Francois Pinault

“He is a man who has endowed himself with singular means because he has always had the calm audacity to think differently, to think ahead.”

“At that time, he was running Pinault-France in Rennes, a medium-sized company that had just crossed the threshold of fifteen hundred employees, and was dealing with timber according to an astonishingly, and except for a brief dip at the end of 1974 and beginning of 1975, continually rising curve despite the crisis.”

“A presence due to his focus when he listens, to the penetration of his blue gaze, and to the sudden changes of his face, which can switch in a moment from the tension of blockage to the lightness of a smile or the frankest laugh.”

“It's merely an introduction to a complete man, as sure of his allure as he is of the effects of his formidable anger, who possesses a deep understanding of how to take action, a quality that his overwhelmed or frustrated competitors, and journalists, would call "strokes," failing to appreciate the often prolonged and arduous preparation or the objective.”

“if François Pinault wins, it's because he invests himself, literally in the analytical sense of the term, he puts all his psychic, physical, and intellectual energy into his businesses.”

“For him, the taste for entrepreneurship is the real engine of life.”

“The investment in a BMW unites his taste for action, for speed-he is constantly seen crisscrossing Brittany at the wheel; he has had his own plane for almost ten years-with the reaffirmation of his ambition. Everyone will know that he is not affected by the events. On the contrary, he draws more energy from them. And it's true. He feels better when he goes on the offensive.”

“This political shock could only further worsen things. So many opportunities surely for me who was in dire need to continue to expand. I was not mistaken.”

“When a period is difficult, the most tenacious resist and thus widen the gap with the others."”

“Indeed, his strength, as soon as circumstances helped him get himself started, was to think like a strategist. That is, to look beyond breaking news, beyond ongoing operations, especially if they were so important as to monopolize his attention completely. And even beyond debts to be settled, which, unlike others, he always took great pains to pay off in full, especially if it was unexpected or difficult.”

“Calculation for the long term, well beyond investing in reputation, and less for the public than for those who whisper from ear to ear what a balance sheet means. The rare sense of the price of discipline, sometimes in comparison to debts that are terrifying. All of this coupled with the need to think big. Very big. Excessively big.”

“Setting his sights on France as his horizon when his presence in Brittany was still anecdotal, then giving himself a global perspective as soon as a brilliantly executed financial operation gave him a real investment capacity.”

“These fifteen years, observers have never really perceived them. It is however truly the time of his training, his flight out of the professional environment that awaited him and what his early successes could reasonably promise him. In 1981, you can count on the fingers of one hand those who know that he has already owned his maritime chartering company for five years.”

“Immediately after 1974, this crisis began by unleashing over the ten following years an inflation rate higher than 10%, no longer nibbling then, but devouring established situations. The timber trade was naturally exposed. Francois Pinault took a hit like the others, but he managed to recover faster and in better shape than his competitors, much bigger than him, and to get carried by this unprecedented groundswell, conducive to active entrepreneurs. Those who understood that because of the crisis, nothing would ever be the same again. He also paid a hard price for the lesson. "You can't imagine what this man is capable of taking without even flinching," one of his collaborators told me back then.”

“If he was able to take advantage, no doubt for the better, of the subsidy policy practiced by socialist governments to rebuild troubled companies, he was already in May 1981 at the head of a powerful and dynamic company, where he still practices the flexible and direct management methods of a SME. As for the instinct, let's say political, to think broadly, which he demonstrated on May 11, 1981, he began to acquire it as soon as he became his own master. This ability to exceed expectations is called flair.”

“that Ambroise Roux, the prince of the Establishment5 of big business, is asking for him on the phone, François Pinault thinks it's a joke. He doesn't have an office in Paris yet. But Ambroise Roux is calling him to ask him to join the very closed circle of AFEP, the French Association of Private Companies he is creating, with about twenty major bosses who survived the first wave of nationalizations (which deprived him of the management of the CGE6). This will be the decisive transformation of François Pinault's network of relations and the start of an unwavering friendship.”

