Conclusion is a service provider specialising in digital business transformation and IT services and one of the latest additions to the NPM Capital family. Bolstered by its alliance with this new financial partner, the company is looking to increasingly focus on supporting clients with their business-critical and mission-critical processes and systems over the next few years. We spoke to Conclusion CEO Engbert Verkoren and Bart Coopmans, Investment Director at NPM Capital, about market trends, the need for the digital transformation of business models, and the background to their remarkable deal.
We are meeting Verkoren and Coopmans in a room on the twentieth floor of Conclusion’s Utrecht head office that offers spectacular views of the city. Although the two executives haven’t known each other for that long, they have been working closely together over the past six months in developing one of the more sizeable deals in NPM Capital’s recent history.
Verkoren: “It has indeed been a pretty intense process. I would say that NPM Capital went further than any of the other candidates in learning about the inner workings of our company. They really went the extra mile in trying to understand what we’re all about. My fellow Management Team members and I were impressed by their diligence.”
Laughing, he adds: “Although that did mean we had to answer a lot of questions from their end… But the good thing about all that interest and personal interaction is that it creates a lot of positive energy. Right after we started working together Bart and I went out for dinner, and I was struck immediately by the astute questions he was asking. It helped me realise that there were still some areas of our strategy we could further refine and, while there was a lot that we could be proud of, there were definitely some areas for improvement too.”
Focus
Backed by its new partner NPM Capital, the medium-sized company Conclusion is well-positioned for further growth, while professionalising its services is another key priority. It has already completed the first step in this process by hiving off all its non-IT-related operations into standalone business units.
Verkoren: “We have spent the past few years sharpening our focus, and these efforts have enabled us to secure a number of substantial deals in the market. That’s why we were more than ready for the next step, also in terms of management and governance. We still have some way to go, though. The strength of our business model – which is very decentralised and very proactive – also happens to be our weakness: sometimes things are a little too unstructured. There’s some headway to be made still in that respect.”
Coopmans: “We are definitely seeing that increased focus bear fruit. Since you are now focusing specifically on IT and on the knowledge of the business and the sector that is relevant in this context, Conclusion is rapidly transforming into a specialised IT company.”
Verkoren: “You are completely right: Conclusion is continuing with a sharper focus on business and IT, which means it has evolved into a real IT company. But it’s a company with a multidisciplinary bent. That’s important, because no matter how strong you might be on the technology side, your projects are bound to fail unless you also understand organisational processes, know the client’s line of business and make sure you don’t neglect your ‘soft’ skills in the process. By the same token, there’s no point in trying to implement a new business model if you don’t know the first thing about technology. So there is an important link between those two elements.”
