Patrick Henckes is founder and CEO of Moria.
Patrick was born in 1965 and married in 2018 to Marion Braumüller. He got his MS degree in Electronic Engineering specialisation Micro-electronics at the KUL (Catholic University Leuven) in 1988. He trained over the years in international transport, Management Skills, Negotiation, NLP, finance, communication, coaching, stress handling, Self-reflection (The Work with Byron Katie), Imago Professional Facilitation, … Besides his 2 mothertongues (Dutch and French) and his proficiency in English, he has a reasonable understanding and communication ability of written and spoken German.
Patrick started the first 5 years (1988 – 1993) of his career as scientific researcher at IMEC (www.imec.be) in the domain of submicron CMOS process development. In parallel, he worked free lance for Hefboom, where he co-wrote the study for the “Koning Boudewijn stichting” called “werken aan werk” : a study about the economic viability of social projects within the regular economy. It lead him to realize that his passion was less with the high-tech environment he worked in, but more into supporting projects for unemployed to become economically viable. As a person with an exaggerated work ethic, unemployment seemed as the worse of all evils.
In 1994, he founded Moria NV, one of the first insertion businesses “invoegbedrijf”, companies created to enrol mainly previously long term unemployed. The company serviced the industrial maintenance of a gas canister park of 250.000 pieces for Praxair Europe. Main focus was on the production and HR, safety and ISO certification. The activity was stopped in 2002.
In 1996 he created Eco PC, Belgian market leader in refurbished computers PCs. Eco PC was also an “invoegbedrijf”. In 1998 he integrated the small company of 10 people in the European (Dutch) market leader Flection International, and he continued to manage the Belgian (and French) operation till june 2006 (25 people, revenue 4M EUR). His main focus moved from the operational daily management, to more business and project development, creation and growth of a French entity, introduction and development of an ERP application (Axapta) and commercial activities for specific large international contracts. Meanwhile the international group was taken over by Arrow international, who first gathered worldwide refurbishing actors and then closed all those activities in 2019. Eco PC was saved from this onslaught and taken over by his largest non profit client and renamed the activity in CTG Circular. Patrick helped in this transition.
Meanwhile he co-founded “De Wolkammerij” in 2001, a business centre focused on social profit companies, with offices and workspace to rent with value added services. And he founded Varda Relighting, a company active in lighting : maintenance (relamping), relighting, repair, security lighting, electro installations. 20 persons, 6M revenue. His focus there was on business strategy and finance.
From 2006-2009 he led Cenergie CVBA as CEO, an engineering and consulting firm for energy aware building and construction. It went till 30 persons and 2,5 M Revenue. From 2010 on, he decided to retire from the daily management and moved to business development, with a main focus on business development for for large accounts: Flemish Government, Brussels Institute for Environment, and many architectural competitions.
This gave him the space to co-found Caeleste CVBA and to lead it from 2010 on. Caeleste is a beyond state of the art custom image sensor design house. In 2016, Caeleste won the Deloitte fast 50 in its category for Belgium. In its 2021 fiscal year : 40 man personnel, 8+M revenue.
Since januari 2017, he retired from Caeleste and from Varda, in order to go on a sabbatical world journey, to marry in Austria, to think about life, dance, meditate, follow many trainings and to take the time to search and develop new markets.
He does private coaching and did and does still some long running projects for Close-the-gap and for the Imago International Training Institute.
