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

This will be my new business OS for 2026.

It’s my biggest breakthrough of last year, and it will definitely change how we do business for the next few years.

I’m very curious…

Have you heard about using Claude Code for business (AKA not for coding software)?

I’m thinking about sharing my learnings here on LinkedIn.
But I’ll only do it if there is interest 👀

Would you like to learn more about this?

P.S. I'm totally obsessed 😬

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 •

A 450-person company cut review time by 61%.

Now managers ask me to do MORE reviews, not less.

Two years ago, their annual cycle felt like torture.

HR chased forms.
Managers copied old comments.
Employees left reviews angry, not engaged.

They called us for a new tool.
They received a new ritual.

We killed long forms.
And we introduced:

• One shared General Expectation Profile for every role
• One simple D.O.T. structure for every 1‑1
• One 7‑minute prep ritual for every manager

Before a 1‑1, a manager now spends only 7 minutes of preparation per team member.

No more page-long notes, no more vague feedback.

During the 1‑1, both manager and employee see the same picture:

• Clear role expectations
• Concrete definitions, not gut feelings

Result after one cycle:

• 61% less time for reviews across the company
• Perceived fairness score up by 27 points
• Quote from one manager: “I love annual reviews.”

Performance management stopped being “evaluation”.
Performance management became “enabling performance”.

When managers ask for MORE reviews, I guess we created a system that works.

You told yourself you'd deal with pay transparency "in 2026" ... Well, it's 2026!

The EU Pay Transparency Directive is no longer a future problem. Deadlines are approaching, and most companies still don't have a plan.

550+ HR leaders have already joined our live sessions to get clarity on what's actually required.

Here's what we cover in 45 minutes:

→ What the directive actually requires (beyond the headlines)
→ A simple 5-step method to reach compliance
→ Where to start this quarter without getting overwhelmed

This Friday, you could finally have a clear roadmap instead of a vague sense of dread.

👉 Save your spot here: https://lnkd.in/er2CFqnz

P.S. We keep sessions small so you can ask questions - don't wait to book your spot 😉

Most founders have it backwards.

Last month, a former founder told me about a CEO in his portfolio who was perpetually overwhelmed. The diagnosis was simple: he was a 20/80 leader when he needed to be 80/20.

This CEO was dedicating only 20% of his time to high-leverage strategic decisions that only he could make, while burning 80% on tactical work others could handle.

Successful founders flip this ratio.

There's a classic example about a world-class surgeon who's also an excellent typist. Should she spend afternoons typing medical records? Obviously not. Her unique value is performing life-saving surgeries.

The same applies to startup founders.

The best founders focus on their "Zone of Genius" - where three things intersect:

1. Work that only you can do.
2. Work with the most organizational impact.
3. Work that genuinely energizes you.

That third element is critical. You might excel at financial modeling, but if it drains you, it's not your Zone of Genius.

Maybe yours is product vision, team building, or storytelling.

That's where your 80% should go.

Holistic Go-To-Market & AI for B2B / 12 domains / €2M up to €1B+ / 14 int. known experts.

As a Chief Revenue Officer, I operated 25+ B2B AI, SaaS and traditional companies in more than 20 industries, I can help you: 

- to build an AI-native modern revenue system. 

- to take your revenue system and team to the next level by taking full ownership as a CRO (full-time) or fractional CRO (every day, half a day)

- by supporting you and the team as a Revenue Architect and/or GTM advisor.

Stephane Maes

8 months in, I decided to shut down The GTM Syndicate and I'm looking for 1 (full-time) or two companies (my fractional, every day, half a day concept) to take their revenue system to the next level, using all my experience.

Can sugarcoat it LinkedIn style, but the truth is I didn't succeed in generating enough revenue and traction with the concept the past 8 months to make it a viable company - or to make a living out of it.

After ADCR Capital, I was convinced bringing together 20 known domain experts, spanning a narrative of the 21 domains of a modern revenue via "the house" narrative, would be a real game changer.

Most challenges are multi-domain and making the McKinsey focused on auditing revenue systems in total or a domain or subdomain would be refreshing. To be a real long term partner, who has that ability and that really knows you.

Turns out that was a mistake. But as the saying goes, you either earn, or you learn. Had 2 years of a lot of learning. I now decided for myself, it's time for earning again :).

I also had counted on certain dynamics between the experts and brand equity that catalyzed the brand. That ultimately didn't play out as I thought it would. That's also perfectly alright.

Deeply grateful to our 20 domain experts who lend me their face and brand for 8 months in my attempt to make this work.