“have always been uncompromising towards those who, having claimed responsibilities, subsequently proved incapable of assuming them, whether through incompetence or lack of work"”

“One evening in 1973, Hubert Guidai, his first deputy in Rennes, apologized for having to leave him to pick up his daughter from nursery. The next morning, François Pinault asked him where his wife worked and what she earned. He immediately increased his colleague's salary by the announced amount so that his wife could stop working.”

“"The difference". Key word. Let's try to start by putting behind this term what François Pinault means when he sets as a rule of life that one must, day by day, "make the difference". It is then positive. But the difference, as he perceived it, if not in his childhood, at least in his adolescence, was a handicap. He therefore had to learn to reverse it.”

“He was born on August 21, 1936, in a tiny village about ten kilometers south of Dinan, Les Champs-Géraux. A Brittany of landlubbers, but the sea is very close. The massive church is tucked away in the hollow of a valley well carved into the peneplain, a few houses are staggered towards the plateau, most of them in solid granite walls like the church, one or two older ones are in cob. Around, it is today a landscape of crops rather than livestock, large fields without hedges with many small woods nearby that make it green. Except for the asphalt road, one would think they were out of the century. It was probably even more true in 1936.”

“François Pinault is the first to confess: "When I see a fat schooner go by, my appetite wakens."”

“Geography does not shape temperament, as Taine believed, but it provides an initial part of learning about the environment that adults never forget.”

“Jean-Yves Hollinger asked him on RTL: "Why do you not own a forest?" The answer came quickly: "Because the French forest is quite fragmented and it is difficult to acquire significant areas, and above all, because one cannot do everything. You know, between industry, trade and everything else, it was not necessary to own the forest."”

“Everything is there, in few words, as is his habit. A frank analysis of the situation. The conclusion that, as soon as you control transformation and trade, primary exploitation is not indispensable (and probably not generating enough added value).”

“"I rolled the 'r's, I had an accent. They made me feel that I was dressed poorly. I was met with sneers and ridicule. I did not accept it. They didn't make fun of me for long. I was not the strongest, but I was the most fighter. I discovered young people who, undoubtedly because of their bourgeoisie attitude, were convinced they were in the right place, acting as they should and treating those who did not belong to their environment as a slightly inferior race. We were allowed to go out once a month with our parents. I remember when my mother came to pick me up in the visiting room with her basket, dressed as a peasant, they ridiculed her." As long as one knows him, they could hear how these humiliations were indelible and have marked his future behaviour, but, what mattered most, was that the taste for revenge did not lead him to regret or bitterness, on the contrary to conquest, not to make a place among those who excluded him, but to surpass them by applying other rules of conduct than their own.”

“It's not about being stingy with words. It's about marking out one's path and sticking to it. A loan of one hundred thousand francs collected from his relatives, enough to buy land, a house, and a warehouse on Roberdière street in the industrial zone being created in Rennes, on the road to Lorient—we are at the dawn of the major wave of industrialization in the French provinces. "Enough to get started by buying 'a few beams that I resell in the afternoon'."”

“He flies very quickly on his own, with the conviction that there is a place to take in his trade. He is more resolute, faster and he immediately has the conviction that he absolutely needs to expand. First, respond to all requests, especially do not miss any and, for that, he hires a little. François Pinault Establishments, trading in coniferous, wood and panels. He knows that he does not have the means to wait for the client and must always go on the offensive, convince him, show him that it is better to go through him. He innovates by applying as a matter of course methods hitherto foreign to traditional commerce-to the wood trade especially, encrusted in its traditions-, touching the range of choices, the analysis of the competition and the concern for speed that disrupt the first supermarkets in rural areas.”

“Coniferous trees are used for structural timber. When they are of the best quality, they are used for joinery and decoration. François Pinault hires to organise his storage and equips himself with a representative, and then a second one who will approach the joiner-carpenters in order to expand his sector and create a network of transactions with the obsession of reaching the size that will allow him to obtain the best wholesale prices. When his clientele has become large enough, as he still doesn't have any cash flow, he comes up with the idea of taking pre-orders, in order to group them together and be able to buy more in bulk, which is naturally also in the interest of his customers. In 1964, with such methods, he reaches a turnover of one million (to be multiplied by seven to get the figure in 1997 francs).”

