ETI: the importance of local roots for growth outside Paris

Interview with Prolival

Recruitment is the number 1 challenge for digital services companies (ESN). To ensure its growth, Prolival has chosen to expand outside the Paris region. Pascal Combe talks about Prolival's expansion into the region and the support it got from NFI.

Published on 20.09.2024

“We had no room for error!”

Pascal Combe, Managing Partner at Prolival, explains why this SME specialized in digital services decided to locate in Lille. A carefully thought-out decision, given the stakes involved…

Read the full interview with Pascal Combe

Prolival's Associate Director answers our questions about why he chose to expand into Hauts-de-France and the support he got during this process.

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Read the full interview with Pascal Combe

After careful analysis, Prolival decided to set up in Lille.
What were the key criteria in your location study?

The first was to be able to staff our production and project teams with quality, well-trained and rapidly operational profiles.

Setting up in an area where we could easily find the right profiles for our business was essential.

This means a dense and diversified student base, with universities offering IT courses.

The second priority was to find a location at an acceptable distance from Paris in order to make exchanges easier between our La Défense site and this new site.

It was out of the question for us to set up shop 4 or 6 hours away from Paris…

We wanted to set up in a city less than 2 hours from our Paris offices, with rents that would reduce our operating costs. The Lille area met these specifications.

You emphasize recruitment, an essential strategic factor for you.
How did the Lille region help you solve this problem?

Currently, Prolival employs around 340 people.

We hire young graduates, from Bac +2 to Bac +5, and train them in-house.

Of our 12 business managers, 10 began their careers with Prolival as junior technicians or engineers.

This HR policy forces us to recruit young graduates whose salary levels are currently incompatible with the price of housing in Paris.

By having to live far from our offices, our young employees have long and tedious commutes to and from work, which adds 50% to their working day when you have a 2-hour commute every morning and evening.

And not only in terms of productivity, this also affects their motivation, and therefore their loyalty.

By coming to Lille, we killed two birds with one stone. We have improved their living conditions and made them want to stay with us.

Lille is a university town unlike any other. Its graduates are so attached to their region that they want to stay. For a company like ours, which makes employee loyalty a major focus of its development, this is a major advantage!

Why does coming to Lille
represent a growth lever for you?

Prolival’s client portfolio consists mainly of small and medium-sized businesses with 1,000 to 5,000 employees.

We’re pretty well focused on this type of target, even if we’re now able to handle larger groups as well as SMEs.

We’ve done a lot of prospecting in the Paris region, and now we need to find new outlets.

The only way to do this is to broaden our geographic scope of intervention by being as close as possible to this new potential clientele.

When you’re targeting a clientele of mid-sized companies in the provinces, proximity is essential, because this type of business is characterized by strong local roots. To work with these businesses located in the Hauts-de-France region, we need to live there and share the same local culture.

What was the most difficult part
of this investment project?

A project like this requires a great deal of investment and energy.

While you mobilize this energy, you don’t do anything else. So it’s bound to be a risk. The hardest part is getting it accepted.

But once the decision to go ahead has been made, the risk accepted and a number of guarantees taken to minimize it, the project is extremely motivating for the teams.

This is a new area of development, which our sales and operations teams see as an opportunity.

As for management, they understand that this is the way to expand the company.

Embarking on a new location project is risky. In this context, the support of an economic agency like Nord France Invest is all the more crucial since we couldn’t afford to make a mistake.

How would you rate
the support you received?

We contacted Nord France Invest as soon as we decided to go ahead with the project.

Several presentations followed.

We were quickly put in touch with the Hello Lille attractiveness agency, which provides support to companies in the Lille metropolitan area.

Their team really understood our issues, and coordinated a number of essential tasks to help us find office space, put us in touch with local employment players such as Pôle emploi, APEC, local employment missions and so on.

Obviously, all this saved us a lot of time on the project. If we hadn’t had this help, it would have been very difficult to keep to the schedule we had set ourselves.

We have also benefited from support in financing and structuring our projects to ensure their success.

While I had no doubts about the friendliness of the people from the North, I have to admit I was surprised by the agility and responsiveness of the institutional and economic stakeholders we met. They showed us their desire to see our project come to fruition and to help us, regardless of the number of jobs we were going to create.

Do you stress the need to rely on local economic development agencies
for a project like yours?

Others, who have been through this experience, advised us to get help from structures that know the local and regional fabric inside out, because it’s difficult to do it alone.

That’s how the idea came about.

Some are very responsive, others less so.

This was also a criterion that helped us make our final decision, bearing in mind that we had three months between the decision to set up in the provinces and the choice of the site in Lille.

Clearly, structures like Nord France Invest are perfectly equipped for this.

When you ask a simple question, you get an immediate answer that saves you valuable time.

It would be a mistake and foolish to not seek help from these organizations.