Now I'm back on the market, looking for projects I can be passionate about as a seasoned operator (20+ B2B companies as executive revenue leader), ideally with an ACV of 50k to 1mio+, which is what my speciality is.

I always operated 1 or 2 companies historically and led the revenue team, taking it to the next level. It's what I always did since I was 22 years old, always via my management company. It's what I do.

Having been able to bring together this top group of people, hopefully is a demo of what I am capable of in terms of vision and building top teams. 

It's a piety customers or the market thought otherwise, but the market dictates and decides - always.

Would love to discuss, if I could add value to your company. Really someone who sits with you behind the whole chess board. Leading the revenue engine and team but also great with boards, investors, finance, funding and M&A - or overall contributing to the long term vision & strategy.

Feel free to reach out.

Looking for 1-2 companies as an AI-native revenue leader & company builder / CRO, Revenue Architect & GTM advisor / Winning By Design Ambassador

Since I shut down the GTM Syndicate a few days ago, what's next?

Back to being an operator & company builder, as a seasoned and AI-native revenue leader and Chief Revenue Officer profile.

Having effectively operated 25+ B2B SaaS, AI and traditional companies in the most various of industries, enables me to offer experience and a broad view, few can offer.

Gave it some thought and I'm open to finding the right company, with a great product and team where I can be very passionate about and have lots of fun.

Either dedicated (full-time) or two companies, according to my time-and-time again validated concept of being there every day, half a day (fractional).

Also very happy to guide revenue leadership teams and revenue team overall, as a GTM advisor, if you're already covered but would love to have me as a co-pilot and sound board.

How people buy has changed the past 2 years. A lot of people are still operating like two years ago, selling the same way, to a changed buyer in a changed world.

I could have a lot of impact on taking that revenue system next level and by building an ai-native revenue engine, adapted to today's buyer and market.

If you're building something cool, from early revenue up to 100m+, I'd be happy to explore if that might be a fit and how I can support you and the team.

Also not your typical "CRO" but a real company builder, proficient in finance, funding, investors, boards & M&A. Someone who really builds out the company with you and is much more than "just a CRO".

Open to VC-backed, PE-owned or bootstrapped.

Don't want to box it or limit it, curious what will come on my path now.

Also never worked 1 day in my life on payroll, so absolutely have that entrepreneurial spirit, by heart. It also has to work via my management company.

I also believe operators like that are very rare, and I truly could have an incredible impact, at the right company.

Feel free to reach out if that sounds like something worth exploring.

We don’t do deals. We build relationships. And in complex sales, that means time, patience, and a lot of asynchronous touch points.

Content, reputation and DMs. Conversations that go quiet and then restart months later. One of those conversations changed our entire direction.

A top CRO at a 100M+ company replied to an outbound message. We did discovery. At the time, I only had one thing to offer: a full revenue system audit. Really in the beginning of the GTM Syndicate and our first campaigns.

She gave me direct feedback. Clear. Sharp. Fair. And instead of defending the offer, we listened. That feedback became the reason I rebuilt everything.

We went from one monolithic audit to an overarching framework where companies can start with one domain, multiple domains, or the full system. Sales. Marketing. CS. RevOps. Partnerships. Subdomains when needed.

That was the real turning point.

Not a brainstorm. Not a roadmap session. One core ICP stakeholder taking the time to explain what would actually help.

Fast forward.

Nine months of iteration later. Continuous voice-of-customer loops. From rough outbound and MVP collateral to a fully orchestrated model with domain experts embedded where it matters.

Recently, their VP Sales left. She now needs to step and be the ad-interim solution herself and look for a permanent solution. 

Already overloaded (I l meanwhile learned how hard she works every day, to put that "overload" in full perspective). Already carrying the system. There only are so many hours a day.

She reached out again and asked a simple question: how would you help me turn Sales into a modern revenue system?

The answer wasn’t a deck.

We proposed:

1. First, a deep audit of the Sales domain

2. Then stepping in as ad interim VP Sales, part-time (every day half a day) up to 4/5th

3. A 6–12 month transformation where we build the system, build the team, then help hire and hand over to a long-term leader

That’s how I’ve always worked. Two companies at a time. Mornings and afternoons. Ownership, not advice.

I also told her, Sales of course never lives in isolation.

Marketing signal quality.
CS handoffs.
RevOps visibility.
Partnership motion.
ICP and ABM.
AI workflows for list building, intent, and account tracking.

