PHCom, a pioneer for more than 25 years

The internet, the sharing economy, sustainability, ecology, working from home - when the company was founded in 1996, there were many things that the business world had barely heard of. From the outset, PHCom was a pioneer in creating a service offering that did not yet exist: knowing how to advise while delivering concrete results in business development.

The world has changed enormously over the last quarter of a century, but in terms of its ecological approach and the roll-out of new technological tools, training and HR policy, PHCom has always been a pioneer.

Many companies were caught unprepared when the Corona crisis forced most of them to work from home. At PHCom, however, the decision to favour working from home had already been taken in 2005. Digital meetings and online performance monitoring were not a new reality but already the norm.

Why? Because business sustainability and social well-being have always been PHCom's top priorities.

Founder Stéphane Depaepe quickly realised that allowing people to work from home and part-time was not only good for CO2 emissions. He also saw the motivation and human performance of business developers improve.

Offering part-time work with responsibility, autonomy and engaging content is not common.

It also allows staff to build up experience over longer periods, since they stay on average more than 7 years, whereas in a call centre an agent "lasts" roughly 6 months.

With the rise of the internet and the rapid changes in the IT world, PHCom has always been among the early adopters.

As early as 2000, a spin-off was created: O3, to help companies improve their website rankings and boost their visibility in online directories. Nobody talked about SEO or SEA back then. It was the era of advalvas, altavista and yahoo.

From 2002, a powerful tool tailored to business developers was developed. This tool not only optimises prospecting, but also provides clients with an in-depth analysis of market potential, with measurable results for the future of the market. It was called phsys, and it became phcomDM

2005: data sharing. 20 years ago, developing a collaborative database was unimaginable for most companies (... and still is today). In a world before Uber and Airbnb, the sharing economy had not yet proven its business benefits. PHCom, however, had already understood that synergy and information sharing bring great added value to companies and salespeople.

When it comes to training, PHCom has also always been at the cutting edge.

In 2003, Stéphane Depaepe and Hugues Hamelinck founded ImproTraining. Improvisation, a popular theatre technique, suddenly became an effective tool for leading individuals and teams to new ideas and, above all, to adopting new behaviours through a playful method. Going beyond the logic of PowerPoint training to develop the experiential side was ground-breaking. These training techniques are still relevant today.

The wealth of experience in prospecting and sales has made it possible to build training modules fully tailored to the needs of companies and their sales teams.

PHCom's long history of working from home even proved very useful in offering training in video-conference sales techniques.

With a certain pride, we can say that PHCom has written a success story over the past 25 years.

Professionalism, the ability to create added value for its clients, combined with the emphasis placed on the well-being of its staff, have enabled many companies to boost their growth and many people to surpass their own abilities.

We will continue to build many successes in the years ahead, because being able to make a positive contribution is our ultimate motivation, now and always.