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6 years after TBSeeds, Simon Sentenac sets out again to democratize Marketing
Six years after his first entrepreneurial venture, where he helped florists go digital, and following a wealth of experience in marketing as an employee of Groupe TF1 in particular, Simon returned to the entrepreneurial adventure by creating Acing, a marketing consultancy enabling companies of all sizes to have a marketing team worthy of the biggest companies.
Simon SENTENAC (TBS Education 2017) joins the school in Bachelor Hospitality management. During this year, he took part in the Bureau Des Etudiants campaign. It was there that he discovered the world of communications and marketing. He then undertook an internship with a communications agency, Ctoopub. That's when it all clicked. He wanted to continue his studies and move into the world of marketing and entrepreneurship.
What is your professional background?
I joined the Grande Ecole Program at TBS Education in 2015. As early as my first year of the Master's program, I got involved in student associations in the communications department. This enabled me to put into practice and develop my communication/marketing skills.
At the same time, I discovered the school's incubator, TBSeeds. Curious and keen to try my hand at entrepreneurship, I entered the ATALE competition with a high school friend. We came up with a marketplace for florists, which we defended in front of a jury. Our project won third prize against existing companies already generating sales. The jury even encouraged us to actually create our own business.
Neofleurs was born in 2016. Our concept: to create a marketplace for florists, anywhere in France, to digitalize their services without the slightest technical knowledge. It's been a very rewarding experience. It enabled me to develop a large number of entrepreneurial skills, particularly in sales canvassing and management. These were areas in which I was not at ease. However, three years later, we decided to call it a day. It was my first failure. Despite growth and good product and network development, we had made mistakes in positioning and margins at the outset. We hadn't balanced our investment between product and sales development. Our remuneration didn't live up to our expectations, so we decided to quit.
In 2018, I enter the job market with apprehension and imposter syndrome. I know how to do everything, but I'm not an expert in anything. As I'd never specialized, I didn't know which profession to turn to despite my appetite for digital. I had mastered a wide range of skills without really being a specialist in any one of them.
An opportunity finally opened up for me in the TF1 Group's performance marketing agency. It was a double-hatted position, Digital Project Manager & Social Ads Manager, which suited me perfectly. I was very enthusiastic about the idea of working on campaigns for well-known companies such as Yves Rocher, Renault, Nocibé... Thanks to this first experience, I also understood that what seemed extraordinary and unattainable to me, was in fact not so. On a day-to-day basis, I was carrying out missions involving high stakes for the agency and its customers, with budgets sometimes 100 times higher than what I'd known before. And yet, everything was going well.
Since then, the phrase "Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion" by Michael Jordan, has spoken to me a lot.
Three years later, I was headhunted for a product position at Artur'in, a startup specializing in marketing automation for SMEs in the real estate and insurance sectors. My role: Social ADS product expert, I had to ensure that the automation of targeting and advertising on social networks generated the best results. An opportunity I accepted. This second experience as a salaried employee enabled me to work on a more "product" aspect and to return to small and medium-sized businesses. Then, in 2022, I became Marketing Director at Looping, a European performance marketing agency.
I've been in marketing for six years now, so I know the mechanisms and players in the market. I've mastered every link in the marketing project chain, from sales to balance sheet, and I have a network of ultra-qualified experts in every field. I'm able to work with major groups and apply their methods and tools to smaller structures that want to grow, but don't have the means to pay for a full marketing team.
So last January I launched Acing, a marketing consultancy thatprovides customers with a team of specialists tailored to their ambitions, size and budget.
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What were the main challenges in creating Acing?
Becoming a contractor again was a real challenge. The end of my first experience had been painful, and I didn't know if I wanted to go through that again. Entrepreneurship meant giving up the comfort of being an employee and taking a risk at the age of 30. I knew the workload it could bring and the sacrifices it required in my personal life.
But paradoxically, I felt that it was time for me to return to entrepreneurship, to rediscover the challenges of everyday life. Starting from scratch and building a solid project surrounded by incredible people motivates me enormously!
How did you come up with the idea of setting up your own consultancy?
During my career, I've met some exceptional people in different marketing sectors, and I had this crazy idea of seeing them work together, of creating a "national selection" of marketers.
I wanted to bring these experts together around a common goal: to give all companies access to marketing and digital. This was already the case, with Neofleurs for florists, and Artur'in for real estate and insurance. Today, I'm going one step further and addressing all sectors. My experiences with major groups, with whom I obviously continue to work, are highly formative and help me to progress every day. My aim is to work on the best marketing practices of the best, to turn them into processes and make them accessible to smaller structures.
What advice would you give our readers?
You have to dare. When you try and give it your all, you manage to do things you often don't even think about.
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