How many times have we all heard that consultants are good for nothing, except for giving you time after stealing your watch. I certainly had my fair share of those comments in a previous life.
Actually, some consultants become great entrepreneurs and businessmen. I give you today the portrait of a young man (he's only 34 now), Pierre Beaufils, who started his company about 4 years ago, a couple of days after 9/11 with 4 other co-founders. Times couldn't have been worse: he came from a consultancy that was in a turmoil (Ernst & Young), recently acquired by Cap Gemini; the market was heading south big time, and customers were not spending anything anymore on outside resources, in particular the telco sector that had over-invested in previous years.
Well, these 5 boys did it: they launched a specialised consultancy, Greenwich Consulting, with a very narrow and vertical focus, the telecoms market. We can easily say that in France today, they have worked for every major player in this space, and have expanded to about 10 Western European countries. And they are growing by the day, at around 100 people now. I've mentionned these guys before a number of times, as I keep stumbling on them everywhere (ie here, or here or here)
Asked about his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, Pierre says that it is really rather easy, but requires enormous effort, just do it! He should know what the word means, as he was on the French Decathlon team...
As a matter of fact, I'm just about to finish Jack Welch's book, Winning. A great read, I've enjoyed every page of it, as it's more of a conversation with the man himself. In his chapter about recruiting great people, he says he looks for the folks who meet the 4E and a 1P criteria: someone who has positive Energy, who has the ability to Energize others, who has the Edge to make tough calls, and who can Execute. P stands for Passion. GE: you'd better do something with telcos again, because this guy is a natural fit!
By the way, I was reading last night about the problems that Christophe Becker from LeBlogGenealogie.com was having with a 50Mb video file he was trying to share, and that took for ever. He's on an experiment with our solution (what's the word we use for versions before alpha ?), and to celebrate it, we all now get a new player for the videos that works the same on all browsers, all OSes, and all Flash versions. Neat no ?
Note: video taped early this morning (8 october 2005) around 1am, outside the EBG party (Electronic Business Group). Some folks said when I got in earlier that damn! they were really too many men in this Internet business. I tried to prove them wrong :D
