How did things go?

The whole ride was enjoyable, but I went through two extremely difficult periods. Firstly at the start, simply because I was highly delusional and unprepared. My sales technique was ridiculously inefficient, close to a 100% rejection rate. And six years later when I started my first magazine in France – Andy - because Paris is an old-money market where all doors are closed unless you have a solid network coming from your family or your school.
 

How did you solve these issues?

I knew from my professional golf decade that if you work long enough on something, you generally prevail. In Paris, I was in the office at 6 a.m., calling 400 numbers per day and leaving at midnight for a jog in La Defense. It was so hard. It took us months to understand that we had to bypass the agencies and go straight to CEOs. After that, we signed Heineken, Lexus, Lacoste and a big bank in rapid succession. 18 years later, we still use the same approach: sell to the top decision makers and connect with marketing people after. That is what works best for an agency like 360Crossmedia, which is a challenger everywhere: In France, we are considered a Luxembourgish agency, and in Luxembourg we are the agency run by the French guy.

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“A high performing service provider is only compatible with like-minded clients.”

What lessons have you learnt?

We made every possible mistake and they cost a lot of money and time. If I had to do it again, I would prepare better, especially in things I don’t like : sales, accounting, administrative work, etc. Another lesson I learnt is that culture is what matters the most. I spend a ridiculously large amount of time perfecting the culture of 360 and sharing it with the team. We have a 300-page book covering all aspects of our culture, as well as 800 videos and an official internet page: www.360Crossmedia.com/culture. This is the kryptonite of the company, which not only attracts the best talent but also the most compatible clients. A high performing service provider is only compatible with like-minded clients. It took me at least a decade to understand that. And that leads to my last lesson: how to reduce stress! We remained open during covid and realized that working all day from home was effortless. When we came back, we understood that two clients were generating 100% of the stress. Small clients of course, who always wanted “instant action”, disrespected team members and paid their invoices very late. We got rid of them and our stress level dropped dramatically. Since then, I have become much more careful when onboarding new clients, and I do a cultural alignment check first.

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Can you share your best memories?

There are so many! Working in New York, Shanghai or London. The Lexus hole-in-one challenge which we ran at Place de la Constitution gathering 15,000 participants. Innovating successfully with MyOfficialStory in 2008 or the 360Box in 2017. The satisfaction of publishing magazines that we consider artworks. But I can also look at last week: Finishing the “Atel Tech day” with my relentless team and getting a strong feeling that everything went perfectly well. That is what has been driving me for 25 years: a noble quest for perfection and value creation. I always say to people founding start-ups that once you get out of the “extreme precarity” zone, the key is to build a rockstar team. It is not easy in Luxembourg, but we have demonstrated that it is possible.  

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