The Teamleader Titans - Episode 3: Robin

Four in total: from Copywriter to Content Manager, then Brand Manager and finally Head of Creative today.

As a copywriter I was a member of the content team, delivering all kinds of copy, like blog articles and e-books. After a year and a half, I was promoted to Content Manager to lead a team of six to further improve the quality and volume of Teamleader’s content output for all the different countries we served.

I did that for two years and then I moved to the more strategic role of Brand Manager. My responsibility was mainly to revamp Teamleader’s brand ID and brand story. I was the number one protector of the ‘Teamleader’ brand, always looking for ways to increase brand awareness in the market.

After another year, I switched to my current role: Head of Creative. I’m a member of the Brand Studio, which is basically an in-house creative agency, but with a lot more autonomy. We’re a self-managing team which decides freely which content to create, which projects to initiate for which strategic purpose. This freedom within the organization helps us to deliver strong results. My role is to think of or contribute to creative ideas and concepts for campaigns and come up with different storylines for our various segments. Of course, being an ex-copywriter, I also proofread and monitor the quality of all kinds of copy and still write some copy myself. On top of that, I host our Agency Life video and podcast series as well as our Summer and Winter Fold-Up events. For those events, I tend to make one or two amusing videos. Some of my finest moments!

There’s no doubt I’m going with one of our many dazzling Teamleader events. I just love it when we put our heads together and organize things like Work Smarter and Fold-Ups. That’s Teamleader at its finest.

I think I’ll go with last year’s Summer Fold-Up (2021). Thanks to Teamleader I had the opportunity to create a lot of creative content and host the event. After the lockdown it was even more special to do my thing on stage again, feeling the love and energy of my colleagues in the audience and celebrating our hard work together.

1. The first edition of Work Smarter in 2018 took place at Flanders Expo. That year, we really laid the foundations of what Work Smarter is today. We organized it ourselves and prepared it to perfection. We set the bar extremely high. I’m sure this year’s Work Smarter couldn’t have been as phenomenal as it was without the preparation for the 2018 edition.
2. Winning the Deloitte Fast 50 Award in 2017 was a big moment because it was the first time we were honoured in the market as a rapid grower, a success story. To me, it was proof that we were on the right track.
3. The Yadera acquisition (currently ‘Teamleader Orbit’, ed.) was back in 2019 because suddenly we had another amazing product we could sell. It opened the door to a whole new set of potential customers, high-class agencies with high expectations. This, in turn, led to the production of our Agency Life series, which we started distributing in March 2021. This beautiful content campaign helped enormously in establishing our name as the number one work management software for agencies.

We don’t get carried away like we used to. We no longer try to do everything at once, burning our money with every new exciting idea that we come up with. Now we take one step after another, we use a systematic approach. We still do very cool things, but we try to plan them better, making it more likely that they’ll succeed. These are all signs that we’ve become more mature.

Find the golden mean, the right balance for energy expenditure. At the end of the day, Teamleader remains in a fast-moving high-expectation working environment. So you need to be invested, but not too much. Just enough so you can always perform at your best. You don’t want to sit on the sideline, but you don’t want to lose yourself either, because you’ll burn yourself out. You can’t solve everything.

On the one hand, it’s the success and the volume of our Agency Life series. We really managed to create this type of high-value engaging content as the first in Belgium and the Netherlands. On the other hand, it’s probably the fake horror movie I made for last year’s Winter Fold-Up.

Sneak peek of the famous horror movie made by Robin:

Now that we’re part of the Visma Group, I’d love to create some rock-solid commercial content with Wout Van Aert and go viral.