2412 - How Europe’s Top Brands Drive Explosive Growth with Bitsing's Hugo Van Den Biggelaar

0:03Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

1:20Hugo, before we get into your superpowers and talking about what Bitsing is, you always love hearing what high-level leaders do for fun when they're not at work. And I understand you've been into Muay Thai. Yes, yes, yes. I've been doing a lot of Muay Thai lately. And it's just such a cool way to build discipline and be able to let yourself go outside of work. and it's just yeah it's a fantastic sport i highly recommend to everyone because it's like it's like playing human chess where you you got to derive strategies you got to understand what your your opponent is doing you got to see kind of the habits they have and based on that you can start to build a strategy yourself of how you're gonna first of all defend yourself but secondly how you you're gonna attack as well wow uh so i'm curious uh have you found any instances where this has provided any practical benefit outside of you know when you're training or sparring or whatever um is it how is it practical for life it's about the discipline honestly so it's you know it's uh you you go in there and i i try to go around three four five times a week um and when you you go there you know it's gonna be it's gonna be tough you're gonna you're gonna sweat a lot you're going to put in the work but secondly it's also about being able to you know let go and give yourself the freedom once you start sparring to to say okay well i'm here this guy might be much better than i am much more experienced than i am but we're here to to make it work and then when you're fighting a guy like that it's about you know being able to defend yourself being able to pace yourself because they're going to be uh you know better at you better than you they're going have a better stamina you name it so you got to be able to pace yourself whereas when you are actually you know at an opponent who might be less experienced it's about okay how can i how can i you know start to make my way in my moves towards being able to attack this opponent really well and also obviously it's about control because it's not about just you know i want to i want to hit a guy or want to kick a guy no it's about being able to control yourself and and and and enjoy the sparring for both you and your partner.

3:36Wow. Well, very cool. And you just, yeah, yeah, yeah. So as much as I'd love to talk more about that, I, you know, I've been on your website and, and my curiosity is peaking here. Can you give us a one-on-one on the Bitsing method here? What, What is, and again, your website is bitsing.com. I should point out that Bitsing as a methodology has been leveraged within organizations like McDonald's, Sony, Heineken, Dell, Nestle, Samsung, BMW, Canon, Oracle, Cisco, Pfizer, British Airwaves, HP. I can go on and on and on. The logos are quite impressive. All right. So what is Bitsing? Yeah, so Bitsing is a European growth methodology that's been developed about 30 years ago for the first time and then obviously refined over those 30 years and has been implemented successfully by a thousand organizations, including some of the ones that you have been mentioning.

4:37And what it does, it's a growth methodology. So it consists of seven principles that are mixed between finance, strategy and marketing. And if applied properly, you'll hit guaranteed growth. And that's not something I say lightly, I promise you. So, for example, HP used it. They implemented it into 72 countries and they grew 168 % in one year. Schiphol Group, which is the airport of the Netherlands, implemented it and they grew 540 % in one year. The average year-on-year growth that we have with those 1 ,000 plus case studies is around 30%. So, if you do this properly, we're going to make you grow.

5:18And that is what Bitsing entails. So Hugo, if you could just take us through maybe just like a, you know, kind of a slowdown and maybe a deeper dive on the Bitsing method. And so we can understand how this might different, like how this might be different from other, I'd say, growth frameworks might be a great, great, like, I don't know, like EOS or just, you know, other frameworks that folks might be looking at. Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, of course. So what we say at Bitsing is that it's an all-encompassing methodology. So instead of optimizing for a certain part of your business or instead of engineering for growth in a certain sector, what we do with Bitsing is that we analyze the entire company.

6:05We analyze your entire organization. And we create a strategy that helps you to optimize for everything at the same time. Now, what we can't do as a company is we say we have to do everything at the same time with the same amount of intensity, right? So what we actually do is we optimize for certain areas of growth while also acknowledging that other areas might need a little bit of attention as well. So, for example, when it comes to, let's say, your lifecycle, right, as a company, some people say we need to focus on SEO optimization. Others say we need a better loyalty program. But what we help you to understand that bidsing is, okay, what are my biggest obstacles, my biggest barriers right now in that lifecycle?

