When Belgian engineer-turned-entrepreneur David Determe sold the engineering consultancy firm he had spent two decades building, he did something unexpected. Instead of reinvesting the proceeds into another commercial venture, he channelled them into a mission he wished had existed when he was leading a company of 100 people: a human-centred support system for entrepreneurs, managers and students navigating the pressures of the modern workplace.
Determe grew his Luxembourg-based consultancy from a two-person start-up in 2001 to roughly 100 staff, before it was acquired by VK Architects & Engineers group in 2020 [editor’s note, the company has been rebranded as Sweco after it acquired 100% of the shares in VK architects+engineers and merged Betic with several other entities]. Yet, despite the scale, leadership often felt solitary. “Data shows that two out of three leaders feel isolated,” he explains. “Even with a business partner, when you’re the one taking decisions, you still feel alone.”
Determine’s own leadership journey lacked one crucial element: mentoring. “I’ve always learnt a lot from coaches and consultants, but what I was missing was mentoring. There’s always a clock, or the feeling that things are being stretched to sell more hours,” he says. “That made me uncomfortable.”
So when he exited the engineering world, he committed to building the support network he never had. He reinvested €250,000 of his own funds to launch pairtopair a not-for-profit-oriented platform centred on peer mentoring, knowledge-sharing and intergenerational support.
The platform rests on four pillars: one-to-one mentoring for SME leaders and executives by expert volunteers; InsideOut, a curated peer-group system based on personality insights designed to break silos and which launched in November; IntraLink, a forthcoming corporate knowledge-transfer module; and, eventually, MyFuture, a professional-to-student mentoring chain guiding them on their career path. Forty volunteer mentors from Belgium, France and Luxembourg already cover sectors from industry to cybersecurity, finance, healthcare and sustainability. Three of the pillars are offered on a subscription basis, while the only condition for the student mentoring is to mentor someone younger, a ripple effect of positive influence.
What sets the initiative apart is its human-centred ethos. Determe’s engineering career was marked by a holistic focus on people in their environments. Now he applies that same philosophy to organisational life. “My mission now is simply to help the professional world work a little better. I’m not going to save the world, but I want it to improve a bit,” he says.
For Luxembourg, Determe sees both opportunity and challenge. Many leaders he meets “are aware of market difficulties but they move; they’re not frozen.” The harder task is reaching those who are struggling financially and “don’t dare ask for help.”
By building a community where leaders support each other without commercial interest, Determe hopes to shift that. “It’s incredible to see how powerful a single good piece of advice can be,” he says. “The right word at the right moment can be a game changer.”
His new venture is, in many ways, the continuation of his entrepreneurial story, only this time, the product is not a building or a technical solution, but a stronger, more humane professional ecosystem for the next generation of leaders.
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