From Solvay to Success - Maxime Van der Meerschen

From where?

I was born in 1995 in Uccle. I spent my whole life in Brussels, mainly in Watermael-Boitsfort. My childhood was quite normal with a quite strong emphasis on sport (foot, tennis, climbing..). I studied at l'Athénée Royal d'Auderghem where I received 4 prizes in the final year: excellence, latin, math and history awards. A great start before going to the Solvay Brussels School.

From which program and class do you come?

I followed the business engineering degree in bachelor and master and participated in the QTEM program. I also did an internship at ABInBev within this program, focused on analytics, data and marketing.

What is your job title today and your projects/mission ?

I am the cofounder and manager of a startup called GiveActions that we set up in 2019 with Elias Printz, also graduated from Solvay, and Gaspard Merten.

My mission is to manage the company GiveActions, with a particular focus on sales and finance, even if we need to be multifunctional as a cofounder. In a few words, GiveActions is a marketing agency specialised in positive impact organisations. We help them to be more attractive, more desirable and more visible. Our job goes from communication strategy to implementing marketing campaigns and creating websites or managing databases. Today, we have helped more than 50 organisations and companies like the Belgian Red Cross, Thalys, Unicef, second-hand shops Pêle-Mêle, Fairphone, and many more.

What was your most significant professional obstacle, and how did you overcome it?

My first real obstacle was more of a personal questioning. Our planet is facing major environmental and social issues and I wanted to be part of the solution. And to tell myself that I have a positive impact on the planet and the society. It was therefore key to me to find a job or a professional activity that fulfills this goal. This is why I set up the company GiveActions with Elias and Gaspard. The solution was indeed to create our own company that represents our values and vision.

The second obstacle that we faced at GiveActions and that we are still facing today is our ecological commitment. We select the companies we work with based on their positive impact. Creating a profitable company while doing social entrepreneurship is my biggest challenge. There is no secret to overcoming this: work, belief, vision and being surrounded and helped by good people.

Have you had an experience abroad with SBS-EM? How has it influenced your life?

Yes indeed, I even had the chance to spend almost an entire year abroad, one semester in Tokyo and one semester in Exeter, UK, thanks to the QTEM program. It is always difficult to tell how much and how such experiences actually influenced their life. But I think that it definitely did and to a strong extent. It is a time of your life when you meet people from different cultures, you experience a new lifestyle, you get to manage yourself without your parents and family. I would advise every student to study abroad because it is the experience of a life, and traveling will never get close in terms of experience to living an entire semester in a different country.

Is there a particular teacher at SBS-EM who had a significant impact on you as a student?

I would say Olivier Witmeur for the entrepreneurship spirit, Hugues Pirotte for his finance courses that I really liked, Gilles Van Hamme for his economic geography course that was thrilling (and who was my master thesis promoter), and Marek Hudon for his ecological and social vision.

In what ways do you believe you contribute to society?

My contribution is through my company GiveActions. We have an impact at three levels. First, we do everything possible to help positive brands to come out on top as we need them to become the new standard in order to meet our climate objectives. Second, we try to show the path to creating a company more responsible to the planet and the society. And third, we try to change the world of marketing and advertising so that it becomes compatible with the ecological transition. We have kind of an activist role. To illustrate that, I filed a complaint against an ad from Lufthansa that did not respect the advertising ethics (the ad was saying that Lufthansa is protecting our future with an image of a plane transforming into the planet). The complaint was accepted and Lufthansa had to remove the ad. The info was even shared by two major Belgian media, Le Soir and La Libre and was eventually taken as an example of greenwashing on a TV-show in France (Cash Investigation on France 2). The proof that it is possible to have a positive impact and to change things in our society.

What do you feel passionate about?

I am passionate about sports. I am playing football, tennis, padel, squash, badminton and I am also a fan of climbing and mountaineering. Sport is key in my personal life (and professional as well in a sense). Obviously, I am also passionate about social entrepreneurship.

Who has had the biggest influence on you?

That is a difficult question. I would say Christian Kroll, the founder of Ecosia, a search engine that plants trees, as he succeeded in creating a profitable and innovative positive impact company. I would also say Thomas Piketty as he is one of the few economists to talk about social issues. I remember studying the social inequalities in my economy course at Solvay. He definitely had a big influence on me.

So, to where now?