The subject of this week’s entrepreneur spotlight is Alain Trébucq; a medical publishing entrepreneur who worked alongside David in the early-mid noughties.

 

With a fascinating career, and experience of thriving through adversity, we thought he’d be the perfect candidate for the second installment of the feature.

 

Starting out as a medical doctor in France, Alain launched the publishing firm ATP [1] in the early 1990s. Over the ensuing 25 years, the company was bought, merged and sold several times. Alain has been at the helm of each transaction and has seen the company grow and change. He has encountered many challenges; the .com crash, the 2008 financial crisis and more recently the severe drop in revenue from advertising. Yet, he has adapted to them all and continues to run a successful business to this day.

 

We sat down with Alain to discuss the role of passion in work, how to overcome difficulty and the importance of keeping your eyes on the cash!

 

But first, we take a look at Alain’s journey into entrepreneurship.

 

Alain’s first experience of entrepreneurial life came when he launched ATP in the early 1990s. He created four journals, which were published as medical reviews. Over the next few years, ATP grew and was eventually acquired by France Telecom. The future looked bright; France Telecom had just launched an online portal for the medical industry – egora.fr – which Alain would oversee. ATP was merged with egora.fr, and Alain was engaged to run the combined business. A few years later, the dotcom crash hit, and France Telecom began to unwind assets that weren’t connected to its core telecoms business. They decided to sell the ATP egora business, which was bought by Huveaux PLC, the company David was working for at the time.

 

Over the next few years, David and Alain worked together to merge Huveaux’s French political publication company with the ATP egora business. Following the acquisition of another medical publisher in 2005, the business became one of the biggest medical publishing companies in France. Then in 2008, Alain decided to buy the business back from Huveaux PLC.

 

When we ask him why he decided to start his own business, he answered: “Circumstances!”

 

“I was the general manager of Huveaux’s French subsidiary from 2006. In January 2008, the CEO of the company told me he wished to sell the French medical publishing activity, which formed around 90% of the total activity of Huveaux France. I thought it was a real opportunity to run my own business again, by going through an LBO (leveraged buy-out) with a venture capital firm backing me. This occurred in June 2008 … a few months before the financial crisis hit!”

 

Throughout the crisis, Alain kept the business running. The financial crash has not been the only difficulty Alain has had to overcome; over the last 10 years the medical marketing industry has changed significantly. Advertising revenues used to form a huge part of the business; back in 2005 they contributed €12 million to the business, but by 2016 this had fallen to €2 million. The digital transformation of the publishing industry and the changing trends in medical advertising have been difficult to contend with, but Alain is still running the business at a profitable margin and has managed the change in the structure very well.

 

His advice from this experience?

 

“Do not take your eyes off your cash! In the medical press, we were used to big advertising revenues, and no cash problems. I must admit that for years, I managed the company without a close eye on the cash. Since buying the company in 2008, we have lost 70% of our advertising revenues and if we do better than just survive, it is because we have managed to change our business model. There is now very little that is advertising-dependent, and eyes are kept daily on the cash!”

 

And in terms of what it takes to run a successful business? Alain sums it up in a word:

 

“Passion. A passionate entrepreneur communicates his enthusiasm to his teams and his customers while protecting himself, including against burn-out.” And when passion disappears? “It’s time to turn the page.”

 

It’s safe to say that Alain has had an incredible journey, which looks to keep going. In 2008 Alain made a 10-year deal with a French VC firm to buy Huveaux France. Alain has a 51% stake, and next year when the deal with the VC firm ends, Alain is considering taking over the rest of the company with his current management team. With such an exciting career, we ask Alain what his favourite part of running a business is: “Freedom of enterprise,” he answers, “by focusing on the medium and long term.”

 

Here at Add Then Multiply, we feel incredibly lucky to know and work with such inspiring entrepreneurs. Want to feature on our blog some day? Get in touch and together let’s write your success story.

Until next week!

 

[1] Alain Trébucq Publishing