Monet + Associates, experiencing significant growth with the development of the Ceetadel group, has been structuring its processes with Furious for several years.
It is within this context, and to uncover the secrets behind this rapid growth, that we spoke with Amaury Bataille, Managing Director. Sector challenges, the use of Furious within their group, and business units are (among other things) on the agenda for this interview.
Can you introduce yourself, Amaury?
My name is Amaury Bataille, and I’ve been working at Monet + Associates for almost seven years now as the Managing Director, focusing on structuring and developing the company.
Monet + Associates - what do you do, who are you?
Monet Agency is an agency that was created and taken over by Julien Monnet about fifteen years ago. It was initially specialized in media relations, then gradually incorporated other areas of expertise such as social media management and influencer management. Today, we are part of a group we are building called Ceetadel, which includes two subsidiaries: one specializing in media buying, called Allmatik, and the other in website creation and marketing, called Smartfire.
How are you organized?
We are currently organized by Business Units. Within the Monet group, we have experts in various branches. Creative services, public relations management, social media management, influencer management, media buying, programmatic services, and website creation.
What are your main challenges today?
Monet faces several challenges: the first is that we are creating a group, aggregating different expertise, and ensuring that people work together using common tools.
In this context, we face growth challenges in two areas: external growth, integrating agencies with similar expertise that we can develop, or agencies with slightly ad hoc expertise that we can aggregate.
Of course, we also face a challenge, like most of our competitors, of retaining and internally growing our teams.
Developing also means being able to retain these teams, especially the best ones, as they are the ones driving the company’s growth.
How long have you been using Furious?
We have been using Furious for a little over two years now (since 2021).
We switched to Furious when we were just over 6 million euros in sales, with the aim of saying “now’s the time to accelerate, we need a tool that will enable us to manage our business and track our growth”.
Since we installed Furious, we’ve doubled our sales in two years. This success isn’t solely due to Furious, but it certainly helps us manage our business and ensure that our teams work together efficiently.
People can see what is being done, and we have gained significant fluidity.
I believe we wouldn’t be able to manage our business as finely as we do today without a tool like Furious, which perfectly meets our needs.
It allows us to manage our business comprehensively: from invoicing to the entire CRM flow, including all aspects of our purchasing management.
These optimizations enable us to absorb growth smoothly.
What is the key KPI you follow?
If I had to choose, I would say that today we couldn’t do without our gross margin estimate.
To give you an example, it’s an indicator we track almost daily with Julien, our president.
The problem I have, and this will make you smile, is that when you arrive at the end of the month and you haven’t invoiced 100% of the month, because a purchase order is missing for X/Y reasons, and you arrive on May 1st for example, well the sales positioned on April 30th no longer appear in the dashboards. This leads to a drop in our estimated gross margin, which drives my boss crazy! Result: I anticipate. And so on the evening of the 30th, I usually shift all remaining invoices to May 1st, the following day, to make sure that our macro figures are up to date.
Really, gross margin management is clearly what Furious is all about.
