"A CEO for a high growth company needs to behave like an athlete in a business world – wake up early, take care of their mental and physical health, be ready to take risks, be eager to learn and improve, and focus 100% on how to become a market leader in its sector."
Eliane Lugassy is CEO and co-founder of Witco – an all-in-one app for more serviced and collaborative spaces.
After graduating as a lawyer and joining ESSEC Business School, she began her career at Rothschild & Co in Paris in M&A where she worked on several transactions among which were major real estate projects. In 2016, she left finance to create her own tech startup, Witco.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Eliane Lugassy: My background in law studies and my career in finance at Rothschild & Co has helped me to where I am today. The knowledge I gained has been very useful when setting up my own business venture.
I always had big ambitions even though my parents sometimes were afraid my dreams would be too big, but I didn’t listen to them and instead, I followed my gut. It took me years to get meetings with key decision-makers. I started out alone and I had many bumps in the road, but if you trust yourself and don’t give up, it often works out. From being a French-based business, it is now expanding internationally.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get to where you are today? Give us some lessons you learned along the way.
Eliane Lugassy: Since I was seven years old I wanted to become a lawyer. I had a way with words even then (to the despair of my parents). But once I had passed my exams, I finally decided to enroll in a business school in order to get a broader education. It was there that I realized I was not a specialist, but I liked to work on various topics, with a high pace. I was able to take several classes dedicated to entrepreneurship which I enjoyed.
After graduating, I joined Rothschild&Co in Merger & Acquisitions which was a unique opportunity to learn quickly from talented people, in a different way than at school. After three years, I felt that it was time for me to try the entrepreneurial adventure.
When I started out, I met a CEO of a well-known company who told me that selling is a real job and that I was not good at it. I also had potential customers who told me they didn’t see the value of my product as they did not intend to provide a better service to their clients. It took me years to get meetings with most of the decision-makers in my industry. I started out alone, and I had lots of bumps in the road, but along the way, I’ve learned that nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it.
During my journey, I got to know very nice people who believed in me and who helped me more than they could understand. This was invaluable for me and helped me to get where I am today.
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Eliane Lugassy: Founded in 2016, Witco is a web and mobile application that aims to improve the communication and collaboration of occupants in office buildings and shared spaces.
Witco’s fully customizable white-label technology is used in offices, co-working and co-living spaces, and residential housing for students and seniors. The smart building app centralizes all the services offered to occupants to improve the experience of their workplace or living space. A cost-effective solution appropriate for the age of hybrid work and mixed building use.
The solution is designed to give users and building managers (e.g. reception, maintenance, security) flexibility and comfort in reporting and resolving any building use issues quickly, from a single app. It empowers users and facilitates communication and transparency for both building managers and landlords in need of better information management.
As building managers and landlords diversify how and when their buildings are used, Witco’s solution gathers real-time data and then relays actionable insights to users via its custom interface.
Today, the Witco app is used by more than 5,000 companies across 200 cities and in over 800 buildings. Existing clients include Amundi, Swiss Life, IPSEN, Guerlain, AXA, Covivio, BNP Paribas Real Estate, Union Investment, Deskeo, Ivanhoé Cambridge, and Unibail URW.
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Eliane Lugassy: I can talk from my own experience as a founder and CEO of a technology startup. A CEO for a high growth company needs to behave like an athlete in a business world – wake up early, take care of their mental and physical health, be ready to take risks, be eager to learn and improve, and focus 100% on how to become a market leader in its sector.
Besides having an athlete’s mindset, I believe that CEOs should have qualities such as being charismatic and positive leaders, enabling a sense of passion and purpose within an organization to create an inclusive company culture. To fully create a positive culture and leadership approach, as the CEO, I make sure to surround myself with a team that is aligned with our cultural values and beliefs, and as a team, we will reflect this across the entire company.
Any leader within an organization, whether it is the CEO or the manager, needs to lead by example, and be a positive change agent. They need to make sure everyone feels engaged and included.
Entrepreneurship is like running a marathon – being an entrepreneur and CEO is extremely demanding and requires you to take immense risks with a lot of sacrifices, financially and personally – you have to be ready for this because having a good idea is not enough.
Overall, good qualities of a CEO outweigh good degrees.
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Eliane Lugassy: As I mentioned earlier, having an athlete’s mind is one contributing factor to being a successful CEO. I would love to meet Rafael Nadal. He impresses me on many levels. For example, his mentality to win “whatever it takes”, his tenacity is legendary, his focus on his game from an early age, and how to continuously learn to improve – most people are not willing to sacrifice that much to become a champion. And, lastly, his willingness to give back notably with his foundation.
Many CEOs fall into the trap of being all over the place. What are the top activities a CEO should focus on to be the best leader the company needs? Explain.
Eliane Lugassy: I believe that the four top things CEOs should focus on are the long-term vision and strategy of the company, attracting and retaining talents, managing the team effectively (whether remote or in the office), and building a network of valuable contacts.
