10 years of building her company, she leaves it too late - Muriel Bernard - eFarmz

Muriel Bernard founded eFarmz in 2013 after being made redundant from Orange. She knew nothing about entrepreneurship, had no role models around her, and still grew the company to 50 people.

eFarmz is a Belgian platform for organic products and meal boxes. 1,500 references directly from the farms, delivered to your home. Ten years of building logistics from scratch, managing the growth of Covid, and then absorbing the market downturn.

It was during her first real vacation that she decided to stop. She told her husband about it the day after a sleepless night. A few weeks later, she was crying in the restaurant in front of the president of her board of directors. The restaurant thought it was witnessing a breakup. "It was a bit of a breakup."

For the past few months, she has been CEO of BeCentral, the 10,000 m² tech campus in the heart of Brussels, which brings together startups, scale-ups and companies on the same site.

In this episode:

• How a redundancy at Orange became the starting point for eFarmz

• Growth levels: from 0 to 50 people, Covid, logistics, margins at 1-2%

• Why she didn't raise funds at first: "I didn't even know it existed"

• What she would have done differently with ten years of hindsight

• The frozen shoulder, and the signals she didn't immediately understand

• BeCentral's mission and what it sees in the Brussels ecosystem today