“From this moment on, and for as long as his main objective will be the timber industry, his fixed idea will be to combine his own growth with that of his profit margins. This can only be achieved by conquering new positions first upstream and then downstream, in order to eliminate as many intermediaries from his circuit as possible, and also to secure his rear.”

“François Pinault then realized that the only way out for him was to forcibly carve out a role that was not planned. He took the plunge, not just metaphorically, and decided to blow up not one link, but the entire chain at once, which involved switching from loading one or two wagons at Saint-Malo to an entire ship in Scandinavia and, importantly, featuring only one intermediary agent instead three, the agent of the sellers. This was feasible for someone who had no experience in maritime transportation because this agent of the Scandinavian exporters also took care of the chartering of the ships. However, this was a transition from one or two wagons to a ship, which is a change in scale in volumes and in money from one not to ten or twenty, but squarely to a hundred.”

“They finally admit to me that it is the importing firm, my direct competitor but their main client, who threatened them: "If you unload Pinault's wood, we will divert our ships to another port." I managed to shake them, but they didn't want to take risks for me. Dockers have a monopoly. We cannot use labor outside of them. Finally, to prevent my boat from having to go elsewhere, which would have resulted in a great waste of time and even more money for me, by repeatedly arguing that an additional importer was more work for them in the long term, they compromised: "If you bring in your own staff, we will turn a blind eye." They were opening a door for me."”

“What he has just achieved with the help of his clients and the few workers he had at the time has become a kind of dress rehearsal for his approach at the start of his career. His favourite way of progressing is to storm the difficulties, to force his way through. He has always, and he will always, aim to mobilise those who work with him, to instill in them more than a team spirit, a real spirit of attack and conquest. And this first aggressive move initiated a plentiful series. "I often had a rebellious attitude towards my competitors, I never fit into the mould, into the professional schemes," he confides to me with certain satisfaction.”

“We should also note that, even though the magnitude of the gamble taken with the chartering of this first ship is somewhat excessive, François Pinault is looking for his development in a sector where capital investments and fixed costs are not of the same order of magnitude as in the industry, far from it.”

“Then he corrects: "I'm going to surprise you, but while I of course saw the entrepreneur that he was firstly, I could already sense the strategist he has become. Even then, he was thinking more about expansion, investments than daily management, even if he's always been attentive to that. He thought about gathering the means for the future he envisioned."”

“François Pinault has indeed already been able to inspire confidence in Roger Puéchaldou, from Crédit Lyonnais in Rennes. And, already, he works with the money he borrows. His debt unsettles the augurs of good homes in the area who, reproducing their profits identically, do not think about modernising, neither by the benefits they garner, nor, especially, by attracting other capitals.”

“There is already a regular shuttle of boats working for him between Saint-Malo, Sweden, Finland and even the Soviet Union. In less than four years, he has radically eliminated intermediaries from his import chain and modernized it to the extent of the revolution in communications that we are now beginning to see the first signs of. It is a global qualitative leap where François Pinault is no longer just attacking routine.”

“"It was very pretentious, he says today, and it took a long time to get started, because I had several really heavy handicaps, no training for business theory, no or few relationships, no money. I learned everything on the job, in my first client-producer contacts. I had to earn my first kopecks, organize a network of relationships. It was not simple, you can believe me. The business world is very closed when you don't really know who you are and they're not expecting you."”

“"François Pinault's first quality is to delegate. You can see, there's never anything on his desk."”

“By the end of 1972, its turnover had already reached 163 million francs for 63 employees10. He is determined not to stay stagnant and to pave the way for his expansion, always as a hurried man who does not want to be hindered in his decision-making speed. 1972 demonstrated this, which was the year of his first private plane. There were only three on the Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande aerodrome next to La Droulinais at that time. His Porsche didn't go fast enough, the era didn’t have the fax, and in Brittany, especially, there was only a still archaic phone available.”

“The boss then teaches him his golden rule that a sale is not a gain for the company, but a debt of the customer until the money is in.”