"Interview of Yves-Michel Marti, CEO of EGIDERIA, for OUTSELL MAGAZINE, April 2002,by Joel BLOCK.
What is your positionning ? Egideria is a 100% Competitive Intelligence Company. We are completely committed to and specialized in this domain. Our focus is primary research. We obtain sensitive and strategic information through direct interviews of professionals, by phone, email, or face to face. Research is exclusive for a single client. Our turnover is 80% research and 20% consulting.
Tell me about your business model and revenues … Our work process is very traditional. We could have done the same kind of work 500 years ago. It is all about human interaction with people. We see ourselves as craftsmen, focussing on quality of work and close and lasting relationships with clients. We have no leverage in our business model and do not plan to go public.
Please describe your organization. The company has less than 10 people. We are all very close and share information. We are concerned about the security of the information that we handle, so we treat our employees very well.
What is your target audience, your typical customer profile ? Our clients are Fortune 500 companies in any industry where good information makes a difference. Our target clients are mostly operational decision makers. Typical client responsibilities are Sales, R&D, Manufacturing, Marketing, Strategy, CEO.
What about your scope and geographical coverage ? Geographic scope is Europe, North America, Asia. 2/3 is Europe and 1/3 is America. Primary industries are Pharma/Cosmetics, Chemicals, Transportation, Energy, E-commerce, Electronics, Department Stores, Financial.
What products and services do you offer ?
Typical assignments are :
· Discreet investigation of acquisition targets prior to due diligence and acquisition.
· Analysis of competitors’ new products strategy and development
· Intelligence support for winning competitive bids
· Intelligence on clients for identifying business opportunities
· Intelligence on suppliers in order to assess supply risk
· Analysis of competitors’ manufacturing processes and costs
· Acquisition of competitor products
· Rumour verification and source identification
· Profitability analysis of companies per product line, per country, per business unit, per distribution channels, etc.
· Background checks of decision makers
· Identification of supply channels of grey markets
· Prior art research in order to challenge competitor patents
We have close to a 100% success rate. We had limited success on only 2 projects out of well over a hundred in 7 years.
As an example of tangible results : the critical information we provided helped a client in winning a 100 million dollars competitive bid.
What is your pricing model ? Our fees are on a per project basis for research and on a per day basis on consulting. We limit our consulting to 3 clients a year, in order to ensure time availability and quality of work.
Tell me about your strategy and differentiators... We love work well done (our roots are in engineering). We put the main emphasis on production. We believe that if we do good research, then a lot of nice things will follow such as image, recognition, client loyalty, employee retention and so on. It really works, but it has taken us half a dozen years to get this virtuous circle started. We are very resourceful. Faced with any problem, we always find workable solutions to client problems. We are very good at building human networks from scratch. We are ethical. Our people are nice people and they are free to refuse to do something if they feel uncomfortable. We have an internal project feedback process that ensures that any operational mistake or overstep get corrected for good. We keep a very close contact with our clients during a project. We keep them informed day to day. We innovate and are perceived as leaders in our field. Egideria is a learning place. We think about our practice. We teach and we write books (M. Yves-Michel Marti’s book received an award from the Financial Times).