Hugues Vandepeutte, co-founder of EMAsphere, is handing over the CEO role to Bart Baute, currently Director of Operations. The latter will be focusing on the UK in particular.
Candidate for the title of Scale-up of the Year 2022, EMAsphere was created ten years ago with the idea of rendering obsolete the Excel files that had until then been exchanged by e-mail for reporting purposes. Today, the Walloon ‘Waze’ of business management has convinced many companies to call on its services. Belfius, BNP Paribas Fortis, Standard de Liège, Kazidomi and Grottes de Han are among its customers.
To get to this point, some €12 million will have been invested thanks to the support of players such as the listed holding company of former CNP employees Whitestone and the Carolo invest Sambrinvest. The company employs more than 65 people and expects to achieve double-digit sales growth of over €5 million by 2022.
Who is the new CEO?
EMAsphere was run by its two founders until 2021, and then by Hugues Vandepeutte alone. The time had come to make way for fresh ideas”, explains Vandepeutte. So, from Monday, he is handing over the CEO’s reins to the current Director of Operations, Bart Baute (33).
Baute, who has been on board since 2016, has until now been responsible for the development of the company in the north of the country, as well as in the Netherlands in particular, and was selected in April as one of the champions of the future by the Walloon Region. “As Hugues Vandepeutte points out, “He is perfectly trilingual and is used to meeting CFOs (EMAsphere’s main contacts), so he has all the necessary skills. “We’ve been preparing this handover for nine months, with the aim of ensuring that things run smoothly. Hugues is still very much involved, and is returning to his true loves: the product and finance”, comments the new CEO.
Setting course for the United Kingdom
The first challenge will crystallize in the UK. After installing connectors to the main local management software packages (Exact, Xero, etc.) over the last few months, the sales and marketing machine will now be launched around the Belgian solution. This solution automates the creation of scalable dashboards based on raw data. It differs from competitors such as Tableau or Power BI (Microsoft) in that it is turnkey.
In the long term, Luxembourg could also be of interest to the former ‘GPS for Enterprise’, as it was in France in the past, where it now accounts for around half of sales thanks to a partnership with banking giant BNP. “We could repeat this strategy,” says Bart Baute. EMAsphere now has offices in Louvain-la-Neuve, Ghent and Paris. Its tool is offered by BDO and Deloitte. It can be easily connected to Odoo and Teamleader, to name just a few of the software packages developed in Belgium.
SIMON SOURIS
Published in L’Echo, 06th of November 2023
