Setting the scene

When you started Agilytic 10 years ago, what did "entrepreneurial" mean to you back then?

Entrepreneurial means starting from a blank page. You have a bit of individual reputation, but no organizational reputation, no brand, no clients. Every day you try to meet people, to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Plenty of people asked us, with real skepticism, what backed up our claims; remember what the data business looked like in 2016!

That context shaped us: a kind of necessity, just to survive and hope to grow one day. Work doesn't land in your lap, so you have to get moving to find it and make your own luck.

Lots of companies put "entrepreneurship" on a poster. What made you decide it had to be a working principle rather than a slogan?

When we started hiring, the memory of our early days was still fresh. The last thing we wanted was to surround ourselves with people who didn't understand what starting a company means, or at least didn't have a feel for it. We don't ask colleagues to be more entrepreneurial than the founders, but we do ask everyone to understand where we come from.

Our success, however modest, came from being proactive. We took responsibility, we pounded the pavement, we tried, failed, experimented. Our fear was exactly that: ending up surrounded by people who didn't share this mindset. For us, that was an existential risk.

What it looks like day to day

You explicitly say you don't hire smart people to micro-manage them. Where's the limit? When does autonomy go wrong, and what happens then?

We're lucky to be surrounded by very capable people, and the problems usually come from colleagues who want to do too well. It sounds counterintuitive, but the trouble often comes from someone who should have asked for help sooner. So we channel that good intention with a bit of self-awareness: putting autonomy first doesn't mean doing everything alone, and asking for help isn't a failure.

Your company playbook includes a "right to be wrong": no penalty for bad outcomes of experiments. What's a failed experiment you're actually glad someone ran?

There are plenty. Recently we tried to build tools that automated some of our marketing illustrations. We went quite far on the technical side before deciding to rely on a commercial solution instead. I'm glad we tried, because building the process taught us what we actually wanted from outside providers. We debriefed it internally as if it were a real project carried through to completion.

Sometimes concluding that an experiment shouldn't go past the experiment stage is itself a success.

What's the "pièce à casser" (the martyr document), and why do you push people to share unfinished work? How do new joiners typically react to that?

You'd have to ask the new joiners, but what we really insist on is working with the garage door open: sharing drafts and work in progress, within the bounds of confidentiality where it applies. We dislike the performative side of the “big reveal”. We'd rather know everyone is moving along on their own topics, and be able to step into each other's work with a simple link and comment directly in the drafts. It saves an enormous amount of time, and it isn't intrusive; it's an invitation to make each other better.

The "pièce à casser" fits that spirit. The point is finding the right moment: pushed and refined enough to be debated, without over-polishing parts you'd have had to redo anyway. Sometimes we end up saying, "if you'd shown me this two weeks ago, I'd have told you straight away it wasn't the right direction." So it's a way of saying, "I'm working here, come take a look now and then to check I'm on the right track." It avoids the performative effect of big deadlines and the idea that you need meetings to make progress. That one is genuinely my pet hate.

Consultants bill time, and entrepreneurial side projects don't. How do you square internal initiatives with a business where most of revenue is time-based services?

There's a big misconception that entrepreneurial spirit is somehow measured in hours. We work in a profession where one of the main units of measure really is time spent. Some wrongly equate entrepreneurship with time, when it's first and foremost a mindset. Even when someone is busy on a project, we encourage them to ask: "How could we do this better?"

We say it all the time: having ideas, or owning something, doesn't mean doing it all yourself. It's on you to push back when things stall and carry ideas forward, but also to recognize when you don't have the time and ask for the resources you need. We very rarely say no to someone who wants to build something inside the organisation, and we're happy to free up time, money or technology.

Proof it's not just words

What's an employee idea that became part of how Agilytic works today?

Our "Platform Engineering & BI" practice is the result of several iterations on the same vision. Beyond our traditional, strategy-led projects, a whole part of our client base needs reliable sources of truth, performance metrics, and the full chain that goes with them. It starts with something that itches: clients keep asking for the same thing, so you start with small projects and then turn them into a real entity within the organisation.

