Davy Tessier and Mickael Lellouche founded and ran the communications agency Disko for 10 years. They are now at the head of the young start-up Furious Squad, which offers a complete solution for agency management.
Interview.
IN A FEW WORDS, WHAT IS FURIOUS?
Furious is an innovative, tailor-made platform capable of managing all operations (CRM and sales management, reporting, staffing, projects, expenses, subcontracting, etc.) via artificial intelligence. Furious has already impressed many leading and growing agencies.
Through AI, Furious enables the anticipation and improvement of our customers’ operations (and not just monitoring them). And that changes everything (conversational interface, predictive alerting, HR management and prediction, etc).
With all their feeds in one place, Furious replaces an average of seven tools at our clients’ sites and saves 30% of time on back-office issues and 20% of management time.
It is the most advanced management tool for service companies on the market.
WHY HAVE YOU CREATED FURIOUS?
At the time of Disco and our strong growth, we challenged the best tools on the market but we simply concluded that more there are tools, there is less insight.
So we thought of a method, then interfaces, then tools, then correlations and finally APIs to manage the agency’s growth and profitability in the most effective way.
But in an agency, it’s practically impossible to combine publishing with services. Whenever a talent was available, it was quickly taken up by an urgent client need.
So we had to wait until we sold the company and a suggestion during a coffee with a former colleague: “And now that we are no longer competitors, don’t you want to help me restructure my internal tools?
Furious was born…
HOW DID YOU EXPERIENCE THE PERIOD OF CONFINEMENT?
Excellent! We have two locations, one in Paris and one in Montpellier.
We already have a culture of dematerialisation (thanks to Furious). For example, we have weekly teleworking days for everyone. So we used to hear from each other’s children behind the screens! In short, from an internal point of view, not much has changed.
On the other hand, in terms of activity, we had a high workload (and it’s not decreasing!).
Indeed, many agencies were not prepared to manage remote operations. As a result, some of them found themselves lost during this period (planning, kpis, customer relationship monitoring, capitalisation, HR, etc.).
So we have been working hard to help our new customers get through this period as well as possible.
WHAT IS YOUR LATEST NEWS?
We have been lucky enough to convince many agencies with very different profiles: advertising agencies, digital agencies, PR agencies, development agencies, media agencies… And we continue to invest in the product so that each type of agency, ESN, start-up finds its own way of working in Furious.
We have released a variant of Furious that allows us to deploy inside agencies integrated into large groups, for example at the advertiser.
WHY DO YOU THINK YOU ARE THE BEST TOOL FOR AGENCIES?
We already have the widest functional coverage on the market.
This enables us to take advantage of a large amount of data and correlations.
Our goal is therefore clear: to save time for all the agency’s businesses and above all to be predictive.
This is definitely our greatest strength! Instead of pulling out of the dashboards after the battle, Furious offers systematically projections that allows decisions to be made faster.
With Furious, it is impossible to lose money without having been warned before losing money!
WHAT IS YOUR GOAL FOR THE BEGINNING OF THE SEASON?
We continue to invest ” Furiously ” in the product.
Because we invest enormously – and will continue to do so – on integration, our tool deployment time is already among the lowest of the market (approximately 3 weeks).
For us, this is the most important key success factor. The higher the speed of integration, the lower the risk of changing the tool and the internal method. A change of tool cannot be made without the support of the teams.
We invest a significant amount in this area with our customers to secure the change.
This interview was made by CB News on 14 July 2020.
