About Nico Daenens

Nico Daenens is a social entrepreneur and CEO of service voucher company Daenens. With his strong focus on social responsibility and sustainable employment, he has built a company that is a successful player in the domestic help and service voucher industry.

How it started for Nico

At the age of 26, Nico Daenens had a late vocation and decided to take up a new study in the then fairly new field of facility management. During his internship, he endeavoured to work in as many different jobs as possible, from cleaning in hospitals to sitting in at boardroom tables. His internship period made Nico realize the general disinterest in domestic workers. To turn that around, he founded Dienstenaanhuis in 2004. Twenty years on and his brainchild has evolved into a group of companies with over 16,500 employees. His unwavering commitment to household helps remains to this day and he keeps striving to improve working conditions for all domestic workers.

Nico’s vision of the service voucher sector

Today, additional fees have to be charged from clients in order to offer household helps better working conditions. Nico has never been a fan of these added costs because he wants everyone to be able to keep using service vouchers, but unfortunately, few alternatives exist so far. That is why Nico is in strong favour of indexing the service vouchers to better reflect the real costs.

Nico on expanding the service voucher system

Cleaning is and always will be physical work, there is no way around that. By expanding the type of services that can be paid for with service vouchers, a lot of household helps could keep working for longer. If household helps are no longer able to do the actual cleaning work, they could still be picking up children from school or visit senior citizens to lend a helping hand. This ideal combination of job creation and savings on healthcare is Nico Daenens' dream for the future.

Nico on the financial situation of the industry

In order to keep the service voucher industry economically healthy in the long run and to provide well-deserved proper working conditions for household helps, Nico believes two key issues need to change.

First, the government should abolish the currently granted tax benefit of service vouchers and fully inject that recuperated amount into the sector itself. For the moment, every service voucher costing €9 entitles users to a reduction of €1.8 through their tax return, effectively reducing the price of a service voucher to €7.2. Abolishing the tax benefit could be part of the solution, but only if it is fully invested back into the sector.
Abolishing the tax benefit alone is not enough to address the industry’s challenges: an actual increase of the service voucher’s price is also needed. Is there a risk that this will deter users? It does not seem to, considering the figures of companies that are charging additional administrative fees and do not see a drop in demand. However, Nico stresses one important condition: applying a price increase must happen in a socially responsible way by working with different rates. This could ensure that service vouchers remain affordable to everyone, including the elderly and single-parent families.

Nico, chairman of KRC Harelbeke

In November 2023, Nico took up the role of chairman of KRC Harelbeke. He wants to bring professional football to the Forestiers stadium and return the club to the highest league. Nico has big plans for KRC, not just on a sports level but also regarding the social impact of the club. Expanding and strengthening its youth operation, G-football and women's football are just a few of his goals.

What’s more, Nico looks beyond the gates of the Forestiers stadium. He truly wants to strengthen the city of Harelbeke’s fabric from within the club. For example, there are plans to build a completely new sports site in collaboration with the city. And as KRC Harelbeke should remain a club for every local, offering free season tickets to all residents is a great example of how Nico connects the club to the city.