When needed, Syndicate experts can plug in:

- Pricing and packaging that added 400M ARR across their 60 clients last year

- RevOps and HubSpot specialists mapping the full bowtie end to end

- Data and AI experts turning noise into usable signal

- Advanced, AI-driven Account-based Marketing

Nothing about this is transactional. It’s a relationship built over time, proven through iteration, and activated when things get real.

When your revenue system is under pressure, do you have partners who’ve already earned the right to step in and carry it with you?

We'd love to earn that right.

We don't do deals, we build relationships.

When was the last time you let someone look at your entire revenue engine?

Not a sales audit.
Not a marketing review.
Not a RevOps clean-up.

An outside-in look at how the whole thing actually behaves.

For most teams, the answer is never. Instead, help comes in fragments.

A sales expert looks at sales.
A marketing specialist fixes demand.
Ops cleans up tooling.
Everyone improves their part.

And still, the outcomes don’t change.

Because no one is looking at what those improvements do together.

2026 has started. And go to market has already changed so much in 2025.

Buyers changed how they buy. Signals moved. Cycles fragmented. AI amplified whatever was already broken or already strong.

In this environment, fragmented help isn’t just inefficient. It’s risky.

Local optimizations now create second-order problems faster than before. Progress in one domain quietly breaks flow somewhere else.

That’s why our starting point is always the same. We look at the system from the outside in. One domain, multiple domains, or the full revenue engine.

Depending on size, scale, and complexity, that ranges from:

1. Me screening the entire revenue system end-to-end

2. A small number of selected domain experts based on your specific challenges and me, screening your revenue system

3. For €50M+ companies, each domain being reviewed by its domain expert, coordinated as one system.

But this doesn’t stop at diagnosis. We’re not a strategy-only partner. And we’re not a collection of advisors handing over a deck.

Through the GTM Syndicate, we embed with your team.

We stay involved. We help you to decide what to implement and when. And we make sure it actually happens! That’s the difference.

Strategy.
Tactics.
Operations.
Execution sequencing.
All owned, not outsourced.

The output isn’t advice.

It’s a clear picture of how your revenue system behaves today. Plus a prioritized action plan based on impact, dependency, and risk.

From there, implementation finally makes sense. And it also sticks. Where you as an executive are the orchestrator. We just help you to make better music.

And for the right company, I’m not just helping with orchestrating from the outside. I’m still open to rolling up my sleeves. 

Being there every day or half a day. As your CRO inside the business. Or as a close advisor to you and your team, 2 to 4h a week. See myself adding a lot of value there in both scenarios.

Hit me up if any of this would seem interesting to you.

When was the last time?

I watched Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off last night. It hit harder than I expected. Not because of skateboarding.

He was world-class early. Lived for competition. Then, years later, got tired of the competition while still living for it.

- That moment when the money dried up.
- When everyone around him said grow up.
- When his wife’s environment questioned why he was still trying.
- When he adjusted his life downward just to keep going.
- Selling the house.
- Tearing down the ramp he made with his dad.

He uses one word that matters here: jaded.

When you make serious money early and it just keeps coming, you don’t learn durability. You learn velocity.

You don’t think long-term. You don’t secure. You assume the tap is permanent. Until it isn’t.

They then had to make choices and adapted their lifestyle, so they could keep on skating and building.

I had my GTM superstar phase early and it lasted for 11 straight years. 

Recognition. Velocity. Being ahead of the curve. Then, a decade later, realizing that winning inside the game was no longer the point.

Competition stops being fuel at some point. It starts being noise. Then he felt free and started to create again instead of being a robot, as he describes it.

He then later went back to competition, because he lives for it. But he had changed because of that journey.

What struck me most wasn’t his success. It was his refusal to quit when the external signals flipped.

No applause. No certainty. Just the thing itself.

Skate.
Build.
Figure it out.
Never stop skating.

That’s not ambition. That’s identity. 

This is the Personal Transformation framework. 

Not the polished before and after. But the quieter shift from proving yourself to staying true to the thing you’re built to do even when it stops making sense to others.

Birdhouse, his skateboard company, wasn’t built at the peak. It was built after the illusion broke.

Most people don’t fail because they’re not good enough. They stop because the environment no longer validates the path.

I'll never stop skating.

The hard question is simpler than we admit. Are you still doing the work because it matters to you or because it used to win you approval?

Everyone is talking about closed feedback loops in GTM.

Marketing.
Sales.
Customer Success.
Partnerships.
RevOps.

But most teams can’t answer a simple question. What exactly is closing the loop?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. A closed loop is not data flowing. It’s accountability flowing.

