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A conversation with... Michael Vandenhooft

Michael Vandenhooft is founder and CEO of Extenseo, the leading search-engine marketing agency in Belgium, serving over 200 clients throughout Europe.

J2G What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?

It means working for yourself, your own freedom.  Developing your own projects the way you want.  Also what’s very important to me is that you don’t have to report to someone else, besides your partners.

J2G What are the most important qualities to be successful as an entrepreneur?

That’s a very difficult question because an entrepreneur needs a lot of different qualities.  According to me it’s important to have the right feeling about your target market.  You must have energy and motivation, and also a lot of happiness and enjoyment.  It’s important to stay positive, because there will be a lot of problems and you will need to always keep going and leading the project forward.

Then, a good idea and a good timing are a must – which is not always easy.

On top of that you need very good networking – that’s something I didn’t have initially because I was too young.  If I had to launch a new project tomorrow it would be much easier.

And of course you have to have a lot of luck.  Without luck it’s very hard to succeed.  But then you have to push the luck and make it work for you.

J2G Could you please tell us a little about your company, Extenseo?

Extenseo is a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) agency – it’s the leading SEM agency in Belgium.  We do Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Advertising.  The goal is to make websites score high in the search results of Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

Michael Vandenhooft
Without luck it’s very hard to succeed. But then you have to push the luck and make it work for you

5 comments

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Your comments and questions [5]

NDOA Joins 2 (52 interest)

I totally agree with you Philip.  

 

4/22/2007 
Philip Vanneste (17 interest)

I think that succeeding in business has to do with being aware of the luck you have, and being willing to take it into your hands and do something with it.
But also with not giving up during the moments that luck is not on your side.
 

 

4/22/2007 
NDOA Joins 2 (52 interest)

@MAJJAH Group: If luck had nothing to do with it, and everything is caused by planning ahead, how come our birth moment is a moment of chance, dependent on all kinds of external and internal influences.
If luck had nothing to do with what we achieve, we all would be rich and famous or achieving it sooner or later. I am not saying that planning is not necessary, but without luck you can plan as much as you like, but you will not get where you want to go.
 

 

4/21/2007 
MAJJAH GROUP (17 interest)

I disagree. Being at the right place at the right time is not luck... it must be the achievement of a well prepared strategy which brought you there.  

 

4/17/2007 
NDOA Joins 2 (52 interest)

I do agree with Michael that running a business takes luck. You have to be at the right place at the right time. And even then you will need some more luck to find someone who really sees the need or usablity for your product. But if all that goes right you can still fail because you think that you are in, because you think you made it. So in the end, after you had the luck you still need to work hard to keep the momentum going.

What I wonder about is what use search engine marketing has? So it is known that most people do not look further than the first two pages generated by their search. But that is only a problem if there are many sellers of the same product. Being found in a search engine, does not say anything about the quality of your product. So maybe using SEM is like getting your foot in the door, but is that at the same price as having a sales person call customers with a nice story? Or is SEM cheaper than calling and sending out folders? And besides that it is also known that 80% of your sales is created by 20% of your customers, so do you really need to find new customers everyday?
 

 

4/1/2007 
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