From +2000% growth to the edge of the cliff. The list of what I'd do again.
In 2019, Deloitte Fast 50 ranked us at +2289% growth. Three years later, the press was writing about how we nearly crashed. Here are the decisions I'd make differently.
In 2019, Sortlist won the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 with +2289% revenue growth over four years.
Three years later, the Belgian press was running stories about how we’d “avoided the crash.”
This isn’t an article about what went right. It’s about the decisions I’d make differently if I started over — in chronological order, no posturing, just the diff between what happened and what I’d do today.
2014 — I would have validated buyer-side value before monetizing the seller side
Before Sortlist, we had TeamCorner — a digital agency we built to learn how to sell B2B services. We signed about twenty clients, hit €50k in revenue within months, and landed a major pharma client in under six months. We learned fast.
But we carried that “sign, sign, sign” mentality too long into the marketplace phase. When Sortlist launched, we sold subscriptions to agencies to validate the model. It was noise. The real signals — were buyers actually finding better service providers through the platform? — got drowned in the satisfaction of having paying customers.
What I’d redo: validate buyer-side value before monetizing the seller side. In a marketplace, demand-side liquidity is the only real indicator of value at the start.
2015 — I would have pivoted six months earlier
We waited until the visibility-only subscription model clearly hit its limits before launching the active matching marketplace model. That pivot generated spectacular growth within months — proving we were right.
But we’d seen it coming. The signs that the first model was exhausted had been there for months: churn was accelerating, agencies weren’t renewing, they didn’t see the ROI.
What I’d redo: decide to pivot when the data suggests you should, not when it forces you. A pivot under pressure is always more expensive — in energy, in people, in capital — than an anticipated one.
2021 — I wouldn’t have hired so fast after the raise
This is the decision I feel the most.
After the €11M Series B, we hired at a pace nothing justified operationally. In 5 months, we’d added 50 people to a ~100-person organization. We were proud. We thought we were building.
The problem wasn’t the number of people. It was the speed. At that pace, onboarding becomes fiction. Managers receive teams before they’ve figured out their own mandates. Initiatives multiply because every hire justifies their existence through a project. And the energy that should go toward the core business scatters.
Investors had started flagging the excessive spend-to-revenue ratio by early 2022. The signal was clear. We had 8 months of runway. We took too long to hear it.
What I’d redo: cap hiring at 2-3 per month, regardless of cash available. And introduce a simple rule: no new position without a clear answer to “which KPI will this role move?” If you can’t answer that in one sentence, the role doesn’t exist yet.
2022 — I would have said no earlier and more often
This is the muscle I’ve developed the most since, and had the least of at the time.
When the bank account is full and the team is growing, saying no feels unnatural. Managers come with initiatives that make sense. Teams propose legitimate experiments. And you want to be the CEO who trusts, delegates, gives space. So you say yes.
What I should have understood sooner: in a scaling company, the scarce resources aren’t money — they’re attention and focus. Every yes to a secondary initiative is an implicit no to the main priority.
In 2022, we had too many parallel initiatives. In hindsight, if we’d concentrated the same energy on the core — matching quality, buyer conversion, lead value for agencies — the results would have been better with far less noise.
What I’d redo: at the start of every quarter, identify the two initiatives that truly matter. Explicitly refuse everything else. Good ideas at the wrong time are distractions.
2023 — I would have restructured several months earlier
The restructuring we announced in early 2023 — significant headcount reduction, new business model, back to focus — was the right call. But it should have been made six to nine months earlier, when the signals were already there and we still had more room to maneuver.
The problem with late restructurings: you lose your best people first. Talent has options, and when uncertainty rises, they leave before you ask them to stay.
What I’d redo: define clear trigger thresholds upfront. “If we miss two consecutive quarters AND monthly growth drops below X%, we decide.” Criteria defined in calm, applied under pressure. No waiting, no hoping things will fix themselves.
2023-2024 — I wouldn’t have waited on the pricing migration
The decision to force-migrate legacy subscribers to Sortlist+ was the right one. We made it too late.
We’d known for years that the flat-rate subscription model wasn’t capturing the value we were creating. But changing pricing on existing clients is uncomfortable. Sales teams resist. The board resists. And you keep pushing it back because there’s always another fire.
What I’d redo: treat repricing as a product initiative, not a commercial one. Define the target model, test on new accounts, measure for six months, then migrate existing clients with a structured plan. Never let underpriced contracts sit in the portfolio for more than 18 months.
What hasn’t changed
Despite all of this, a few principles held.
Clarity on the “why” gives energy in hard moments. We founded Sortlist to change how companies find their partners. That conviction survived the crises because it didn’t depend on financial results.
Transparency with the team always pays. Honestly announcing a difficult situation to a team that trusts you is hard. But the team that stays after that announcement knows exactly what they’re in. No illusions, no surprise six months later.
Hiring people better than you in their domains is the only real scaling strategy. Everything else is tactics.
The short version
If you’re a founder in growth mode, remember three things:
Focus is a resource you have to actively defend, every week, against everyone including yourself.
Bad decisions made under pressure always cost more than good decisions made in calm. So make the good decisions before you’re under pressure.
And the most important muscle to develop as a CEO isn’t knowing how to say yes. It’s knowing how to say no — with conviction, with respect, and without apologizing.
Thibaut Vanderhofstadt
11 years as B2B scale-up CEO (€10M ARR, 9 markets, 3 M&A). Fractional consultant for post-funding founders.