Most loops look like this:

- Marketing ships leads.
- Sales works them.
- CS inherits the outcomes.
- RevOps reports after the fact.

Information moves. Ownership doesn’t. So nothing is actually closed. 

A real closed loop exists only when three things happen at the same time. 

1. The signal travels end to end. Not activity, not volume but outcome-based signals that survive handoffs.

Why did this deal convert?
Why did this customer expand?
Why did this churn happen?

2. Someone is responsible for acting on the signal. Not just or only shared visibility or alignment.

A named owner who is expected to change behavior upstream based on downstream reality.

3. The system is allowed to change. Closed loops break when insights are collected but architecture stays frozen.

ICP.
Qualification.
Incentives.
Handoffs.
Capacity allocation.

If none of those can move, the loop is performative. This is why many teams feel data rich and direction poor.

They built reporting loops, not learning loops and definitely not correction loops.

A closed loop is finished only when the system behaves differently next cycle. Otherwise it’s just a dashboard.

Where in your GTM motion do signals travel end to end but ownership stops halfway?

When is it time to replace a (full-time or fractional) CRO or to hire one?

You don’t miss a CRO because revenue slows. You miss one when no one actually owns how revenue works end to end.

Here’s the clean distinction I see in practice.

You miss a CRO when:

- Revenue problems are cross-functional, not local. Marketing, Sales, CS, RevOps are all doing reasonable things and the outcome still degrades.

- Decisions keep getting escalated but never resolved. Trade-offs exist, but no one has the mandate to choose between speed, margin, risk, and focus.

- Forecasts feel fragile. Not wrong, but constantly revised. The system reacts instead of predicts.

- Founders or CEOs are the glue. They are still arbitrating GTM conflicts weekly because no one else truly owns the system.

That’s not a talent gap. That’s an ownership gap.

It’s time to replace a bad CRO when:

- They optimize functions instead of flows. Sales looks “better” while cost of revenue, churn, or delivery strain quietly worsens.

- They confuse activity with control. More dashboards. More initiatives. Less clarity about why outcomes move.

- They act as a super-VP of Sales. Strong opinions on deals, weak ownership of the full revenue architecture.

- They explain misses with narratives, not mechanisms. Market, timing, buyers, execution. Never system design.

- Alignment becomes a meeting, not a structure.
Lots of talk. Same frictions. Same handoffs breaking.

That’s not bad intent. That’s role misfit at the current stage.

The hard truth most teams avoid… You don’t need a CRO when revenue is simple. You don’t survive without one when complexity overtakes intuition.

And replacing a CRO isn’t about performance. It’s about whether the company has outgrown how revenue is being owned.

Question worth asking honestly: who currently owns the behavior of our revenue system when things conflict? And do they know their stuff?

Coincidentally, I’m back on the market looking for an interesting company or 2 companies as a full time or fractional (every day, half a day) Chief Revenue Officer.

If me auditing your revenue system, combined with a priority based action plan sounds like something, also very possible.

And what makes me different than all others? I’ve factually operated 25 B2B SaaS, AI and traditional companies in as much industries. Enabling me to have a unique look at companies - and your company.

And having the ability to understand every department, every part of your revenue system but also finance, funding, investors and m&a.

That’s rare. Much rarer than you’d think.

First or second working day of the year.

The inbox fills up again.
Meetings restart.
Targets get repeated.

And almost automatically, teams drift back to volume.

More outreach.
More calls.
More campaigns.
More motion.

This week I had a conversation with a 40M ARR company. 

Their challenge sounded familiar: “We want to run a more focused motion.
But we keep sliding back into volume.”

Not because they don’t believe in focus. But because once pressure returns, reflex takes over.

December was reflection. January is reflex.

Here’s where it quietly breaks.

- ICP exists on paper, but isn’t enforced in the system.
- ABM is the ambition, but not the default behavior.
- GTM engineering is discussed, but not wired into execution.

So when decisions get fuzzy, the system does what it knows best.
It scales activity.

Volume isn’t the problem. Volume becomes the problem when it replaces choices that were never locked in.

- Which accounts do we not go after?
- Which signals actually qualify intent?
- Which parts of the motion are allowed to scale, and which are not?

If ICP isn’t operational, ABM collapses into targeting theater. If ABM isn’t executable, GTM engineering becomes tooling without leverage. And when none of it is explicit, volume fills the gap.

What decisions will you finally make explicit before the system pulls you back to volume again?

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The Battle

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