Two markets opened from zero. Seventeen consultants deployed.

Opening a market for a brand few people knew in the region means building credibility and business at the same time. You sell the engagements, recruit the technical profiles, deploy them at clients and keep them there, all in the same motion.

I prospected and signed the first industrial and telecom-operator clients. In parallel, I sourced, recruited and managed the consultants. In two years, a team of 17 simultaneously deployed consultants.

The biggest file: a tender from the Eurométropole de Strasbourg, €400K committed over four years. I ran the response with Bid Management, kept the follow-up going, and met the client and its stakeholders through to submission. Two things won it: the skills being asked for already existed in-house, and the reading of what the teams actually needed had been done with those teams before a word of the response was written.

A deployed consultant works at the client site, not next to me. When one of them was not putting in the full hours, I put the client and the consultant in the same meeting. The problem was raised once, in front of both, and we left with an arrangement that held for everyone.

With a sales pipeline and a candidate pool to hold at the same time, every hour spent on a deal was an hour not spent on a hire. I learned to drop what wasn't moving, fast.

What decided the public tender happened before any writing, in the meetings where I understood what the teams actually had to run.