6:51And focus your efforts on that while at the same time ensuring that you're still optimizing for things that might need a little bit less of attention. So it's an all-encompassing growth methodology that helps you to understand where to focus on, where to put your budget towards. But also at the same time, still understanding that you have to focus on the other parts as well, just a little bit less. well how did you come across this hugo so i know that um this is a method that's been around uh for a while um where did it come from and and i know that uh bitzing uh has been around for a while yeah so um it's a it's a fun story about how the little things in life uh you know happen to have a big impact later on in your life so um i i met uh my mentor my my good friend france de Groot.

7:41In Dutch, we say Frans de Groot. And I met him at a PR event five years ago. And I was working for Nike back then. And my role was called Member Growth. So my function was called Member Growth. And what we did is we were optimizing for the life cycle of our members within Nike. And I was developing this model and understanding that if you are at a certain phase of your life cycle, and you have a different relationship with the brand, right? So if you've never bought Nike, you expect nike to act differently than if you buy 10 pairs of sneakers a year and i was talking about that with friends um and while doing that he was shocked by the fact that actually i was talking about one of the seven principles of the bitzing method because friends founded the bitzing method 30 years ago after having a successful marketing firm and he had been developing that and then when i was talking about that we instantly had a connection because he uh he asked me do you know Bitsing?

8:39I was like, I never heard of it in truth be told. So we started connecting on that. And he wrote a book about Bitsing. I read the book and we connected. He became a mentor of me also throughout my career at Nike. And when I moved to New York about five months ago, he called me and he was like, Hugo, I know we've had tremendous success with Bitsing in Europe, but I've never taken it towards the US. You are a guy that understands the methodology, that believes in the methodology that I trust, that I have a relationship with. How about that I tell you the secret sauce of what BitNIC is? I'll give you access to the financial models and whatnot.

9:19And I'll train you to become a true Bitzer, as we call it. And you can bring this to the United States. And that is how I got involved with the methodology. And now I'm making it my life work. Well, Hugo, who have you worked with? What would be some examples of organizations? And what's kind of the before and after? Yeah, so right now, the method itself has obviously mostly been implemented in Europe by a thousand plus organizations from the biggest corporations out there, like some of the ones I were mentioning, to smaller agencies and smaller startups, scale-ups and whatnot. So the beautiful thing about this method is it's industry agnostic.

10:05it's size agnostic you can even as France once worked with a politician you can use it to win the elections of that politician so it's not necessarily focused on a specific business it's not necessarily focused on B2C it's not B2B, it works for everyone if implemented properly so in Europe France has worked with over a thousand organizations from the biggest out there like the names you were just mentioning to smaller scale-ups, startups. However, in the US, I'm bringing this for the first time. So I just signed my first client this week. So that is a really, really, really big, big news. I'm very happy, as you can see on my face.

10:48It's actually a creative production agency. But I've also been in conversation with a lot of AI companies, tech companies, because what I do see is that specifically how the industry is evolving, that there's a lot of growth pressure on that area. So obviously, all these AI companies that are popping up, all these tech companies that are scaling, they have a lot of pressure to grow on them. So that has been a very easy connection because they want these growth methodologies to work out for them. Well, Hugo, to our friend that's been listening, how might they know that they should reach out? And, you know, if they are thinking of maybe gaps that might exist within their organization.

11:35And then if that's the case, what would you recommend? Like, what's the first step? You mean to reach out to me? Yeah, maybe. If they have a gap, what should they do? Yeah. So what I would recommend is the following. So I do these things called inspiration sessions, which is about 45 to 60 minutes, where I take you as an organization or your team, I take them through the seven principles of Bitsing. And we have a dialogue around how that applies to your company. So if you're interested in hearing what those seven principles exactly entail and how they will help to solve the issues that you're currently facing in your organization, you can go to the website, Bitsing.com, and you can book a free inspiration session, which we can do either online or if you're in the area of New York in real life.

12:27and we have that dialogue around how we can, you know, how Bitsing might solve the problems that you're currently facing. And I can promise you it's a very engaging, it's a very fun session and the reactions I've been having so far are super, super positive. People really love it. And if that is too much and you don't have the time for like 45 to 60 minutes to go through this inspiration session, you can always reach out to me via LinkedIn and just shoot some of the questions you might have around how some of the Bitsing methodology might apply to the problems you currently are facing. Hugo Vanden Bigeler, you're the CEO and co-founder of the Bitsing company USA.

13:07You're found on the web at bitsing.com. Hugo, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you so much, Josh. It was a pleasure.

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