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Product Strategy

Building a Company that Serves the Greater Good

Frédéric Lasnier
Frédéric Lasnier
Chief Executive Officer, Pentalog

Why the heck did I give myself the headache of taking on freelancing and recruiting, two challenging areas my company knew nothing about?

After all, no one forced me to go and convince my company’s shareholders (all employees themselves) to do this. I was already running a business that had become a European leader in digital product development outsourcing, with a lengthy client list of European start-ups. And, not to mention, a presence in the US that was growing an average of over 30 percent per year.

We were generating double-digit profit margins, millions of euros, yearly.

We had some of the most impressive organic growth in our business sector.

So, why go and spend money like crazy selling services to recruit engineers or better yet, freelancers? Why take the risk?

When it comes down to it, these are businesses where threshold effects can make or break and profits are very, shall we say… uncertain. Why, you ask?

Business idea

The Pentalog platform’s freelance and recruitment services were designed to meet the needs of the entire entrepreneurial and software engineering community. Contact us to learn more!

Because our ENTIRE COMMUNITY needs this.

  1. First & foremost, we do this for our clients.
    HR requires swift action. The very first order of business for a start-up that has just raised a bunch of funds is to recruit as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
    In respecting a roadmap, there’s no getting around this step – period.

    One of our clients, for example, recruited around 300 people in Q1 of 2018 (in a country where, unfortunately, we don’t have recruitment operations).

  2. To initiate fruitful relationships with clients earlier in their start-up life cycle.
    Many products start in the hands of freelancers. Positioning Pentalog up front benefits us both because later, we can offer clients recruiting services – and then tech, cloud, and marketing outsourcing. On top of this, we offer continuous traceability and an unparalleled ability to mobilize resources.

    Our end goal is to be the go-to partner for product makers helping them design, build, launch, support, and sell their product, and much more. The Pentalog platform must operate in all areas.

  3. To meet the expectations of engineers.
    In my line of work, everyone either is, has been, or will be a freelancer. The examples set by the UK and US are clear. There’s no point in re-explaining, the demand is clear.

  4. Because, every month, thousands of people join the SkillValue online IT testing community and we wanted to offer them opportunities as well.
    In addition, we now have thousands of client accounts from companies using our tests. We want to be their professional matchmaker.

  5. Because, I want the Pentalog platform to be recognized as a public service to start-upers around the world! Is that egocentric or selfless? Hindering or helpful?

 

A business idea worth a goldmine? How?

This year, we will bring in €40 million in revenue, maybe even more. We will continue our strong growth and in the face of these heavy investments, generate millions of euros in profits, allowing us to continue investing to produce double-digit growth and a double-digit profit margin, too.

That’s what really interests me – the machinery of business.

Investing heavily in data, software and automation to create a platform matching thousands of clients with thousands of Pentaguys – boasting 300,000 job candidates and freelancers in our community. Automation, data-driven, Pentalog as A software!Only seven businesses throughout the world can say they do all that.

Maybe we’ve stumbled across a goldmine?

We certainly think so. We haven’t increased our number of salespeople in two years and yet they continue to regularly absorb new business. We earn more revenue per salesperson than the world leaders in our industry.

 

Broadening horizons

It would be great to be able to more closely track a customer’s needs, in a totally different way than how a simple marketplace operates while maintaining amazing scalability, unlike IT consultancies and agencies.

That has always been my goal in challenging the way the consulting sector has historically operated. We’re not far from achieving that goal, but we still have a few stones to turn.

In the meantime, we have now completely succeeded in incorporating RevSquare’s growth-hacking services into our approach to product life cycle management. We build a digital product from the design phase to the marketing phase, with all the steps in between.

We are going to almost double our US revenue this year and are opening our first unit in Mexico, which we identified as the best human resource solution to the shortage of developers in the US, while being in the optimal time zone.

If we succeed, it will be thanks to all of you. All the entrepreneurial and software engineering communities we work with are bubbling with creativity and push us to offer a unique experience for developing brands and products. There are 2,000 companies using our products and services, as well as over 300,000 developers in the Pentalog community.

I have so many ideas about what else I want to do for them that I can’t even write them all down for you!

 

Follow me on Facebook and Linkedin to discuss IT and business development.

 

Learn more :

Freelancing, outsourcing, and hiring: how to tap into digital work resources What if freelancers were to join modern platforms as franchisees instead of selling their skills in the marketplace?


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