How can we make our branches profitable and well-organized?

After founding and leading the Disko agency for nearly 10 years, Davy Tessier and Mickael Lellouche now head Furious, an online management tool that offers agencies, startups, and consulting firms a comprehensive solution to manage their operations and optimize their profitability.

For this “Entrepreneur’s Perspective” feature, we spoke with Davy Tessier, co-founder of Furious. He gave us an inside look at his 100% remote company and explained how this “control tower” can make life easier for your agency—and for you, too.

What is “Furious” in a few sentences?

Davy Tessier: It’s an online agency management tool. Furious manages all workflows and everything related to running an agency—from lead generation to quotes, including sales closing, pre-sales coordination, project management, Gantt charts, ticket management tools, scheduling, invoicing, purchasing, financial closings, human resources, interviews, and more. It’s an extremely comprehensive tool with a wide range of features. The advantage of having all of this in one place is that we gain valuable insights from all this data. This allows us to make predictions and save time.

The challenge for us is that each of these features has to be on par with the market—or even better. Our challenge in recent years hasn’t been simply to create something that saves time, but something that saves time when compared to industry standards—like Pipedrive and HubSpot. The thing is, those tools only cover a small part of the business. For example, Pipedrive is great for managing pre-sales. But tracking and understanding the time spent on all pre-sales activities for a client, as well as the time spent on winning projects with that client relative to overall profitability, is impossible to calculate withsingle-feature tools.

Does Furious have a unique selling point compared to the rest of the market?

D.T.: Since Furious is a general-purpose tool in a niche sector, it allows us to adopt a mindset that’s well-suited to this market. Some ERP systems specialize in a wide range of sectors (e.g., Septeo for the legal profession), but we specialize in businesses that sell “man-hours” —time for money—and those that sell fixed-price packages.

All of this is something we developed in our previous venture, at Disko. For 10 years, we experienced significant growth (+40% per year), had offices all over the place, and were always profitable. Why? Because we had our workflows under control and managed the business using more than just theaccountant’s reports, which always come after the fact. When you have a 20% or even 30% turnover rate alongside 40% growth, that means you’ve replaced more than half your workforce in a single year. And if, on top of that, you’re retaining some of your clients while acquiring new ones, it’s very hard to model in your head if you’re not using predictive analytics. You need a system that’s closely tailored to your talent pool, relative to your current project pipeline, but also relative to the pre-sales opportunities you’re bidding on, including probability-of-win rates, and so on.

When you factor all these parameters into the equation, it results in something that’s very difficult to do—and even more difficult to recalculate every month—which is why we developed this approach to flow management, which was the philosophical foundation of Furious.

What led you to create Furious?

D.T.: When we sold Disko, I started doing other things: real estate, lots of projects, and I even launched a startup making boat alarms! Then one day, some former colleagues came to see me and said, “You developed something cool with Disko—now that we’re no longer competitors, could you help us out with some internal tools, too?” And this came with an interesting goal, since it was before the pandemic. For example, the bosses would say, “Okay, I run a big agency in Lyon, and I’d like to spend two days a week in the mountains, but how can I manage my teams without being there every day?” When you have multiple agencies in different countries, you can’t be everywhere. That’s how we created our first prototype. When I presented it to this colleague, he brought along two or three other agency executives, and that’s how it all got started. Soon, others joined us—since it’s a small industry and everyone knows each other—and clients began approaching us on their own.

Why the name “Furious”?

D.T.: I also created Furious because I realized that in many other industries I’d dabbled in—real estate and startups, for example—everything moved very slowly. We quickly realized we needed to get back to something with real stakes, which is why we called it Furious. Originally, this tool was created primarily to help business leaders, explaining things to them methodically. Over the course of two to three years, the tools have been significantly enhanced with artificial intelligence.

” Furious” is all about speed. We’re committed to helping our clients achieve their ” furious growth.”

Are the agencies already well-equipped with solutions of this type?

D.T.: We have two main types of agency profiles: first, small agencies with fewer than 15 employees. Generally, they have a lot of different tools, but they don’t see the connections between them—and they’re often run with the boss at the center (who sees everything and does everything).

