Your personal coach in your pocket

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Pitch

Intuo is a talent enablement platform that provides the alternative to the yearly evaluation cycle, in your pocket! They introduced a system that helps people and offers data on skills and careers. Intuo focuses on CEO, manager and employee and provides a solution to increasing issues such as retention, engagement, coaching and employee experience, to name a few.

Our customers want to offer value to their employees. Our early adopters are recruitment companies, professional staffing companies and consultancy companies. People are the centre of the organisation since they are the product. We have more than halved some of our customers’ churn. If you can do such things, you really influence their business model which then again has an impact on their profit.

Facts & Figures

Intuo was founded in 2013 with three main operational shareholders: Gilles Mattelin, Tim Clauwaert and Philip de Smedt. In 2017, the company nearly tripled its turnover to more than €1,100,000. In the last 12 months, we have doubled again and we want to keep it that way for a while. We are proud to have come this far without having to raise a single euro in venture capital, although at the start we had €210 000 from angel investors at our disposal. In 2018 we have 28 employees and have paying customers in more than 5 countries. We currently do business development for only three markets: Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK. We have a client portfolio of more than 100 companies including USG People and Brussels Airport.

Ideally, every company should continuously be in startup mode

Own your career

Making a difference comes down to recognizing and managing emotions: Everyone is going to have amazing technology in their company, so it’s your people who will make the difference. We hope to have a head start. At the moment our competitive path is empty. Other companies, however, will undoubtedly evolve in our direction.

 We ensure that there’s an increase in efficiency of coaching and communication. A manager might not think to ask, “What has given you energy in the last three weeks?” A manager asks “How are you feeling?” and ticks off a checkbox. We are trying to have more meaningful conversations. We don’t replace people, we facilitate them.

Coaching is considered to be a soft skill, but it is sometimes your responsibility to be tough. If you win, you are satisfied with your coaching even if you were harder. But every individual should own their career. Using their own data, employees can decide which data the employer can use to help them improve to realize the strategic goals. Does it help you if someone knows your glucose level? Maybe not. But then maybe yes, if you knew it will help you to detect early onset diabetes, for example.

Coaching is not about exposing your weaknesses. Coaching is about learning to live with others’ weaknesses. If I had focused on my employees’ weaknesses, we would not have seen this growth. Let people devote 60-80% of their time to the things they get energy from, and they will probably perform well too.

 Performance

 We traditionally combine two things in performance reviews. We want to help make sure that people are more performant in the future, and at the same time, we, sometimes negatively, look back on their previous performance. Human nature makes it so that during these conversations, we feel we are being criticized. Little thought is given to the “helping” aspect. I am not against the annual evaluation, in principle, but if your once-a-year evaluation is the only time you talk about how your employee is doing, you’re not doing it right.

Competence management–in the way it is currently organized within many companies–is outdated. In a company of 2,000, it is very difficult to manage everyone's skills. We are more interested in doing this from a crowd and/or peer-sourced way.

 Research & Ambition

We want to become a key European player in HR automation and started our international efforts the past 12 months. We could even have grown faster in Belgium if we had limited our focus to home. But conquering Europe is an opportunity, though a difficult one because of the many cultural differences. In all honesty, our choice of countries was a combination of research and random guessing. We did not have the resources to do extensive research on market opportunities. Of course, we knew that a lot of European and global businesses are headquartered in The Netherlands. The same for London, which is still the global hotspot for many companies. We tried both out and they appeared to work.

Momentum

There are quite some interesting evolutions in our sector. In the last 40 years, HR has been becoming more of a commodity, like payroll and compensation and benefits. Some providers are tackling these components with very small margins.

After the automation of administration, sales and bookkeeping, we now notice an openness to start working on the more human side of human resources. This creates an opportunity to not use data to punish but to leverage people’s capabilities and drive business performance. At least, that’s the direction we believe companies and people should move towards.