The Covid-19 Pandemic put the leadership skills of many to the test, what were some of the most difficult challenges that you faced as a CEO/Leader in the past year? Please list and explain in detail.
Eliane Lugassy: Even before the pandemic, we were a decentralized organization with teams around the world. This has already shaped my way of running the company and how I communicate within the organization. However, with COVID-19 the ability to see each other in-person sometimes disappeared which brought the need for even better communication.
One of the biggest challenges was to turn this time of crisis into a time of acceleration. The demand for communication tools like Witco, were increasing, as there was a need to rethink the way we use offices and workspaces.
The other challenge is to continue to nurture the company culture, to create exchanges between all team members even from a distance, and to be attentive to everyone. We have established rituals at the company level and at the level of each team, as well as moments of games and relaxation. Our goal was to continue to grow together, to continue to grow the company, and to keep employees engaged in these difficult times.
What are some of the greatest mistakes you’ve noticed some business leaders made during these unprecedented times? What are the takeaways you gleaned from those mistakes?
Eliane Lugassy: A lack of communication, especially in times of crisis is a huge missed opportunity. Crisis creates a lot of uncertainty so the best lessons from leadership I’ve seen during the Covid-19 pandemic were leaders who communicated regularly and transparently with their employees to give them some visibility and a sense of direction. This continues to be important as part of companies’ workforce are still working remotely – creating processes to engage with remote workers and make sure they still feel this sense of belonging.
Being too prescriptive about adopting a fully remote or in-office culture. I strongly believe in the future of the office, as it is critical to fostering qualitative communication, creativity, a sense of community and ultimately strengthening the company’s culture. We’ve seen some leaders backpedal after announcing their workforce could be 100% remote going forward because it’s going to be hard to make that work for all the reasons mentioned above. And, it is going to be especially hard for junior workers who need to build visibility with senior leaders, build their network, and benefit from guidance and mentoring. But being fully against remote working is risky too, as employees’ expectations are changing and in the context of a talent war in some industries, it is going to be hard to attract and retain talent as many valuable flexible working.
In your opinion, what changes played the most critical role in enabling your business to survive/remain profitable, or maybe even thrive? What lessons did all this teach you?
Eliane Lugassy: I don’t think there has been a change in the way we operate, but instead a real acceleration – driven by increasing demand for our smart building app. We have always considered our customers and end-users (employees, tenants, coworkers, etc.) as being at the heart of our business model and the future model of the smart city that we are defining.
Having a ‘client-first focus’ has allowed us to detect key trends in how spaces are being used at an early stage including services, technology, and collaboration. Having this information helped us to react and act from the first hours of the Covid-19 crisis, while many business leaders were trying to figure out how to implement a new organization in their offices and workspaces, for example. This difficult period has been a real accelerator for us, and I have learned that listening to the customer and focusing on the product are key elements in the success of a business.
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Eliane Lugassy: As our company is scaling fast, we need to hire more people at a fast pace. This is one of our most pressing tasks right now and it presents challenges on different levels:
– Finding the right talents and recruiting takes time and requires us to mobilize some of our most senior talents to interview new recruits. We’re improving our hiring process for maximum efficiency and to find new employees who will fit well with our team and company values.
– We also need to evolve our selection criteria, as we scale we need to make sure we have the right talents to power our growth to the next stage.
– Finally, when you’re growing fast and not considered as a small startup any longer, we have had to hire many people in a short period of time (for example, we’ve hired 10 people in a month alone). Even when expanding quickly, you need to make sure you can preserve or evolve the company culture.
I’m a firm believer in the fact that a company’s greatest asset is its people. I want to make sure that Witco can be a company that attracts the best talents because it’s a place where they can thrive.
You already shared a lot of insights with our readers and we thank you for your generosity. Normally, leaders are asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is the most useless skill you have learned, at school or during your career?
Eliane Lugassy: I think it is important to constantly learn. However, if I was to pick, I think that at school, I had classes in the history of law. Even if it is useful to learn about history, I never applied this in real life.
At work, I learned to make bound paper books for clients when the reprography office was not open at night – this is totally useless because nowadays we no longer print these paper books, as everything is now digital.
Yet, I believe that any skill can be useful down the line, you might not know it yet but it might come in handy one day. No knowledge you gain, no skill you develop, can be completely useless down the line.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Eliane Lugassy: As we are scaling up, we had to start reorganizing the company’s hierarchy, structure, our teams and make room for more senior people in leadership positions. The reorganization created some questioning from some of our longest-standing employees because they saw the company go from a comfortable smaller size startup where everything was a bit more informal, to a more structured company with an established leadership. But this decision was critical to helping scale our operations and make sure we can still provide the best product and service to our clients. And, it was also necessary for the teams down the line as past a certain size we absolutely need senior managers to help guide the vision and strategy of each department – support them and make them flourish.
Mike Weiss, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Eliane Lugassy for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Eliane Lugassy or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
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