When an agency grows beyond 50–70 people, none of them have a full suite of tools. They do have some tools, of course, but these are generally 20 years old—and heavily focused on finance.

That’s the big difference between us and Furious: we come from an operations background. The tools were first designed to improve the day-to-day lives of people—project managers, operations directors—and only then to provide financial reporting.

There is one final category: agencies that have nothing and delegate everything to their accounting firm. These agencies expect someone who is unfamiliar with their industry to provide recommendations and advice…

How much of your offering consists of support, beyond the tool itself?

D.T.: Support is always included. It’s actually quite brief, since customers can get up to speed with the tool very quickly. But it’s also included because the tool is very comprehensive and modular. We provide support on training-related topics, including best practices —where Furious will highlight key points and deliver methodological training. The goal is to make clients aware of certain aspects so they can implement changes on their own. Of course, all these recommendations will depend on the nature and size of the company and who we’re working with.

What kinds of teams do you have?

D.T.: We have three main areas of focus:

1- Discover is the upstream division, which verifies alignment between what we have, the market, and what we’re hearing. We identify customers’ challenges, and they discover the tool. It’s our marketing and communications division.

2- Success, whose mission is to ensure the success of the migration.

3- Product: This section covers the product and its improvements.

The average age here must be around 38, with senior staff who have spent at least 10 years working at the agency.

Isn’t it every digital agency executive’s dream to pivot to SaaS (Software as a Service)?

D.T.: That’s quite a dream! It’s all the more of a dream because, at the beginning of the month, we already know what our revenue will be. Even the slightest extra effort brings in new customers. It’s much more reassuring—I spent 15 years scrambling to meet month-end deadlines, praying that everything would work out.

Next, we’ve actually put a lot of our people on project-based work—50% of the product team is working on customer feedback. When a customer tells us something during the day, we can make the improvement for them as early as the next day. This is a real contrast to the software industry.

50% of the staff is focused on short-term responses, while the rest is focused on “long-term” responses—meaning we’ll do things we haven’t been asked to do, in order to help the client.

Are you working entirely remotely, or do you still have an office?

D.T.: We have two offices, one in Montpellier and one in Paris. But the company is set up for 100% remote work—all meetings are held online, for example. We also all use Furious.

How do you view the agency market right now? And what about three years from now?

D.T.: Last year, we saw strong growth in our client base—and not necessarily just digital agencies, for that matter. We also saw an increase in profitability. 2021 and 2022 were excellent years in terms of cash flow and customer acquisition. They were more challenging from an HR perspective, and things are starting to get tighter from a sales perspective.

There was a crisis (COVID) that the agencies had to weather, and they struggled to manage the HR side of things—not everyone was ready to dive back into work full steam ahead. Hiring has become complicated. That’s what we’ve observed over the past few months: issues related to sales management, production, and human resources.

What we’re starting to see abroad are concerns about tight cost and payroll controls relative to revenue—especially if clients were to cut their budgets. We’re sensing a tightening in the market as the year comes to a close, even though it’s still too early to say for sure.

From a short-term perspective, we believe there will be some adjustment effects, particularly if macroeconomic issues persist. A year ago, it was unthinkable to imagine Ukraine and the energy crisis linked to gas and oil. We were talking about COVID, and that was already a huge deal!

We don’t know what will happen in the coming months, but given the trade tensions, marketing departments may be affected. That said, we’re seeing strong growth, because the demand for intelligence is constantly increasing across all markets. We believe the market for intellectual services has a bright future ahead. Given that we’re seeing fundamental shifts— agency management models will evolve, and Furious’s tools will support that transition. There will be more flexibility in contracts, fewer permanent positions, more freelancers, and greater interaction between them and the rest of the workforce.

This hybrid work model is a trend I’ve observed frequently in tech startups; we’re seeing it emerge and spread to the rest of the world. We anticipate a gradual shift toward hybrid teams—both in terms of the nature of the contract and its duration.

We want to be a European alternative to Anglo-Saxon tools; there are some great ways of approaching organization in Europe. That’s what we’re trying to be, on our modest scale—hoping that our scale will only continue to grow.

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