The second part is everything around training and support on AI. There too, it starts from a small need, and then you think, "OK, this could exist and meet a wider need."

The Agilytic playbook asks colleagues to be "a proactive force of proposal". Is it one of those mottos everyone politely ignores?

Today’s technology makes it very easy to get a summary of everything in a knowledge base. Coming up with an interesting idea on how to move forward is harder.

What matters most is the reflex to propose. A truly constructive stance means putting something forward: you can't only summarize a situation, you have to actually think. You can't know everything or be right the first time, and we don't expect people to have all the answers.

Surely it’s not all positives. Where has the entrepreneurial approach genuinely cost you?

Some people join with a slightly romantic idea of entrepreneurship, and the graft doesn't always take. There's often confusion between small-business logic and entrepreneurial logic. People come to a small structure because they want to be more than a number. We deliver on that front.

The flip side is that we expect everyone to contribute, at their own level and in their own way. In a small team, anyone who isn't a proactive contributor ends up being carried, and someone else has to pick up the slack. So we're frank, sometimes uncompromising.

We sometimes genuinely like someone (personally and professionally) but quickly realize that looking for a spark that isn't there is counterproductive and frustrating for everyone. Hiring mistakes are very costly. That's one of the reasons we're talking today: to say it without any value judgement. Don’t get me wrong: our mindset doesn't claim to be better than anyone else's, and not being entrepreneurial doesn't mean you've failed your career. But anyone joining Agilytic should know it's the baseline expectation on the team.

For the candidate reading this

What does an entrepreneurial profile look like in an interview, concretely?

First, curiosity. If a candidate isn't curious about the company, it quickly becomes obvious they're just after a job and that we're interchangeable with any other employer.

The entrepreneurial streak shows through the questions people ask about the culture and the vision. Questions about the role alone could be asked anywhere. But the moment someone digs into what makes our culture specific, or what the project's ambition is, you know you're dealing with someone who thinks beyond themselves and cares about growing a project, not just growing as an individual.

Who should not join Agilytic? What kind of person is great elsewhere but would be miserable here?

Without any value judgement, the fit has never been good with people who have a very strong sense of individual success. When someone's first ambition is their own advancement, a divergence with the collective project always shows up eventually. This isn't a judgement on ambition itself: drive, when well-directed, can be a good thing.

But if a person is focused on themselves first, it shows in their actions and the way they work. When someone is focused instead on the organization and the project, my only concern becomes making sure they have what they need and that they're recognized. There's something counterintuitive here: the less you worry about yourself, the more you progress as an individual.

For those with a strong reflex toward individual ambition, putting a collective path first doesn't come naturally, and at some point it shows. When we spot it, we say so, with a lot of respect and humility. Here we simply measure success by the progress of the project. Once you move the project forward, you're generously and fairly rewarded, but that comes second. If we sense someone arriving with a strong individualist streak, we'll tell them it isn't a good fit.

A junior data scientist joins next month. What's the first opportunity they'll get to act entrepreneurially, in their first weeks?

One of the questions we ask after the first month is: "what can we improve to welcome the person who comes after you?" It might be details of the onboarding, the clarity of information, or a short fresh-eyes report. Continuous improvement can start as early as the first month, simply by asking a new colleague what they'd change for the next person we bring on board.

You ask yourselves "with the bar this high, would I be hired today?" So: would you?

Given my position, my personality has rubbed off a lot on the company and its values, so there'd probably be a fit... But I hope it wouldn't be that easy. Candidates often tell us the recruitment process was demanding, but that the demands were reassuring: they send a strong message about the caliber of the people they'd work with and the standards we hold. I'm fairly hopeful I'd get hired if I went through every round, but I don't think it would be a walk in the park!

Closing

Ten years in, what's one thing about keeping a company entrepreneurial at 20+ people that you wish someone had told you in 2015?

Keep meeting people. Don't rush your hiring, and if you're not sure a message landed, over-communicate rather than assume it's obvious. The key is to surround yourself with people who give back entrepreneurial energy. It's vital to be around people who thrive in that way of working, because their fulfillment is what gives you energy in return. We've been lucky to have far more successes than disappointments, and long may that last!