How every choice I made during my career has shaped who I am today.
Sometimes I feel like a sailor. The rougher the sea, the more challenging it is for me. With a creative mindset, I always want to discover new horizons. I like to color outside the lines. Life is too beautiful to be boring.
In fact, I was put in the cradle to go into education. I come from a nest of teachers and my mum used to say, 'you have to go into education because you can explain it very well. And yet things went differently. I chose Sint Lucas and studied 'publicity and graphic design' because I was looking for a creative challenge. 'How do you turn nothing into something?', that's what drives me. I wanted to communicate visually and stick the image to the word.
After my studies I left Hasselt for Brussels with my amazing Daf Vario Matic. On the way to the great adventure. I worked for ten years in various advertising agencies as an art director. In that job I was allowed to come up with the concepts and then also added all the images to the word. It was a very important learning experience in my career.
But partly I stayed hungry in the advertising agencies. As an art director, you didn't see any clients. The accounts went to the client and they wrote the briefing and only then did the briefing come to us. As far as I was concerned, a lot was lost during that intermediate step. I wanted to be able to hear, see and feel the customer directly. The noise could be avoided in this way. It seemed much more efficient to be able to interpret problems and questions directly.
The entrepreneur in me woke up. I jumped and founded my own advertising agency: RS Communication. B2B customers in the pharmaceutical sector found me quickly. The direct contact was a victory for them. Without the intermediaries, no information was lost. I recorded the briefings and was a designer on my team.
We did numerous product launch campaigns for the pharmaceutical sector. The core and strength of the assignments were our presentation. We developed hundreds for them. We transformed the story, sometimes just briefed in bullet points, into beautiful presentations. From structure to finding images, creating layouts to pouring the whole into an app. They were often large presentations, up to 180 pages interactively connected to each other. This interactive structure helped to quickly answer the doctor's questions.
I want to be able to see things clearly. If it is not clear, there is no communication. Clear and yet surprising, that is the ideal presentation. I dare to say that I have the know-how to organize and present the most complex matters crystal clear. I trained myself in this for years.
During the twenty years with Pharma as my main customer, I regularly saw presentations at networking events that were not good at all. No essence, no purpose and poorly visualized slides. That's how the ball got rolling. With Presentation Lab I christened myself crusader of the presentations.
Pretty soon after the launch of the website, I also received coaching questions. How do you start a pitch. How do you present graphs? What techniques are there to make a presentation engaging? Yes, there is not always a budget to outsource a presentation or it has to be finished for the next day. All recognizable problems? They became my challenge with Presentation Lab. My motto is: a good preparation ensures success.
A crowning glory of all my work is now also the online presentation training made for anyone who has to give presentations - internal or external, online or offline - and who wants to surprise their audience with a solidly substantiated story that sticks. I analysed various Ted Talks, scripts from screenwriters and insights from international speakers, in combination with my years of experience in the advertising world. You will find a thousand ready-to-use tips. As a student you will also receive a bundle with +/-340 slides in advance. This way you have the perfect manual for every subsequent presentation. All brought with a smile because learning can be fun!
It is my personal mission that everyone can make their presentation as strong as their idea. Once you know how to make a clear presentation, all stress disappears, and the pleasure of presenting takes its place. Let's make sure that people come for your presentation and not for the drink or snack afterwards!