I ask the question nobody in your life is asking.
And this is why.
This is my story.
My name is Anne. Anne Swers. Answers.
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Yeah, my parents didn't think that one through when they gave me my name. In dutch it's just a name. But when I rocked up to my first English class in secondary school, the teacher found it pretty funny. Years later... I turned it into my motto, my business.
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Anneswers to questions that change everything.
My roots
My parents run their own business. Always have.
And I want to be honest about what that looked like, because it wasn't the Instagram version of entrepreneurship. It was customers paying late and suppliers delivering wrong and employees you legally couldn't let go even when you desperately needed to.
It was my parents working around the clock while Belgium in the nineties offered basically zero safety net for the self-employed. You couldn't get sick. You couldn't stop. And that pressure, the financial kind, the relentless kind, it lives in a house. It sits at the dinner table. It shapes a kid whether they know it or not.
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I knew it. And I still chose this life, the independant life, the entrepreneurial life.
I chose it, partly because of what I saw at home. Because underneath all that stress, I also watched two people build something that was completely theirs. No boss. No permission. Just the consequences of their own decisions, good and bad.
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I think I was twelve when I started cleaning my dad's company vehicles every Saturday. The workers weren't taking care of them, my dad was sick of asking, and I saw the gap before anyone thought to explain it to me. I put together a price list, per vehicle size, and settled up with him every weekend when I packed away my materials. His problem solved, my money made.
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I understand the founder's life because I lived it myself, every day.
"Life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks."
"Antifragile"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My wings
The rollercoaster career one can only dream of.
I went on to spend fifteen years inside businesses. CFO at 28. European Controller before that. Turned 34 the same year I became General Manager of a venue with two hotels, two restaurants, a sports bar and an events calendar that never stopped. I carried P&Ls, sat in rooms where real decisions got made, and learned what it means to be responsible for something bigger than yourself.
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And then I co-founded a food startup. Baking boxes, high quality ingredients, weighed to exact proportions, delivered to your door. We loved it. Our customers loved it.
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Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Within days, my flour supplier was on the phone. You still want those kilos locked for this month? Because the next trucks coming in might be triple the price. Days later, the butter supplier. Same conversation.
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I was recalculating margins like my life depended on it, which in a way it did. Our whole model was built on adding a premium service to raw materials combined with an unmatched hyper-personal service, something that was much needed during covid.
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When the costs doubled, our prices had to follow. Except bakery prices weren't moving that fast. We were becoming more expensive than a finished loaf of bread. Unbaked.
After six weeks I called the team and told them we were burning money on every box we sold. We had to close.
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I made that call with an eight month old on my arm and a two and a half year old running around my feet. My marriage was already falling apart. The startup hadn't helped. My stress levels were, to put it mildly, through the roof. Was this it?
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What happened next I didn't expect. When we announced the closure, hundreds of customers wrote to us. Not to complain. To say: we see you. We hear you. You were doing something wonderful here.
Our order list that month tripled, people wanting to show up for us the way we'd shown up for them. We held a closing sale at the production site. So many people came. It was moving, heartwarming.
In an attempt to give back to our customers one more time, I turned all our recipes into a beautiful baking book, made it myself in Canva, and we sold enough copies to cover every closing cost.
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We bootstrapped that startup and we closed it with zero euros lost.
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I'm still proud of that.
And I'm still a little heartbroken about it.
My observations
Patterns repeat, no one speaks up.
Along the way I worked directly alongside some of the most exceptional founders I've ever encountered. Different profiles, different scales, different industries.
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But the same pattern, every time.
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Brilliant people. Driven, successful, respected. And yet. Up close, you could see the gap. The one between the version they projected and what was actually running underneath.
One was completely focused on performance in every area of his life, and somehow didn't see the one thing silently wrecking it.
Another could map out the next decade of a market without blinking, and was completely lost the moment a conversation turned emotional.
Both had people around them with concerns they weren't hearing. Both had the intelligence to see it, if anyone had been willing to hold the mirror long enough.
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Nobody was.
I was in those rooms. I saw it. And I didn't look away.
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That's when I understood what I actually wanted to do. Not build strategies. Not fix operations. Work with the person running it. Because the business is almost never the real problem.
My work
The energy shifts as soon as the walls drop.
When a founder sits across from me, something usually happens in the first hour. They start with the business problem. The team, the market, the growth that isn't coming, the feeling that something is off but they can't name it. And then, somewhere in the middle of it, they say something that has nothing to do with the business. And everything to do with them.
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That's the moment I'm here for.
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I'm not a therapist. I don't sit with feelings indefinitely. I'm not a consultant. I don't deliver a report and disappear. What I do is get close enough to your story to actually feel where you're coming from. Not as a technique. Because I've been in enough versions of that room, professionally and personally, to know what it costs to carry something like this alone.
People tend to say things to me they haven't said out loud before, or in a really long time. I don't think that's a skill. I think it's just what happens when someone feels genuinely seen. And I create the space for it.
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And then I ask the question nobody else in your life is asking. I name what I see. I stay in the room with you until something shifts. Because the work isn't done when the question lands. It's done when something actually changes.
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I'm direct in a way that sometimes makes people uncomfortable, and I'm okay with that, because the comfortable version of this work doesn't actually work. But if that's the authenticity you can appreciate, we'll get along just fine.
If you've read this far,
you have some sense of who I am.
You've seen where I come from. What I've built. What I've lost. What I noticed in the rooms I was lucky enough to be in. And why any of that led here.
If something in this page made you think: this might be my person. Then let's find out.
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A first conversation is a coffee, a lunch, or a walk. No pitch from my side. No agenda from yours. Just two people, seeing if there's something worth building together.
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I work one on one, with a small number of founders at any time, because that's the only way this works properly. We can work in Dutch, English or French. Remote or in person. Whatever fits your routine.