The DNA of shoes

Torfs (pictured) takes his regular seat in the café De Valk on the main square in the pretty little town of Lier, Antwerp province, orders his morning coffee and prepares himself for the day. The café is also where he recently launched his new book, De ziel zit in een schoenendoos (The Soul is in a Shoebox).

"I would tell anyone who works hard - especially if you work with people - that it's no luxury to take an hour in the morning, if possible, to withdraw and organise your day, do the things you can only do alone," he says. "You'll find it gives you a great deal of energy."

Perhaps it's the result of such a congenial start to the day, but Torfs is not only one of Flanders' most successful businessmen, he's one of the best-loved. His employees have voted him into the Best Employer in Flanders spot every year since 2006. And shoppers at his 62 stores have voted the chain in first place for customer friendliness.

"We wanted to be the most customer-friendly business in Flanders, and that can only work if you have people on the shop floor who are happy and feel good about themselves," says Torfs. "But it's not a strategy that came to me out of the blue. Most of it is based on what we learned at home, from grandpa and grandma and from our parents. That's one of the benefits of a family business; we know who we're working for."

The company is still 100% family owned, and two of the seven managers are members of Torfs' family. "It's a challenge to all self-employed people - to go back to your DNA, back to your roots, and to find the inspiration there for the growth of the company," he says.

The Torfs shoe dynasty was started in 1948, when Louis Torfs and his wife Jeanne Bruegelmans opened a shop in Lier. Louis' son Karel took over in 1957 and opened another shop in Ghent. The chain grew to 26 stores by 1989, when Wouter took over after a brief law career. The chain now sells virtually every brand of shoe, and the one thing customers will tell you is what a pleasant experience it is to shop there.

Torfs says that he wrote the book for four reasons. First, "to set out the story for my children and grandchildren and pay tribute to the first and second generations who laid the foundations upon which we're now building."

Second, "I wanted to write a management book to share my experiences, which I think can be applied not only to companies on the scale of Torfs or JBC [Bart Clays, CEO of clothing chain JBC, is a personal friend] but also to smaller businesses and even independents, like my wife's dental practice."

Torfs' management strategy is built on people: he pays his staff more than his competitors, and he arranges for them to take part in personal-development training, whether it's Tai-Chi classes or learning the techniques of effective communication.

The third reason for writing was his message for the future. "Business people spend too much time sniping from the sidelines about costs and regulations and politicians and so on. That's the easy way. I wanted to face up to the challenges as a businessman, though I don't say that I have all the answers. Business needs to take a different place in the 21st century than it did in previous times. There's no more room for businesses who think of themselves only as money-making machines."

So Torfs the company engages with society through plans to make their shops energy-efficient and through cooperation with Natuurpunt and Cunina, which finds foster parents for poor children in the developing world.

The last reason for writing is contained in Chapter 10 of the book, which he jokingly calls the "Dag allemaal chapter" after the popular celebrity magazine. The chapter, subtitled "Ten recipes for a glass half full," is built around the principles of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), a personal development system Torfs began following in 1995, later going on to become a qualified trainer.

"I want the reader to see how my personal values feed into the values of our company. Wouter and the shops and the staff of Torfs can't be separated from each other. If you want to know anything about Torfs the company, then you need to know about my personality. The company was created from the DNA of the family and the DNA of its leaders, which happens to be me at the moment."

www.torfs.be

Torfs Shoes in figures
6,300 square metres
floor space in the largest store, in Temse. The shop has about 10,000 pairs of shoes in stock

20
truckloads of shoes a day arriving at the Torfs warehouse from Italy, Spain, Portugal and other coun- tries

500
sales staff, as well as 16 warehouse workers, nine drivers, five window-dressers, 28 administrative staff, six sales coaches and eight managers

62
stores in Flanders

€1.49 million
average annual sales per store