Rely on Progress - Vlitix

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business and consulting services but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Bart Bosch, Founder of Vlitix, located in Vosselaar, Belgium.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Vlitix helps companies towards sustainable quality systems. From our expertise, we create innovative, tailor-made solutions that increase efficiency and facilitate long-term growth. Vlitix is an international consultancy company specializing in finding tailor-made solutions to ensure compliance against diverse, industry-dependent quality requirements.

We support large and medium-sized companies in improving, upgrading, and maintaining their quality systems. We guarantee quality through innovative, independent audits. Vlitix always starts from the needs of our customers, which we pursue selflessly.

The Vlitix team has hands-on experience at every level within a quality organization. With proven expertise and innovative systems, we offer valuable contributions to our customers in terms of quality, organizational and financial efficiency.

Quality improvement is of social importance to Vlitix. An efficient organization is a profitable organization with motivated employees and quality products or services. This benefits not only the company but also the end customer.

We do this through the 3 pillars within our portfolio:

• Quality coaching/consulting: we work together with our customers on what is needed. This can be coaching them in setting up a whole quality management system or just a part of it, like supplier quality management or implementing quality KPIs. We keep what is working; we improve what needs to be improved and support setting up what is missing.
• Independent supplier audits (mainly within the food industry): we verify if our customers' suppliers comply with their requirements. We manage the process from beginning to end, which means from fixing the audit date until the follow-up of the implementation of the improvement actions on their due dates. We can use our customer's audit standard and reporting tool or our own developed standard and reporting system.
• A unique online coaching program, QTIP, where we guarantee that the added financial value of quality for the organization can be demonstrated. We start from the mission of the organization to come to a specific quality policy with its objectives and KPIs. We use the participant's data and KPIs to identify the right improvement actions and calculate their Return on Investment.

Tell us about yourself

I only started my coaching/consulting business at the age of 46, after having a career within quality at Heinz, Campbell's, and Puratos, from lab technician working in shifts to group quality director for 56 factories in 43 countries worldwide. I wanted to use my knowledge, experience, and expertise to help more companies improve quality and guide quality professionals towards the next level in their quality-ship. I think I always knew that this moment would happen: at the age of 32, I already said I would probably never retire, and when they would put me on retirement because of my age, that I would start my own business: it just happened 20 years earlier than I expected.

What gets me out of bed each morning is the diversity of assignments, where we can use our knowledge, experience, and expertise, and the feedback that we really did make a difference. We also develop ourselves further with every new coaching project or audit: new processes, new people, different ways of thinking, and new cultures... it lets us evolve our own ways of working as well, and in this way, we can even better serve our customers with our new insights.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Creating a work environment where our coaches/consultants can find there, for them, the perfect balance between private life and work: I expect the work to be done within a given timeframe, and within the framework I created, people have the freedom to arrange their time themselves.

Being able to give that freedom and having happy, satisfied coaches/consultants and customers is something I see as one of my biggest accomplishments.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

Realizing that you don't know what you don't know! When you start a business, you know that you're good at what you do, servicing your customers. But you probably don't know what it's like to run a business: that is something totally different. In every step of your journey, you will bump into experiences and things you don't know, and finding the best solution to that might be the hardest thing for a business owner.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

1. Know your WHY: why did you start your business? You will need this along your journey, for sure, in difficult times. (recommended book: Start with Why, Simon Sinek).
2. Dream big, Think, Dare, Do and Persevere!
3. Be part of a Mastermind: a small group of business owners in different areas and in different stages of entrepreneurship you can go to with your questions and doubts. You will receive different answers and solutions to the challenges you're facing. (recommended book: Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill).
4. Bonus: What you do yourself, someone else can do better: outsource the things you're not good at and hire people that are better in the operational things than yourself, so you create time to work on your business instead of in your business.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.vlitix.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vlitix
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bart_vlitix/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Bart_Vlitix
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vlitix/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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