HERE ARE
SOME QUESTIONS.
WE GET ASKED.
01
WHO IS BEHIND
Beatriz Vilchez Silva since 2015.
She founded La Colmena in Brussels and still runs it: a strategist by trade, a designer by method, working in French, English and Spanish. La Colmena is not a studio with a payroll. It is a network of designers, developers, writers and specialists she has worked with for years and assembles for each project, according to what the project needs. Every engagement passes through one person’s judgement, and that person signs the work. The legal entity is THE HAVEN SRL, 53 rue Darwin, 1050 Brussels. Clients since 2015 include Verdi Ingénierie, Innovacom, Carat Capital, Allen Group, Wormsensing and Campings.com, most of them led by their founders or CEOs.
02
WHO IS THIS FOR
Organisations at a turning point, and the people who run them.
Founders, CEOs, boards and leadership teams who shape change rather than adapt to it; we call them future-makers. This work is not necessary when things are comfortable. It becomes essential at inflection points: a transmission, a change of scale, a change of category, a repositioning, a culture that has drifted from the strategy. We are not for everyone, and that is by design.
03
WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU DELIVER
Clarity that carries consequence.
We help leaders shape what is coming: strategies that anticipate, capabilities that adapt, narratives that carry organisations and people forward. The output is never decoration. It is the infrastructure that governs decisions across product, technology, communication and culture. In practice it is written: a diagnosis, a positioning, a brand architecture, a narrative, a set of decisions with their trade-offs. Not a deck.
04
IS THIS JUST A “BRAND BLUFF”?
No.
Brand is the behavioural expression of business strategy. Internally, it governs decisions across product, pricing, hiring and partnerships. Externally, it shapes how a company shows up to customers and in culture. We work at the intersection: clarifying what you stand for, what you will prioritise, what you will refuse, and how that holds under pressure, growth and complexity. Verdi Ingénierie’s positioning, “Designer de Territoires”, was written in 2019, just before the pandemic; its CEO credits it with attracting the profiles the company needed and with an order book that has grown steadily since.
05
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENT BETWEEN DESIGN AND BRANDING FOR YOU?
Design thinks. Branding speaks.
Together they transform.
Design is the discipline of structuring reality: choosing what something becomes, how it behaves, what it refuses. Branding is the language that makes those choices legible to the world. We treat both as strategic, never decorative. One without the other is incomplete.
06
HOW DOES AN ENGAGEMENT UNFOLD?
It starts with a judgement, not a workshop.
Most engagement begins with Founder’s Eye, our diagnostic in which we look at the company the way a future buyer or investor would, and tell you what is true, what is broken, what it costs to ignore, and which routes are open. It has to be capable of concluding that you do not need us further; otherwise it is a sales device, and we do not run one. If the client decides there is a follow up with us the work continues as a defined project. The three disciplines we practise, strategic, narrative and capability design, are the means we mobilise after the diagnosis, not a menu to order from. Separating them is where most organisations lose coherence.
07
HOW DO YOU WORK: PROJECTS, RETAINER, DAY RATE?
By outcome, never by hours.
Founder’s Eye has a fixed starting fee, set after more than ten years of delivering this work, and it is published on the Asking page. From there, engagements take the shape of defined projects, and some continue as structured advisory retainers for organisations where ongoing judgement at moments of consequence, a board decision, a leadership realignment, a category move, materially strengthens the business. We do not quote day rates. The fee reflects the weight of the decisions involved, not the duration of a calendar entry. Scope, deliverables and decision rights are always defined in writing.
08
WHY DO YOU INSIST ON WORKING WITH THE CEO?
Because the questions we ask are the CEO’s questions.
What game is the company playing, what will it refuse, what is it worth and to whom. A marketing director can commission a campaign; they cannot answer these, and they should not have to carry the answers upward. When the first contact does not come from the person who runs the company, the work rarely gets past the deck stage. We learnt that the expensive way. So we work with the founder, the CEO or the board, from the first conversation to the last. If that is not possible, we are not the right people, and we say so early.
09
HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS?
We define it together, at the outset.
Sometimes it is hard metrics: revenue, retention, adoption, recruitment. More often it shows up earlier, in faster and cleaner decisions, a positioning people can repeat, an organisation that stops arguing about what it is. We do not claim credit for outcomes no one fully controls. We look for a clear, defensible link between the work and your ability to decide with greater conviction.
10
DO YOU USE AI, AND HOW?
Yes, and we say so.
We use AI to research, to structure problems, to brainstorme, to prototype and to draft. We do not use it to decide a strategy for a client, to arbitrate in a client’s name, or to replace the human authorship of what we deliver. We work with Claude, from Anthropic, under commercial terms that exclude client content from model training. We do not put client material into consumer AI tools, and when a confidentiality agreement forbids third-party processing, no AI tool is used at all. AI has an environmental cost that we cannot measure per project, and we will not pretend to; we use the smallest model that does the job. Every deliverable is reviewed and signed by a named person. If it is wrong, it is ours.