Werner Lapage, Partner BDO Belgium

As a Chinese proverb says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” Being proactive and integrating sustainability into your business model increases your resilience against drivers of change, creates new business opportunities, leads to better results, and ultimately increases the value of your business. Preparing your company or organisation for the future to be relevant tomorrow is only possible if you are prepared to learn life-long, strengthen your know-how and knowledge. In our cover story, Ziegler Group shows how vital acquiring and sharing knowledge is for their customs experts and… their customers. I quote: “Without a thorough grounding in the facts, any business, large or small, will get into trouble sooner or later.”

And let that lesson now also be a motivation for us as consultants to start with AI-GUST, a knowledge platform that supports accountants digitally and proactively. The power of the platform lies in the sum of the knowledge and data that individual members share and that external experts contribute. In short, we gather as much talent, knowledge, expertise and data as possible and then use artificial intelligence to unlock that enormous potential for accountants and their clients.

And so I can list many initiatives that we use to sharpen our expertise, day in and day out, to make it serve our clientele as much as possible. These will get some extra attention in this To The Point.

Moreover, acquiring and sharing knowledge is always a multi-road traffic. It is impossible for anyone to excel in every matter today – if it was ever even possible. Collaborating in a cooperative model like this works more efficiently and sustainably in a world where we have to be ever more economical and above all smarter with the available resources: equipment, time and so on, but also talent. Proof of this is our recent partnership with GUBERNA, with which we help raise the good governance of the boards of directors of SMEs to a higher level. Or with Living Tomorrow, with which we jointly developed ‘InnovationLab’, a two-day workshop to strategically and practically prepare your company for the future.

All this is part of a vision in which sustainable entrepreneurship or sustainability is central. Everyone is still learning in this area. So are we. That is why more than 50 sustainability experts from 20 BDO offices set up a global Sustainability Centre of Excellence. A source packed with expertise, experience and best practices at… the client’s service. Did you expect otherwise?