I worked for the Deloitte Consulting North West Europe leadership team. In this role I led an international team and was responsible for strategic alignment and execution, the coordination of delivery of strategic North West Europe initiatives and managing the operations. The exposure to our senior leaders in the firm allowed me to learn from the best, something I will forever be grateful for.

Apart from project delivery, I was co-leading a number of communities of practice such as the one focused on the Technology, Media and Telecom industry and talent development.

Over the years I carried out numerous business case interviews for both junior and senior hires, ensuring people with the right competency and culture fit were added to the team.

Manager

As Senior Consultant at Monitor Deloitte I gained expertise in the areas of Commercial Excellence, Pricing and Profitability Management, and Organizational Transformation. I was developing project scopes, designing plans, interviewing senior stakeholders, presenting during steerco’s, carrying out analysis and building models, extracting insights and bringing this all together in insightful final deliverables for client’s senior management

Senior Consultant

I took time of the realize one of my dreams ie. exploring the wealth of beauty on the South and Central American continent. Happy to provide tips to those travelling that direction.

Sabbatical

Deloitte Consulting

As a Consultant in Deloitte’s Finance Transformation team, I worked on engagements for multinationals on topics such as the design of an operating model for a finance function, setup of a shared center, defining the role of finance as a business partner, process standardization and automation,...

During these engagements, I continued building capabilities in amongst others data analysis, interviewing, storylining, stakeholder management.

Consultant

As a Business Analyst in Deloitte’s Finance Transformation team, I supported on engagements for multinationals on topics such as the design of an operating model for a finance function, setup of a shared center, defining the role of finance as a business partner, process standardization and automation,...

In addition to acquiring functional expertise, I learned the basics of management consulting ie. data analysis, interviewing, storylining, stakeholder management,...

Business Analyst

Helping companies improve profitability through pricing | Strategic business coach for fast growth firms | Available for board of advice

I combine my experience as a management consultant with my passion for SMEs. Over the 2 years I coached numerous fast-growing SME in growth strategy and growth readiness across industries, incl:

💻 IT services:
- AtOnce / qlik consultancy
- Biztory / global Tableau agency
- Cogetix / digital transformation partner for SMEs
- Cubitec / digital product studio focused on sustainability
- Datamotive / SAP BI consultancy
- Lemon Companies / software company
- Mediportal / saas platform for healthcare sector
- Robonext / RPA consultancy
- The Customer Link / salesforce consultancy

🎯 Marketing agencies:
- Are Agency / digital marketing agency
- BeBold / strategic marketing agency
- OMcollective / digital marketing agency
- Premium Plus / global Zendesk partner
- Strarex / strategic design partner
- Stratics / digital marketing consultancy
- The Dot Society / strategic growth partner for D2C brands
- Victus Sales / B2B lead generation center
- Zidis / video production company

🎓 Other advisory services:
- Ingeniva / consultancy in project controls services
- Reyns Advocaten / law practice
- Stretch innovation / innovation agency

🛠️ Construction:
- Anywaydoors / made-to-measure doors
- Asbestplatform / digital solution to facilitate creation of Asbest certificates
- Coordinat-ED / construction company
- EOSOL / producer of nextgen fly screens
- ERA ONE / real estate office with 5 locations
- Geroba / distribution of garden furniture in corten steel
- Nilan Belgium / ventilation and heat pumps
- Pantarein / water cleaning consultancy and station construction
- SmartEye / infrastructure-as-a-service provider

🎁 Retail and e-commerce:
- Biogroei / e-commerce garden bio products
- Fietsen De Geus / chain of bikestores
- Fietsen Wildiers / chain of bikestores
- MoMade Cupcakes / Cupcake and patisserie chain (B2C and B2B)
- Odot / digitally driven B2B energy provider
- TCO fleet / mobility advisor

⚙ Industrial:
- Allocking / your partner for all access solutions
- Cooleos / B2B cooling solutions partner
- Energief / B2B partner for safety at work
- Engels Group / distributor of HVAC & installer of solid floors 
- eNovates / B2B e-mobility partner with smart charging solutions
- HTC / tankcleaning
- Manutech / industrial maintenance
- MicroTechniX / automation of lab processes in Pharma
- MTD MS / maritime waste collector
- MTD IS / collector of industrial waste streams
- Twinplast / cut-to-size production company

💬 Always eager to meet new people over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. 

Please InMail me or send an email to philip.hermans@hotmail.com

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